strobogo

Yes. One of them does it well and the other is a cosplayer.

It's amazing how much better Nick is than Matt at what the Bucks characters in 2021 are trying to portray ONE OF THE GREATEST TEAMS OF ALL TIME IS NO MORE....so immediately throw it to the back and see a DIFFERENT team react and not even show SCU wave goodbye. Lol.

Lmaooooooooooooooooooo Cody really got a whole TV segment to announce he'd be going by the American Dream for the PPV

I'm proud to be an American promo in 2021 what in the world. No one wants to confront any of this stuff on a wrestling show and all that's going to happen is the audience is going to boo the other guy not because he's been beating up Cody but because he's trashing America.

The one where they literally did every spot from Onita/Funk including the post match. And now he's using the dude's entrance them, too?

The nerve of this fuck to come out to Wild Thing after the barbed wire match

Using the lost day from Pfizer shot 2 to catch up on some NJ matches as I haven't seen anything since WK Didn't even finish Tana vs Shingo. I do not enjoy seeing Tana hobble around like Terry Funk, nor do I like seeing him continue to do the HFF to the floor. I got probably 3/4ths of the way through and just was not enjoying it at all. Sho vs Takahashi: No idea why this needed to be a 35 minute EPIC junior heavyweight match where 80% of the match was throwing elbows like it was Shibata vs Ishii or something. Longest jr title match of all time and for what? Match barely went anywhere and easily could have been 15-20 and gotten the exact same thing across and been less of a drag. Ishii vs White-O Castle Attack: White has been the pandemic MVP for NJPW in my eyes, coming from a dude who didn't see shit in him for the past couple of years. Dude has really come into his own in such a crazy way. Real strong match, feel like you don't see a lot of matches in NJ built around mid section attacks. Real tired of Gedo bullshit, though. Naito vs Ibushi Castle Attack: Nice to see them structure a match around something other than trying to paralyze each other at least at first, but lol at Naito not knowing how to properly put on a figure four. The bloom has been off the Naito rose for me since probably 2018. Gedo's shitty booking made me lose all investment and interest in him. In general, I thought his technique was real loose and sloppy all match. Even his normal spots he'll do literally every match he seemed to be getting hung up on for some reason. Did like the finish of Ibushi just fish flopping into a pin, but otherwise boy do I never need to see them try to break each other's necks ever again. Ibushi vs Desperado Anniversary Show: This was pretty good. Never give Despy any time at all but this was actually a better story and better worked match than Ibushi vs Naito, imo. All the near falls and near tap outs actually felt more hype and realistic than anything in the Naito match, which is lol because obviously El Desperado was not going to become the IWGP World Heavyweight Champion under any circumstances here. I also thought this match did much, much more for the junior division than the 35 minute Time Bomb/Sho main event. KENTA vs Juice NJ Cup: Desperately hoping either guy gains back the momentum they once had. This was pretty good. Don't know why Gedo spent 3 years giving Juice this story of slowly rising up the ranks just to start him back at stage one all over again right as he was peaking and had the most crowd support he'd ever have. Okada vs Shingo NJ Cup: This was so much better than the match with Tana. I feel like I haven't seen Okada get fucking REKT like that since the Shibata match. This was really awesome, highly benefiting from not having 20 minutes of fluff in big Okada matches. Suzuki vs KENTA NJ Cup: I think it had been some 15 years since their one and only singles match, and they're both much different wrestlers. Suzuki for the better, imo, KENTA not so much but he was having an astounding run around that time that no one would be able to physically keep up with for another 15 years. I never would have imagined a news paper would be a focal point in a MiSu/KENTA match but it's been a weird couple of years for all of us. I just want to see KENTA mature into a new age lumpy grumpy Tenryu and it just doesn't seem like that is in the cards. Once in a while you still get flashes of the old KENTA, but rarely these days. Goto vs Shingo NJ Cup: Can't bullshit here, by the time I had watched this, I had taken a shot about the size of 1/3rd the bottle of nyquil 70% into KENTA/MiSu so I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. It seemed like Goto probably had one of his couple of matches a year where he rises to the occasion but also seemed like he was kicking out of the same stuff that Okada was kicking out of and that seemed odd to me.

It briefly worked in his first WCW run. He also had a really good run as an earnest Southern white meat babyface late into his TNA run.

That's not really on him. He was performing to the best of his abilities of the garbage they gave him and was one of the very few things in WCW still getting reactions every week all the way to the end. Crazy house Ric Flair really isn't much crazier than regular Ric Flair by that point anyway. He had been acting like a lunatic on TV for most of the prior 10 years, and especially the 4-5 up to that point.

I don't know why anyone would want to listen to old, jaded, bored, hateful JR talk about anything at this stage in his career. Guy can't even hide is disdain for 80% of what he calls on live TV every week.

I would argue phase 5 isn't real, he was just getting old and his body couldn't keep up. Flair doing Flair things always worked, be it the Nitro era, late stage Russo era, the post Russo era, pre Evolution period, Evolution, post Evolution, even TNA.

JR was real bad about doing this on air for a while with AEW. Like any criticism of him online he'd do the "some people will say X" about that subject for the next 2 months on every show. But really he was doing that at least as far back as the Attitude Era when it came to Foley bumps or ladder match bumps.

Probably in 2016 on a different board I listed 100 guys I thought were better than Flair, but now I'm finding it pretty hard to argue against him being a lock in the top 10. It's in large part due to seeing a lot more pre-Horsemen period footage, as by that time he had pretty much solidified himself in his routine and at times a cartoonish version of himself.

I will forever maintain that if Boss Man in the Attitude Era could have worked like he did in 1988-1993, he'd have been the greatest heel of all time

I think Shawn was a good actor by pro wrestler standards, which is lol in pretty much every other acting context you can imagine. But yes, the NXT crew are even worse at that's what much of their main storyline matches have depended on the past couple of years. Basically the HHH vs HBK formula mixed with mid period ROH. Sometimes you just wanna see guys try to kill each other, not announce they're going to kill someone and then have big close ups when their move did in fact not kill a guy. Adam Cole shocked face is such a cliche even the WWE/NXT twitter joked about it come War Games time.

Muscle gut Sano doing nothing but double stomps and spin kicks :blessed

I think that style of epic, creating history match was pretty firmly established in WWF land by WM 3 when there were 2 matches like that on the card that are still lionized to this day. It was usually kept to IC or World title matches and only on PPVs for years, but it was definitely a thing before Shawn's solo run even started. Examples to my mind: Savage/Steamboat WM3 Hogan/Andre WM3 Mega Powers vs Andre/DiBiase Summerslam 88 Hogan vs Savage WM 5 Warrior vs Rude Summerslam 89 Hogan vs Warrior WM 6 Savage vs Warrior WM 7 Warrior vs Rude Summerslam 90 Bret vs Perfect Summerslam 91 Bret vs Piper WM 8 Bret vs Bulldog Summerslam 92 Savage vs Warrior Summerslam 92 tried it again and failed miserably Rockers vs Orient Express Rumble 91 New Foundation vs Orient Express Rumble 92 I think you could probably make the argument for some Hart Foundation tags in their face run as well.

No, I'm talking about guys like Cody/Jericho/MJF saying their opponents are shitty mid carders no one likes and then going on to beat them or otherwise pointing out all of their flaws and doing nothing to build them up before they beat them or lose to them. You don't want MJF pointing out that Jericho is old, fat, and fucking sucks in the ring now before a match. You don't want Cody completely burying MJF/QT/Archer/Spears/Solow and then decisively beating them. I know he put MJF over in that feud but he buried the fuck out of him on promos and then MJF didn't do shit for a year, much like Jericho spending the entire feud with OC burying the shit out of him on promos and even if he put him over multiple times, OC did nothing for the next 5 months and gained nothing from it.

I'm definitely not saying Benoit wasn't a huge influence on the generation after him, I just think that style would have become the dominant style without Benoit ever getting into wrestling as it was already the dominant junior style for years and was already in the US indies and WCW before Benoit ever had exposure in the US. Benoit was following an already established trend.

I think most AEW promos have guys essentially burying their opponents because it's the kind of pseudo insider type promos that they know will always pop their audience. Cody has been really bad with that as well but you've seen it from Jericho/MJF in all of their feuds.

I guess my point was that by the time Benoit got into wrestling (because of Dynamite), the Dynamite/Tiger Mask matches were the template for junior style for years in Japan and even Stampede by that point. You can really even take it back to before Tiger Mask was even involved and blame it on Dynamite/Fujinami. I'm sure that style becomes dominant on the indies as time goes by even if Benoit never became a wrestler. Would you say it was Benoit that inspired Kid and Lynn to have those matches in Global in 1991, or Tiger Mask/Dynamite/Liger?

This is a weird statement to me considering Benoit was about as much of a carbon copy of Dynamite as possible, and the Dynamite/Tiger Mask series really directly influenced the entire junior style in the West and East for generations. Of course, Benoit was a huge influence on the generation after him, but Benoit was directly being a Dynamite clone his entire career. It's not like he took the style and innovated, brought something new, or otherwise elevated work or style in any notable way.

Good, they shouldn't call them that.

What HBK's second run lacked in athleticism (which wasn't much, tbh) it more than made up for it with a large injection of old school storytelling. Now, of course he went way, way, way over the top with the "storytelling" aspect at times, a bad trait he's most definitely still working through with NXT talent today. Personally I think his second run was better than the first run, as I really dislike almost everything about face HBK into DX era HBK outside of a couple of matches. However, Rockers and early heel HBK eras are routinely the best matches on the card and I'd say he probably has the WWF MOTY in 1992 (the UK match with Randy Savage doing fucking Tiger Mask spots), Bret/HBK at Survivor Series is top 5 that year as well. He's just so unlikable and annoying as a face in 1995-1997. It's all very inauthentic and Vince's commentary is so over the top even for him at how he puts Shawn over that for me it borders on unwatchable. He's a top 100 for sure, I don't know that I'd put him top 30. There's a real overhype (to me) within the industry when it comes to him that annoys me more than makes me want to agree with them.

Was Baba kind of forced to push Hiroshi Wajima as a big deal due to his sumo career, or did he actually have high hopes for him as a Tenryu tier guy? Because he's...pretty not good. At all. But there's a huge presentation around him and even his excursion matches.