Cox

I didn't realize Ventura was still with WCW this late into '94. Is this the last match he will call chronologically in a Yearbook?

It wouldn't surprise me if the Japanese wrestlers just toned it down on their own. Muto was notorious for never giving a crap while working in the US after '89.

I think he and Tony Schiavone had absolutely no chemistry together whatsoever. Despite spending something like six years working with each other, they never really learned how to work with one another at all. And yet despite their obvious lack of chemistry, they worked together for over six years - longer than Schiavone worked with any other announcer and almost as long as Heenan worked with Gorilla Monsoon. WCW probably should have made a change a lot sooner but for whatever reason, it never happened.

I think this can best be summed up as a message from Bruno to Babby saying "Kizafizabe, mizark."

All of the TV was taped in long ass TV tapings once a month and the commentary was pre-recorded weeks in advance. My guess is they probably taped a few Prime Times in a row, too. So while it might not have been ideal, it's not like they were required to go on the road doing TV tapings every week. They probably did a month's worth of commentary and Prime Time stuff in a span of a couple of days.

I envy those people.

Did this include the post-match angle with Candido legdropping Boots the Cat?

Yeah, that's weird. Of all the veterans that ROH could use, why those guys? They must be friends of someone important, is the only thing I can think of. Cornette gave them their first break in SMW, and I'm pretty sure got them their WWF jobs as well, so I assume he was the one who brought them in.

I don't care if he is saying this is a fabrication, it sounds close enough to reality for me:

It wouldn't surprise me if the idea was to try to recreate the Mega Powers angle and have them team for a year and then Savage turns for a Savage/Hogan match at Starrcade or SuperBrawl VI, but they never got around to the Savage turn for one reason or another.

Alright, once somebody tells Vince that WCW used to have a show called Main Event Sunday nights on TBS, this show has to get a name change, right?

Normal people don't watch pro wrestling, so of course they wouldn't know it was the Benoit anniversary.

I'm going to give Lethal a pass for the crossface. I don't think it was meant as a Benoit tribute. He did it while he had another guy in a figure four, which was probably just some idea he had for a cool spot moreso than a Benoit tribute. The headbutt was a clear Benoit thing, and Richards using the chain as a garrot was just stupid, but the crossface was ambiguous enough to where I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Of course, if it comes out later that he did intend it as a Benoit tribute, fuck him for doing it.

Between this and this comment from the Observer this week, are we sure somebody has smartened up Kyle O'Reilly? Are we sure he knows wrestling is a work?

I'm almost positive there is a camcorder of the show where Severn beat Candido as I think I saw it once on a Candido comp, but that was probably at least 15 years ago.

That's been the rep on Bret I think for 20-25 years, so I'm glad that holds up on the yearbooks. Bret is a guy who will go all out for a TV or PPV match, but if the cameras are off (or if they're on for a Coliseum Video match I suppose), Bret isn't going all out, and will often visibly dog it. Then again, I think I can excuse that to a degree, because that was the mentality of 80's WWF where Bret spent most of his career - dog it on the house shows, with MSG a notable exception, turn it on four times a year for PPV.

I suspect the plan all along was for Flair to come back at some point in '95, which might be why they didn't do anything. That said, even if that was the plan, they probably should have at least done something to make it look like Flair was actually retired for good, but knowing Flair, he probably planned to come back as a heel anyway, so maybe he didn't want to babyface himself? Who knows?

So Tony Schiavone is the Joe Buck of wrestling commentary, to carry your analogy one step further?

Maybe it was crowd reaction? Vader got a good crowd reaction, so Cole wasn't instructed to shit on him, but when Lauper and Richter came out to a lesser reaction, Vince decided to give up on the segment and had Cole bury it.

And thus ends the Roddy Piper/Cyndi Lauper feud after 27 years.

I was at the PPV live, and honestly I didn't think there were that many problems with crowd heat. The crowd was definitely cold for the women's match, Hunico/Sin Cara, and the four way tag, but going in, those are the three matches you'd expect to be cold. The rest of the show, the crowd seemed fine. It wasn't molten hot, like the Sportatorium in the 80's for the Von Erichs or like MSG can get, but it was a solid crowd I thought. The Meadowlands is a hard building to maintain heat in, because it's so freaking huge, with the steep steps that seem to go on and on forever. I think the Meadowlands is just a hard building to get heat in. Anyway, I enjoyed the show a lot. Most of the matches were at least good. Scattered thoughts: -Man, Christian is just so much better off as a babyface, it's not even funny. They wasted a year of his career having him work as just another heel on the roster. That match was so good, and I'm predisposed not to like Cody Rhodes. -Don't get why Meltzer is hating so much on the tuxedo match. It's kind of like picking on the developmentally disabled kid at school. Was the match good? No, but it was designed to make nine year olds laugh. The ceiling wasn't exactly high there. I thought they did a good job given the constraints. -Three way was good stuff. It definitely would have been better as a singles, but they did about as good a job as you can do with the restraints of a three way match, especially when the focus was around AJ and nobody in the building bought the nearfalls before it because everybody knew AJ was going to get involved. -I missed a good part of the main event, as the guy I went to the show with was looking for his friend so we were moving around a lot, but what I saw looked good enough. Show and Laurinaitis are good foils for Cena, because the crowd isn't going to be split for them - they are going with Cena all the way. I was surprised that Cena winning got as big of a pop as it did, because I didn't think anybody would actually believe Laurinaitis was going anywhere, but it sent the crowd home happy. Overall, I'm glad I went. I'd say that I definitely got more than my money's worth out of this show.

I think the best way to describe Heyman and Cornette would be critically acclaimed. For those that follow the show Community, Paul Heyman might be the Dan Harmon of wrestling bookers.

I was thinking about this today, and while I would never, ever argue against Vince Russo being the worst booker in history, I do wonder if the Nitro formula devised by Kevin Sullivan wound up doing its own share of long-term damage to pro wrestling as we know it. When Nitro started in 1995, Monday Night Raw featured far fewer competitive matches than it does now. It wasn't a total squashfest like the syndicated shows, but the format was far different from what we see now. Nitro changed that by upping the ante and airing more competitive matches, and rarely featured out and out squashes. The reason they were able to air so many competitive matches is because WCW signed so many people to contracts, really 200 or more wrestlers, that it would have taken years to burn certain matchups out, so they could run out fresh matches all over their TV. WWF didn't have that luxury, because Vince from '95 to '97 could not afford to put together the kind of roster that could keep up with the Nitro formula. They had to drop the squash format, but with a smaller roster, there was a finite number of new matchups he could put on free TV before burning them out. If this was a war of attrition, WCW would have won, and I wonder if that was in part their strategy - wear out Vince by having an almost endless series of new matches every week for free on Nitro and later Thunder. It didn't work because WCW had a lot of other problems late in the 90's, but it seems like a good strategy in theory anyway. But now we're in 2012. The Monday Night Wars raised the bar for what's acceptable on a prime time wrestling show. Stars need to be on every week. Most stars need to wrestle every week. Rare is the time where WWE doesn't have their top wrestlers in a match. And like the 90's, there is only a finite amount of matches the company can run before those matches become stale and harder to draw, which means WWE has to bring back old stars like Rock and Lesnar for major PPVs to draw buys on PPV. I don't want to let WWE off the hook for failing to make a single star in the past five years other than CM Punk, but at the same time, it's hard to not burn out big matches on PPV. This is how we get to Cena vs Big Show headlining on Sunday, and while I think they've done an OK job building to it, and I think the match will be great, it's going to be tough to draw any sort of buyrate. The Nitro style of gunning for ratings and running big matches every week on free TV was definitely good for wrestling fans, but I'm not so sure it was good for the long-term health of wrestling.

Actually Sullivan didn't book this. Sullivan was brought in as a wrestler at this point, and might have been on the committee (I can't remember the timeline), but the head booker was Flair, both when Sullivan came in and at the start of the Dungeon of Doom. And, of course, Hogan had the final say on almost everything he was involved with at this point, too.

I would tend to agree, but that seems to be the mindset behind keeping two World titles alive at this point, since we've been well past the need for two World titles for quite some time now. Because of the Randy Orton suspension, this summer they are doing a Cena tour and a Punk tour, so it will be interesting to see if the Cena tour does well without a World title match, and if Punk can draw on top without Cena.