MikeCampbell

During this '92-96 period, there were several title changes that didn't air on TV though. Offhand, I'm remembering several IC Title changes, and a couple of tag title changes.

I seem to recall DDP managing Jake during his AAA stint, so it's possible that Jake acted a mentor or gave Page some pointers for his in-ring career. But DDP officially started wrestling in '91 or '92 when Jake was still working for Vince. But Raven has always been rather upfront about his training. He trained at the Monster Factory with Larry Sharpe for a month or two, and then got thrown to the wolves when it came to actually learning how to work.

I'll carry it over from the '92-'96 thread. Santana being the original choice to dethrone Flair, until they decided to go with Bret. I'm giving Tito the benefit of the doubt only because the supposed reason was that the WWF had a South American Tour planned, and the title changed was nixed when the tour was cancelled. Consider that in '91 on a show in Spain, Santana, then in his El Matador gimmick, was put over the Undertaker, who was unstoppable at that point in time.

The Death of WCW sort of implies that as well. That Bischoff joining the nWo was because he wanted to be associated with the hot ticket in the business, and it sounded like fun.

I don't know his name, but the obnoxious ref from the WWF "Big Event" show in Toronto in '86, who reffed Hogan/Orndorff is probably my least favorite. He spent the whole match getting Paul's face and yelling over and over again that HE was the official. The ECW refs were usually pretty bad too. I remember Jim Molineux slapping one of the Dudleys and then trying to double lariat them. John Finnegan was way out of position for a pin in one ECW PPV. Cyrus fired off a good line, saying that he needed to get on the treadmill.

My sister in law had this funny sign at a show few years ago, it was a white board that said "HELLO, MY NAME IS MRS." and she'd fill in the name of whatever babyface was working. The opening match is spunky underdog J. Freddie vs. Colin Delaney. So the sign said "MRS. FREDDIE" Colin sees it and yells "YOU SHOULD BE PROUD!" At the same show, actually, Jimmy Olsen was getting crazy heel heat, and another of my sisters in law told him he sucked, he yelled back "Shut up, your mother doesn't love you!"

Styles and Daniels vs. Homicide and Hernandez - Ultimate X This is the best UX match I've seen. Instead of going spot crazy without any real attempt at a story, the four of them make an attempt at keeping the match logical. Things like Hernandez having to go up first since 'Cide had a shoulder injury (and was selling like mad when the babyfaces worked it over), or Daniels blocking Hernandez's dive and then trying to climb up when he sees everyone else is down. Even the finish makes sense, with Daniels climbing up to get away from Konnan and Hernandez and taking a big leap to get the title belt down, instead of trying to be Hogan and fight them both, he just outsmarted them to win.

The Danielson/Aries 8/04 match was orginally supposed to go nearly three hours. They wanted 2/3 falls with a one-hour time limit for each fall.

Oh yeah, the 3XW 70+ Iron Man Match. Good stuff, that was.

The point that I think a lot of the "If you don't like it, don't watch it!" people seem to be missing (and I'm singling you out Kris, I'm just talking generally here) is that the people who watch every single week, yet complain constantly about it, are the most loyal fans there are. They're the ones who clearly give a damn about the company and actively WANT to see things get better and hit the highs of previous years. If things get so bad to the point that THOSE sort of fans are driven away, that's when there's a big problem. There's two good stories of this in "The Death of WCW" Bischoff was asked in '98, during a prodigy chat, about WCW's shows all starting to look the same and become predictable. His reply was that they were selling out all over, making big money on PPVs, and doing big ratings, so obviously things were perfectly fine. Fast foward a couple of years to when WCW was doing record lows, and Time Warner's focus groups were showing what people actually wanted to see and Russo just had it thrown out because it wasn't what he wanted to hear

What's even better, to me, is the old woman in the crowd that clearly yells "SON OF A BITCH!" when Andy powders Lawler.

I tried to make a post last night, but got the IPS driver error. I think Lawler may take the cake for the most stupid thing a babyface could do, when he trusted fucking ANDY KAUFMAN to team with him against Jimmy Hart's boys. Yeah, the guy whose neck that he broke, and who Andy swore up and down that he would destroy is just going to let bygones be bygones because he and Hart made a little miscue.

Now that's not fair, Rick was in an accident. Scott explained it at the Chi Town Rumble PPV.

I'm amazed that Shelley ever got out from underneath the whole "baby bear" angle. I went to an ROH show in '05, when he was a babyface, and the fans were brutal, tons of people yelling "baby bear!" and booing him.

Sting trusting Christian to have his back when he went after Jarrett at Hard Justice. It's TNA, nobody stays face or heel for more than a few months as it is. Not to mention that during the match it was obvious that he was trying to get Sting dq'd by doing things like throw him the title, or hitting Jarrett with the chair.

John, that's the great thing about being able to stream via netflix. I'd probably be in your shoes without it. As it stands now, I've left off somewhere in season 5 of The Shield, and have a couple of movies that I haven't gotten around to watching yet, but that's about the extent of it.

I can probably never get another wrestling DVD again and still be watching stuff in 20 years from now. Just off the top of my head: 14 Volumes of SHIMMER shows A bunch of 2009-10 ROH Several TNA PPVs from 06 and 07 A couple months of the 1992 SMW season and the whole 1993 season A handful of SMW home video releases of their Knoxville shows. A few discs of Will's Freebirds/Von Erichs comp Will's Flair vs. Kerry comp Half of Will's Bob Backlund comp All four shows that make up the UWFI best in the world tournament from '94 TONS of 2CW DVDs (although I don't really count them since I only have them because I help the fed out by burning copies of the shows so they always have them on hand at the merch table at their shows). I'll have the 2011 All Japan Champions Carnival and the 6/9 PPV in my mailbox tomorrow or Saturday. I still hope to eventually pickup KHawk's AWA '82 set, a 5 disc set of the International Fed out of Montreal, and the recent All Japan Sumo Hall show. The only things I make a priority to watch are the Kayfabe Commentary DVDs, and that's only because KC sends me them to review on 411.

Harris wore the trenchcoat, came out with the shades, and used the spear as a finisher. I remember way back, on TSM, he was called "Redneck Edge"

http://twitter.com/#!/TNADixie James Storm = Ratings!

This makes Storm the first person to have held the TNA World Title, TNA Tag Titles, and the Beer Drinking Title. I've always been a fan of the guy and I'm generally happy that he won, but the big celebration made it seem like he won some epic match. It was all of one minute long and all Storm did was the Last Call. Sidenote: Is Angle clean now? His arms don't look that much bigger than mine!@

It seems like this is really being slept on here, especially in the wake of the . Has there been any word yet on how much control Bruce actually has over the product?

Pro Wrestling History says the Dome this year only drew 18,000.

New Japan hasn't filled up the Tokyo Dome or Sumo Hall in forever, NOAH hasn't filled the Budokan in forever, and All Japan doesn't even run the Budokan anymore and they haven't filled up Sumo Hall in forever.

When Hogan beat Inoki in the first IWGP, a riot wound up breaking out and it got NJPW kicked out of Sumo Hall for a while.

No, Dave said advertisers would drop off when they realized the WWF product wasn't a ratings magnet like it seemed to be with all the hype and success that WrestleMania had. The Hogan thing was just an analogy, the WWF always getting huge ratings is just as much of a myth as the notion that Hogan is a great wrestler.