strobogo

I haven't enjoyed his heel work at all, in either run, and I think a large part of it is they continued to have him be a dude who it basically takes a building falling on to keep him down for a 3 count, which can work as an underdog face finally conquering the heel, but is real eye rolling when he's such an undersized heel. Another part is the dude should have been out of NXT at least a year ago, if not nearly two years ago now. Same for Cole and Ciampa. Dudes have just been spinning their wheels for ages with everything they've done feeling forced because presumably HHH/HBK don't want to let them go get lost in the shuffle on the main roster. I would say Gargano is such an over the top cartoon heel that he comes off very silly. He was probably the best babyface in the business for a year run there, and it really feels like he just has nothing to do in NXT so they have him as a heel because he can't keep doing the face thing at the top of the card forever. Which is usually the point where okay it's time to move to Raw or Smackdown, but they just won't let him go.

I feel like I could much more easily get into Valentine stuff I haven't seen than I could Piper, but they do have an overlap of two guys I don't care for producing a match I think is really great.

Dude is just brutal to get through in WCCW, imo. Only guy worse with weaker looking offense at the time is Magic Dragon. When he first returns to AJPW under the Kabuki gimmick, he feels like a star and works much better, but within a year or so he's back to World Class laziness outside of the occasional bloody brawl. I remember downloading stuff from Ditch and he'd have blurbs about man great uppercuts how could I have ever not liked this guy...but that seems like the only thing he does well in the ring.

I'm willing to be open to someone changing my mind on Piper, but there are few dudes that have just flat out annoyed me my entire life like Piper. Even as a kid in his face period in WWF where his bullshit should have appealed to me the most, he consistently annoyed the shit out of me on color, and I always thought his matches sucked even if I didn't really realize why. His WCW run was flat out unbearable. I would say that dips into his WWF return in 1994 where he had seemingly aged 15 years and just could not have been cornier if he tried. And then of course the match with Lawler was awful on top of that. Then I got older and saw the real grimy shit of 1984-1986 and man...of course he's getting insane heat. It's not hard to get insane heat when you're saying crazy racist shit constantly. That's the absolute cheapest of cheap heat. I've seen a lot of Mid Atlantic TV now and it has slightly changed my opinion of him, but I'm still left with a guy who has maybe 5 matches I'd ever say were good (but a couple are great) and the rest is a career of this dude with the most annoying face promos possible, the cheapest heel promos possible, and looks like he was never even trained in the ring. I get that the less is more/get most out of the least is a big thing in these circles, but Piper did almost nothing and 9 times out of 10 everything he did looked like shit. Dude looked like he never even learned how to bump. Now, I think the dog collar match with Valentine (another guy who I'm frequently not enamored with but there are a handful of matches I like) and WM match with Bret are great, and the MSG match with Flair in 1991 is a lot of fun. There's the Flair/Piper/Greene vs NWO match in 1997 but that's the Flair show and Greene being a great celebrity wrestler and Piper's contributions are minimal. I would believe there are some other good matches with Valentine from around Starrcade 1983 period. The above Macho match did absolutely nothing for me. But if people have recs that prove to me Piper actually wasn't the shits outside of a couple of matches over 30 years, I'll check them out.

Still doesn't make sense to me why the WWF would put that clip into the intro to their home videos

I can pretty much guarantee that Santos will get called up and be Angel Garza status within 2 months. Probably within a month. Likely teaming with Angel on Main Event.

It seemed like it started as a way to torment Jim Ross and then started spreading to others and by the mid 00s it was just the norm for faces to always lose in their hometown unless it was something like Benoit as defending champion in Edmonton.

How/why on earth did a clip of Lou Thesz hitting a backdrop driver on Rikidozan make it into the intro of the first couple of Coliseum Home Video tapes?

What is the deal with always jobbing out or otherwise embarrassing people in their home towns? It's long stopped being a rib on specific talents and is just SOP, and seems extra weird when they really make it a point to build it up being in someone's hometown with all their friends and family there. I've never seen them follow it up in any way, either. Was Vince doing this before Montreal?

Oh that makes more sense. I was reading it like he was keeping up a proto-blog in his post wrestling career on the nascent internet.

This is an amazing thread. Too much to single out but 1. Sumo and puro really put the carny bullshit of American wrestling to shame 2. It's pretty fucking weird that Jumbo had a blog in 1996

Oh I do like Bruno but especially in WWWF footage his punches and kicks are pretty lol, but in that real 1970s wrestling way that if you're in the mood is really enjoyable. I wish there was more readily available footage of him. I've probably seen less than 25 Bruno matches and outside some stuff in JWA/AJPW and clips of Koloff winning the title, I think all of it is from his second reign or his last 80s run.

The Bar vs Rollins/Ambrose at I wanna say No Mercy 2017, the one where Cesaro fucked up his teeth on the post, was the WWE main roster tag match of the year.

I wonder if part of it has been the reactions to Cena/Roman over the years where they'd rather just put heels on top of everything so if the fans are going to boo, they're going to boo the guy they're supposed to.

Spent a decade booking the boss(es) as heels, then just changed over to the promotion as a whole being a heel. Really pretty bizarre when you think about it. Has any other company really done that?

I dunno, it sure sounded like support for Edge was way higher than Bryan during most of the match and at times there was a mixed reaction for Bryan, but only when it involved sequences with Edge.

I think circles like this/DVDVR/etc have leaned on that or even weirdly kind of taken pride in oh well they're all scum bags who cares for too long. Maybe we shouldn't overlook people being complete garbage humans because we like their play fights, idk.

I personally wouldn't hold that against him because he has so much other stuff I enjoy greatly that it's pretty easy to overlook what was essentially a like....2 month section of his career, with one single tour of Japan as champ with one actual defense and it sounds like he was trying to do it in a style that was years out of date already in 1989 and that he had never had to work before. It's also not like Tiger Misawa was putting out classic after classic at that time, either. But that's just me. It's pretty easy to overlook because he has so much stuff before and after that I greatly enjoy.

Bruno kind of sucks but in that 70s wrestling way that is also charming if you're in the right mood. I wish we lived in a timeline where all these US stars would put in the same effort in the States as they did in Japan.

That doesn't seem like a role Steamboat would have excelled in, yeah. I'm not sure top champion even in the US was really a role he was built for. Obviously not a slight on him or his abilities, but he was just built to be the chaser and if he did win the title, to lose it very shortly after.

There's some really great Steamboat stuff in AJ in the early 80s. I'm still very, very slowly working through the AJ Archive, into April 1986 after being at this shit for years at this point, and I have a lot of Steamboat matches in early 80s that I have marked down as recommended or highly recommended on my spreadsheet I've been keeping. 6/29/80 Jimmy Snuka-Ray Stevens (c.) vs. Ricky Steamboat-Jay Youngblood NWA World Tag Team Poor image quality, Maple Leaf Wrestling Event Highly Recommended 11/28/80 Abdullah The Butcher-Tor Kamata vs. Ricky Steamboat-Dick Slater Real World Tag League Bloody Recommended 12/9/80 Ricky Steamboat vs. The Sheik Bloody Recommended 5/29/81 Jumbo Tsuruta-Ricky Steamboat vs. Jimmy Snuka-The Destroyer Highly Recommended 6/3/81 Ricky Steamboat vs. Jimmy Snuka Bloody Highly Recommended 8/28/81 Mil Mascaras-Dos Caras vs. Ricky Steamboat-Chavo Guerrero PWF Cup Recommended 6/4/82 Ric Flair (c.) vs. Ricky Steamboat NWA World Heavyweight Recommended 11/26/82 Bruiser Brody-Stan Hansen vs. Jay Youngblood-Ricky Steamboat Real World Tag League Highly Recommended 12/2/82 Terry Funk-Dory Funk Jr. vs. Ricky Steamboat-Jay Youngblood Real World Tag League Clipped, Special Guest Referee: Lou Thesz Recommended 12/7/82 Ricky Steamboat vs. Harley Race Special Guest Referee: Lou Thesz Recommended 12/13/82 Ricky Steamboat vs. Atsushi Onita Recommended 2/23/84 Genichiro Tenryu vs. Ricky Steamboat UN Heavyweight Clipped, title vacated after death of David Von Erich Recommended The scale I have is Skippable (which could be boring or just bad or used for super clipped/cut up stuff not worth wasting your time on), Skippable But Interesting (which usually means some cool stuff or interesting combination of talent but otherwise isn't particularly memorable), Recommended (which means good and you should watch), Highly Recommended (Great and you should go out of your way to watch). When it comes to Misawa especially in the Tiger Mask period, I see all these big American names against him and I'm thinking this is probably going to be a disaster whereas in my younger days I'd expect well of course this is going to be a classic.

Of the week I have 1. Bianca/Sasha 2. WALTER/Ciampa 3. Roman/Edge/Bryan And when I really think about it, any of the three could be swapped and I'd be okay with the result in the top spot I think. All for very different reasons of what made them good. Will be interesting to see how they follow up both Takeover and WM, which both had the feeling of booking resets for most of the divisions, but I can absolutely see them just running Drew/Lashley, Edge/Roman, Apollo/Big E, New Day/AJ/Omos, and Sheamus/Riddle for the next 3 months. As for NXT, Balor can finally go do that WALTER match they wanted to do last year, KOR is poised as Kross' challenger, Adam Cole should never have another NXT match, and it's also time for Ciampa to move on.

In regards to Cody, he absolutely should be a heel. Even as a face, he's often a real dickhead and unlikeable shit who outright buries his opponents on promos even though they're his own talents, always dressed to the nines, has his own entrance set and pyro, the most self indulgent entrances and promos, etc. If you see that promo he cut for the house show they were weirdly promoting very hard, he talks about being self aware and he knows people talk about all that stuff because he's Dusty's kid so he's always had to be aware of himself and his actions and blah blah. And I'm thinking, this dude really should have turned this into a heel gimmick a year ago. Where he's the complete antithesis of Dusty. He's never had hard times. He is Dusty's Kid. He's royalty. Everyone knows he's the boss, that's why he gets all this extra shit. I find Cody in general to be somewhat unlikable even at times he was being a good face. I think he excels at being a heel anyway, and he's in a position where this heel gimmick is an absolute lay up, is very small tweaks to what he's already doing as a face, and would work especially well for his particular audience.

One draws the line where they draw the line. Some dudes you can easily overlook maybe fairly major negatives, while others can have lesser offensives that you just can't ignore. I don't know how you can turn that into an objective thing.

I wonder if Edge can stay uninjured long enough to do the Rollins feud