goodhelmet

I have no faith he will be a good heel either. Dylan brought it up earlier but the way they position their heels is horrendous.

Just investing in the future...

I need context Jerry to appreciate that pic.

At some point this may be true but in 1998 WWF it is wrong from the tons of matches I have been going through. Shoe and I just watched some WWF matches from 1998 last night and the crowd was hot for some midcard matches, not just the entrances. Maybe this becomes more apparent in 1999 or 2000.

I'll buy that property Kris.

Rey was awesome in 2009-10 but by "we" do you mean "you"?

It wasn't just athleticism. It was a cool outfit, on a guy that size who had the athleticism and SKILL to pull it off. You brought up the underdog role and there is a reason that Rey was used as the lawn dart by Nash. Rey was small enough and sympathetic enough to be put in the position. As Loss is fond of saying (don't know if he knicked it from somebody else)... Rey didn't get over in spite of his size, he got over because of his size. Also, I wanted to re-read the thoughts on Malenko-Rey from GAB 96 and the one thing that gets mentioned over and over again... Rey's selling his ass off. I don't know about his AAA stuff since that isn't really the stuff I was talking about when using Rey as an example. Other WCW Rey threads are more vague and you see the term aerial thrown out once in awhile.

How high you get on your leapfrog?

Looking at the line-up, from an in ring standpoint, it could be the best PPV of the year. Horsnwaggle vs. Torito could be legit good again. Cesaro-Sheamus could/should steal the show. Paige vs. Fox sounds fun since I like big match Paige and crazy Fox. Shield/Evolution will be similar to last month's match and Wyatt-Cean could go either direction. It could be really good or total garbage like the cage match. Only stinker I see is RVD-Barrett but that is because RVD is just rough right now. I expect Rose-Swagger and Rusev-Big E to be announced on the prelim or go on unadvertised.

Holy shit, his teeth are yellow. HD is a mother fucker.

Who is they?

Man, Strummer is right.... it is scary bad how dead this crowd is.

OJ, it's only the hook. Rey Mysterio can hook me in 1996 with high flying and super sweet flippy moves but if the matches weren't good and he was botching shit left and right (he wasn't) then what good is it to have those gifts? You can hook me with athleticism but can you keep me? No, it's going to take more than that.

OK, I know the singing bit was a little catchy a couple of months ago but man does it seem so forced and hokey now. What happened?

I wasn't listening but was it the "No class' joke? To be fair, I have been using it for ten years in the classroom.

I think this is the disconnect. You believe that being a better athlete gives you an enormous advantage. I think you equate athleticism with skill. RVD is really athletic watching him on my TV screen right now.

Christ, Cesaro being paired with RVD is death.

Kane may be the least over person on the entire roster.

Re-reading Dylan's posts... wait, what.... do we have to define presentation now? Dylan says it needs solid presentation and I just said presentation has nothing to do with the star rating or worth of a match.

The presentation has nothing to do with the star rating of the match or the worth of the match. Every match I watch looks fucking old. I would argue that even the WWE's current product looks dated because they haven't done anything since the Attitude Era to reinvent themselves from a presentation standpoint. There ins't one thing I have seen Tanahashi or Davey Richards or Adam Cole do that a prime Brian Pillman or Jushin Liger or young Fujinami couldn't execute. Yet, I love the latter and can't watch the former.

I keep thinking I have the answers but you keep throwing out some loopholes so i am going back to the original post and breaking it down. What is good wrestling to them is limited to the WON sphere of good wrestling. Since the Observer is highly popular, I think the assumption is then it must be the global standard. That is why in the past, PWO has been dismissed as Fetish Fandom or that the DVDVR project is not valid because it doesn't represent the "global" perspective. The age of the match doesn't prevent us from analyzing the match, the experience of the viewer does. How much DK-TM did Dave see live or on videotape? If it really was that revolutionary and important to wrestling, why didn't it become the standard way of working since there were other fast, flippy guys who could fly around the time? I am sure there were guys who weren't as sloppy as Sayama. I enjoyed the hell out Wrestlemania 28 and you didn't enjoy watching it live. Did it matter that I told you that the matches were a blast in the arena? No, because you weren't enjoying them while sitting in front of your TV set. We watched the same show from a different perspective at the same time but one doesn't automatically invalidate the other. Knowing how Dave felt in 1983 or how Johnny Sorrow felt watching Muraco when he was 12 is a valuable tool for historical purposes but it doesn't mean it is the only acceptable way of viewing wrestling. I'll retract this if I find your answer later in this thread but what are the standards you think have remained constant from say... 1983 until the present day? I think we have already established that what people want from their wrestling is a matter of taste. Once again, I'll go back to the experience vs. year argument. The actual year does not matter, the experience of the viewer does. Maybe Meltzer is saying that wrestling fans know too much now and back then, they were stupid and didn't know it was fake and what guys did back then worked for the stupid audience. Since stupid fans back in the 80s thought Brody was awesome, we just have to accept that he was awesome. Shit, here i am making long posts and I think you really summed it up right here. I am still going to make a long post. It shows that he puts no thought into them or even cares to explain why a match is good. What is interesting about this argument is that we often do hear about wrestlers wanting to have a match for the ages or announcers calling a match one for the ages even back then, the same as sports announcers calling a game one for the ages. Nobody wants Meltzer to change his ratings. However, when a work of art from the past doesn't hold up or loses some of its value, nobody is trying to rob him of his memories. Athleticism is almost never given as the reason that something doesn't hold up. Moving forward doesn't mean moving upward. Just because something is new or current doesn't mean it is actually better. Are the athletes today better than in the 1980s? Yes. Does it mean the body of work is better. No.

So, in short, when it fits Dave's worldview, history is important. When it doesn't, it's not?

Actually, I think I figured out the disconnect and it has nothing to do with the actual year. It actually has to do with the amount of wrestling you have been exposed to, not what year you have viewed it in. Dylan will be the first person to tell you 5 years ago that he was no lucha expert and had no business making judgments on something he had limited amount of exposure to. Now, he is going on podcasts espousing the virtues of lucha to the masses!!! The standards haven't changed because things automatically got better as time went by. They changed because the amount of wrestling we are exposed to has increased and you can't decrease the amount of wrestling you have been exposed to. Everything else... movesets, selling, characters, etc... purely a matter of taste. Somebody who has only seen 200 matches (for simplicity of argument, 1995 Joe Lanza) Eddie-Dean may be one of the best matches he has seen in his limited viewing. 1995 Joe Lanza also has no business being on a podcast and voting for Hall of Famers. Someone who has seen 10,000 matches from all over the world (2005 Joe Lanza) probably has a better grasp of why 1995 Eddie-Dean doesn't hold up. It is also why Meltzer does a disservice to people who watch older footage by dismissing them. All of us have matches we rated highly that no longer rate as high. It doesn't mean we can't acknowledge our fandom or love for those matches that evoked some sort of emotion in us. However, it also doesn't mean we have to turn a blind eye to the flaws of those matches and keep the illusion going that they hold up as great matches. They were only great in our limited viewing, not because they were actually the greatest thing that actually existed. With Tiger Mask-Dynamite Kid, we still put every single one of those matches on the New Japan 1980s set because we acknowledged what they mean historically, Aesthetically they didn't hold up even when the stuff done by their peers in the same time frame did. Somebody brought up Steamboat-Savage. When the first WWF DVDVR poll went up, Steamboat-Savage still ranked #2 for the decade. That is with hundreds of guys voting. Some of those guys have probably seen more wrestling as individuals than this entire board combined. When we do the WWF re-release, Steamboat-Savage will probably drop a few places, not because the match doesn't have merit but because we have discovered other matches that may not have had the reach of a Wrestlemania 3. Now, with technology, those other matches can have the same ability to reach the masses.

Dylan, lets more clearly define these... standards and tastes. The idea of ring psychology and doing something with a purpose or reason is a standard that can stand the test of time. What is considered a finishing move is a standard that can change over the course of time. I prefer to see guys punching each other in the mouth. I am less impressed by guys who can pull off a succession of moves within a 30 second time frame. That is a matter of taste. My Star Wars example above was less an issue of tastes and was a matter of standards. It is standard in today's movie world to use CGI. My example was to illustrate that current standards don't necessarily mean that there is a positive correlation between changing standards and quality in overall product.

I want to write more on the subject but the question could be framed as ... Do standards change for the better or for worse? Just because something is new doesn't mean it is better. "Those prequels are AWESOME. They use CGI. CGI is so new and cool. The original movies used Muppets. Fucking Muppets!!!"