Slasher

Wikipedia says her Annapurna Pictures studio was started with the idea of giving an opportunity to moviemakers to be daring, to create films meant to provoke, bring back the prestige films in today's Hollywood risk averse world. That lends credibility to the idea Megan Ellison isn't necessarily in it to make money. Of course, Terminator 5 doesn't scream prestige film...

Well that's better. At least a clarification was needed, for me, to get a full picture. I am totally ignorant to British wrestling beyond the reputations of Breaks, McManus, Pallo and Saint. Edit: and well Crabtree. I am not including the guys who made a big part of their careers in the US like Davey, DK, Regal, Adams, etc.

The list would be better if you redistributed the overrated folks into the other brackets. Being overrated means nothing to me in terms of quality. It is like if I put Ric Flair in my overrated list... it doesn't tell the real story.

I live in Los Angeles, where having a quirk is "in vogue" but I have never met or run into anybody who threw out "I'm bi-polar lol!" to explain their stupidity or moments of bad behavior. Maybe I'm just good at repelling the possibility of that encounter right up front.

Why would we want that? No one should want that but if hypothetically he was not around for a year and half or something, it would probably force the WWE to focus their creative energy on someone else. They could then in theory find out if there is anyone else that could carry the company to give them more viable options beyond just Cena. However, seeing how the man's 35 or 36 years old, they should be starting to think about creating a plan for WWE life after Cena. Not to be implemented now, but it doesn't hurt to have a plan in place for when it happens.

Orton has been long rumored to turn heel and usually a turn involving a high profile name (ok ok but bear with me here) comes with a title program. Orton and Cena haven't feuded for at least 4 years. I can easily see them plugging Orton in Cena's programming calendar somewhere this year. Assuming Cena doesn't miss time due to injury.

I respect your position but I have to disagree with you about Heyman and leave it at that.

Look at what ROH is doing attendance wise, and they have ended up existing longer than ECW did. ECW was an independent trying to be the #3 national promotion. They couldn't sustain their expansion model and they went out of business. If they had TV and if they were able to keep their major players in place, who knows how successful the company would have been. If they were able to advertise their upcoming shows via a key time slotted tv show a la Raw or Nitro, you are telling me they couldn't bring an extra few grand fans per show? Come on now, Loss. Furthermore we are forgetting, he did book OVW which did well supposedly, and the Smackdown brand, which helped create stars for Raw to poach via drafts. Heyman shouldn't have won the poll by that much, or maybe even at all, but it is easy to see why he did. And no, it doesn't entirely have to do with uber smarky marks voting either.

Again, filling arenas require more than creativity. You have to market, promote, etc. Yes, if you were a good booker and a creative guy, it is easier to get people to come, but it isn't a guaranteed. Look at TNA, no matter what they try to do creatively speaking, they can't draw for shit. It was a different time in the 70s and 80s, but by the 90s the promotion model focused more on television shows rather than house shows. You needed TV to draw. I am not going to lay all the blame at Heyman's feet as a booker, but rather as a promoter.

Ryback, Mark Henry, Randy Orton, Brock Lesnar... I think that might be Cena's lineup going into the next Mania season.

Think promoter deals with the overall picture, which is where Heyman fails (where is ECW now?) But booker deals with the creative aspect of the product. He did definitely create a lot of stars who fell apart when given a chance on the bigger stage or younger wrestlers who used ECW as a springboard for bigger better things. I think Vince has no peer when it comes to being a promoter but as a booker? Eh. I have no problems with people picking Heyman over him. Personally if I was voting, I would go with Watts too though.

Not that I agree with the poll results either but I think some of you are confusing booker for promoter. Heyman was a terrible businessman and promoter but he's absolutely fine as a booker.

Havent seen the segment but wanted to comment on the Ambrose as leader thing. The whole point of the Shield is unity and strength in numbers. I think it is implied that Ambrose is in fact the leader but the beauty is that in theory they are all equals. Of course Rollins ruins the illusion by being the bitch of the group.

Sorry, but wrestling is so niched and ECW even more so, I just don't see any non fans getting into it unless they were sitting with a wrestling fan buddy who went "Hey dude, check this cool thing out." That was my point, not necessarily that they are inviting people to go do stuff. A wrestling fan who isn't familiar with ECW (younger crowd or late comers) might feel inspired to look further into the legend of ECW but a non fan? Not likely. Therefore they probably could have gotten away with showing the fuller story without omitting footage or whatever out of some misguided sense of keeping it clean for an audience that doesn't exist or if they do, comprise of the way out minority. Edit: just to clarify, I don't care if they showed the Mass Transit incident footage or not. And I don't really have a dog in this issue at all but I was just lending my support to Andrews's idea that the DVD is meant for fans moreso than non fans. That is all.

Probably referring to Matt D., since his post was quoting Dylan.

I have a lot of respect for Meltzer for producing quality content for what is it now, 30 years? There is no one in the world who does what he does on a consistent basis and does it as well as he does. That said, I don't know how a writer at a "metro" paper can defend the actual quality of his writing. I mean, take away what he is saying and focus on HOW he is saying it. It truly is garbage. Everyone in the journalism world, we're always told that to be a credible writer, we need to follow all these rules of writing. On that front, Meltzer does definitely fail, and often, but here's the rub. I suspect if he was forced into the traditional journalist role (ie. focusing on grammar, structure, etc) he probably would not have produced the content he has had, and probably would have burnt out badly by now. So with that in mind, it's a necessary evil to take what he is at face value. Content > actual journalistic quality.

Lemme ask, Dylan, what exactly do they want these non fans to do after watching the doc? It isn't like there is an ECW for them to go to afterwards. Let's say they convert to being fans of that product and the history within... then what? Point being, I do agree with Andrews in that this is very much so geared towards existing fans. In the words of the family annihilator of wrestling, "prove me wrong".

If they really wanted to fuck with Davey, have him do a paramedic gimmick. Be a guy who carts injured guys out but gets destroyed by the monster heel of the week. He could get brought up slowly wrestling skills wise like Santino the Italian fan. Would fuck with the ROH marks too.

Not sure what I am saying will necessarily be useful to this, but here is how I see the difference between being a heel that sells and gives to the face and a "bitch" is summed up to two prime examples today- CM Punk and Dolph Ziggler. Punk is never a dominant heel and he is often overpowered but he gets by in his matches by being portrayed as smarter than his opponent. How do you beat a slimy heel who has likely seen everything there is to see in wrestling? Then there's Ziggler... who truly bitches out in every possible way, with his substandard heel gimmick and his bumping being the major two indicators. Hell he is only world champion because someone else destroyed the babyface champion to begin with. I do not think Flair is too much like Ziggler but that is who I identify as a bitch nowadays.

You also don't get to where Cena is in a HHH world without having a certain passion for the business often found in fandom. Look at Batista. That is a dude who was backed by HHH but quickly showed that he was mostly in it for the money. He never got to the heights Cena or even a guy like Jeff Hardy experienced.

Wrestlers nowadays seem to be guys who are actual wrestling fans. It seems almost as if wrestling decided that they don't need the uber athletic guys anymore as much as they need the athletic guys who understands at least one function of professional wrestling. No they don't want the uber smark who wrestles but they definitely want a guy who deadlifts 300 pounds and knows who Stone Cold was.

Why is the Elijah Express being discussed like this? Dude just slams his knees into the back of his opponents in the turnbuckle corner. It isn't a knee killing move or even a move that taxes a body. It is the most perfectly safe move Elijah Burke could do, but it just simply wasnt enough in ECW.

Can't give credit to stiffness, personally. It is like saying it is okay to judge Harlem Globetrotters as a legitimate team. There are advantages existing that makes a certain event more interesting but it isn't fair to judge a match where both guys got to be stiff with each other whereas other wrestlers couldn't.

I was not really trying to be negative towards the board, and I apologize for claiming that people here were pro-Flair fans. I recognize that there are more people here that are open minded towards a wider variety of wrestlers and styles. I let my bias get in the way. That is all there is to it.

I don't want to vote because of how severely biased the site is towards Flair, but I will say I would choose Bret Hart any time, every time. The guy may be as formulaic as Flair as anybody, but the guy knew how to wrestle proportionate to his pay grade. He's the guy that had a formula where it made sense, in every match. Not every one would be a classic, and maybe not as many as Flair's, would be, but this is a guy who was primarily a singles wrestler for only 10 years or so. Flair wrestled 20+ years as a singles wrestler. I think the work Hart put forward as a singles wrestler actually rival if not surpass Flair, as a whole. Just my honest humble opinion though.