S.L.L.

It was actually less than three items - as tempting as it would be to blame Bush and the Mid-East kerfuffle for everything that's gone wrong with the world since 2000, the notion that titties could roam free on American TV before he brought the hammer down is more than a little far-fetched, and the news media was perfectly capable of covering both Iraq being a mess (or in Fox's case, spinning the Iraq mess) and the Janet Jackson thing at the same time. The news media can cover multiple stories at once. I don't know that they can cover any of them well, but they can cover more than one story at once. As for the TiVo thing, I'm not gonna go all ResidentEvil here and interpret my personal experience as a universal one, but TiVo was the whole reason I didn't even know about the wardrobe malfunction until the next day - I used it to just fast-forward through yet another shitty half-time show, and I got to the other side none the wiser. But really, Occam's Razor is right here, and the answer isn't hard to figure out. Americans - for reasons I understand to a point - freak out over boobs on TV. The Super Bowl is one of the most watched - if not the most watched - events on American TV. Naked boob + Super Bowl = EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!! Having the Bush administration around didn't help matters, but this would've happened no matter who was in office in any era. I mean, if Gore had (officially) won, am I to believe Tipper would've taken this lying down? Did she only flip out when sexual content was sung about rather than shown on a major TV event? I like defending Bush about as much as I like defending WWE Creative, but my feelings are mostly the same - they legitimately fucked up so much that I just don't get why some people feel the need to invent new ways for them to have fucked up to complain about. Bush as "The Innovator of Censorship" in a society that has only become more permissive as the years have rolled on (not that he helped that cause at all) and that has always had it's fair share of righteously indignant pro-censorship dudes trying to stop the unstoppable is one of the sillier examples.

Pretty sure this was meant as satire. Poorly written satire, but satire nonetheless. F4Wonline.com columns have become so bad that a parody is indistinguishable from the real thing? Eh...I'd buy it.

That's all I can read, and I can't reads no more.

That could answer your question in and of itself. I don't discount the significance of the Ricky Vaughn thing, but I tend to think that that was compounded by the replacement thing, and the way he was booked in the long run puts it over the top. He was brought in right after Mike got sick, and was very, very clearly his replacement while he healed up (to the extent that he healed up, anyway). Once Mike came back, Lance was no longer necessary and got pushed into the background. He asks for a pay raise, gets turfed, and Fritz goes on the air and tells the fans he was lying to them the whole time and that Lance wasn't really a Von Erich. The fans already knew this, of course, but as Jack Pfeffer proved in the 40's, telling people you conned them even after they willingly went along with the con doesn't really make them feel psyched up to keep following you. Lance wasn't a great worker, and really not even a good one, but he was inoffensive most of the time, and is spite of everything, he was pretty over, and seemed like someone with potential for stardom. The "fake Von Erich" stigma killed that, and I tend to look at him as a victim as a result. I can't help but wonder how things would have gone for him if he had been brought in as a Von Erich friend instead of as a Von Erich. I'd think he'd have been better off as the better version of Brian Adias than as Mike Von Erich's understudy.

Not sure but Russo has been blamed for angles he didnt book. Remember Alex Shelley and others aped Jackass for a few shows beginning the PPV Russo was backstage? Everyone blamed him but he didnt start booking until the next IMPACT! Angle started on the third Impact before that PPV. Russo wasn't even announced as returning to the fold until just before the PPV itself, and it was blown off at that PPV. Nobody blamed him for that at the time. I don't know if he's caught some retroactive blame for it, but nobody thought that was his when it was happening. Im fairly sure that he was blamed initially at the time. You're wrong. Angle begins on the 9/7/06 Impact. Russo is rehired on 9/21/06, and is announced as being rehired shortly thereafter. Angle ends at the No Surrender PPV, held on 9/24/06 People not only wouldn't have known that Russo wasn't to blame, they wouldn't have even known he was around to blame, and the angle ended right after they found out. If you look through what was written at the time, nobody was blaming him for any then-current TNA booking until after they actually knew he was in the company again. Jackass angle was before that.

Not sure but Russo has been blamed for angles he didnt book. Remember Alex Shelley and others aped Jackass for a few shows beginning the PPV Russo was backstage? Everyone blamed him but he didnt start booking until the next IMPACT! Angle started on the third Impact before that PPV. Russo wasn't even announced as returning to the fold until just before the PPV itself, and it was blown off at that PPV. Nobody blamed him for that at the time. I don't know if he's caught some retroactive blame for it, but nobody thought that was his when it was happening.

Are you suggesting that Dave is watching Arn with 2010 eyes?

See that's the thing. I, like most people familiar with Russo's work, assumed Russo got into the Bible because of all the incest. But.... So he missed the whole "global flood" thing. I would also think that the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's wife, the firstborn of Egypt during the tenth plague, everyone who might have been killed as a side effect of the nine plagues prior, the Pharaoh and his army who had the Red Sea slammed shut on them as they pursued the Israelites, and Aaron and everyone else who worshiped the golden calf (who were only spared because Moses talked God down from killing them) might take issue with the above statement. Not to mention God laying all this shit on people kinda calls the whole "Satan ruling the Earth" thing into question. In other words, Russo's theology includes the story of Adam and Eve, and then skips straight to the New Testament. And well, aside from that being a really amazingly stupid way to read the Bible, it means he misses out on all the incest. I mean, the New Testament isn't my area of expertise, obviously, but the Old Testament is loaded with incest, and the story of Adam and Eve - being that they're the only two people on Earth at the time - is one of the only stories in the book that doesn't have any. This is completely antithetical to everything I've ever understood about Russo - he actually seems to have gone out of his way to avoid the incest. It still makes sense on the "Russo is a fucking moron" level, but incest is one of the big recurring motifs in his work, and you'd think it's presence in the Bible would appeal to his aesthetic. Maybe he's an anti-Semite on top of everything else.

It's not explicitly stated, but in fairness to Vince, the fruit has been envisioned as an apple by so many people for so long that it may as well have been. It's a bit like Humpty Dumpty being an egg - never said anywhere in the original text, but the original text doesn't say otherwise, and it's so common in pop cultural depictions that you can just kinda roll with it. As for everything else...well...umm...yeah. This in particular jumps out at me: Aside from being a relatively religious Jew, I've developed an interest over the years in Zoroastrianism, which is sort of the missing link between your old school polytheistic religions and the Abrahamic monotheistic religions of today. It took the multiple gods of previous religions and neatly boiled them down into two different guys: Ahura Mazda, the "uncreated God" who was 100% good, and Angra Mainyu, who I don't think is ever explicitly called a god, but who was an "uncreated spirit" of 100% evil, and who is arguably the jump-off point for the modern day concept of the Devil. This simplified dualist "good vs. evil" notion is one of the major influences on later monotheistic religions, but one of the big differences is that Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were separate creations (uncreations?), and Angra Mainyu - while ultimately destined to fall to Ahura Mazda - could be something of a real competitor to him. By contrast, the Abrahamic God is the sole "uncreated" being in his religions. He created everything else, and no other entity poses any kind of true threat to him. Satan may have his origins in Angra Mainyu, but he's considerably less powerful, poses no threat to God, and could only rule the Earth if God let him. And well, God doesn't really do that. Offhand, the closest he came was God letting him get his kicks in on Job, for the sole purpose of showing Satan that even when given carte blanche to wreck a guy's shit, he was still basically powerless. For the most part, his M.O. is testing people's faith in the hopes that he can expose how flawed God's prize creation is, and by proxy, how flawed God is. World domination isn't really his bag. He's more interested in watching it all burn and rubbing God's face in it. But he can't really do that, because God is a bajillion times more powerful than he is, so he's basically stuck doing small-scale cons. Russo fucked up Christianity so bad that he actually became a really confused Zoroastrian. Also, take a look at this: Well, you conveniently glossed over it, Vince, but what he was going to do was sacrifice every single sinner on the fucking planet except for Noah, his family, and a shit ton of animals in a global flood. Seriously, how do you just miss one of the most famous stories of the Bible like that? I mean, I guess Noah and his family still carried the "sin gene", but it's pretty clear that God's big plan was "kill these sinful motherfuckers, and spare these guys because they're not so bad". "Sin gene" or no, he seemed to be putting an awful lot of faith in a "heel" like Noah to restore decency to the world after 40 days and 40 nights of hardcore sinner sacrificing.

I recall one of the Mean Street Posse had his eyebrow ring ripped out during a match in Memphis, but obviously that wasn't exactly a called spot. Well, yeah, I guess stuff like that and the Bossman/Droz thing happens. I was thinking more along the lines of "Wrestler A gently tugs at Wrestler B's piercing, and Wrestler B sells it like Wrestler A is trying to rip it out". If it's there to be used, use it.

Frankly, if anything, it's not gimmicky enough. I was always a fan of the "babyface ties IRS' tie to the ropes/rudo ties Octagon's bandanna to the ropes" spot. Always up for heels waylaying faces as they remove their ring gear. If a wrestler wears an outfit that their opponent can use against them, I like seeing it used against them. Like Rovert said, piercings are something that a wrestler can have used against them, but I don't really remember ever seeing it happen. It seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Go ahead. Hate him now, internet! HATE HIM NOW!

It's been a long time, but I don't think the chops were even registering with me when I was watching it in '96. All I remembered was VADER SMASH! and that this guy's WWF run was gonna be awesome. And then reality ensued.

While it's hard to rule out the possibility of WWE brass being this intensely stupid, my mind keeps coming back to this: Which happened before "Daniel Bryan" was publicly announced as being fired, but after he was internally announced as being fired. It's not unthinkable that one hand would've failed to talk to the other in time. Still, WWE.com announced his firing around 10:45 last night. Danielson's twitter update was about two hours before that. Even assuming that changing Danielson's name was a snap decision on WWE Creative's part, that Danielson was immediately informed of this, and that his Twitter page was immediately updated accordingly, that means that Danielson would have been fired at approximately 8:30 on a Friday night at the latest, and neither the public nor anyone in the company other than the top brass was told until 10:45. Were they waiting for Smackdown to end before they broke the bad news to everybody? Also, am I the only person having a hard time envisioning this not only as the kind of story that the WWE higher-ups would have been told and needed to keep secret from everyone else in the company - including WWE Creative and Danielson himself - for at least two hours, but that WWE higher ups would have needed to be informed about at all? Does anyone really see Vince sitting down the company's major management figures and saying "look, I know he was part of this big angle we did on Raw, and I know he's a four-time WON Most Outstanding Wrestler of the Year...but we're gonna have to let him go. Just don't tell anyone for two hours. Smackdown's on, and I don't want people getting bummed out."? Is the firing of Bryan Danielson a decision that WWE management would really concern themselves with, much less to the point that they'd need to keep it a secret? When Vince McMahon asked "Who the fuck hired Raven?", was he asking the COO? Did they have to keep Raven's firing a secret for the next two hours? Yeah, Danielson is a more valuable property fresh off of a hot angle, but you can say that about any of the NXT guys right now. Could anyone envision this happening with Skip Sheffield? It's not impossible, and like Loss said, it's not a particularly good work if it's a work, but the circumstances behind it seem so unbelievable that something has to be up.

After many delays, the second edition of More Wrestling Than Wrestling is up, with Part 1 of a multi-part look at Judy Garland and how she pulled one of the biggest carryjobs in cinema history.

That is truly the best introductory vignette I have seen in years.

We'd have to dig back in his thread, but Keller's theory wasn't that the WWF was to blame, Keller's theory was that a parody article he wrote in the Torch was to blame. Seriously.

In the long, long ago, I remember reading something on RSP-W from a British guy talking about a WWF event he saw there in '95 (I think) where Fatu was wrestling Owen Hart, and a "U-S-A" chant started up. In England. In a match pitting a Samoan against a Canadian with a Japanese manager. I think that's still the gold standard for odd instances of the "U-S-A" chant.

These are good points. Mild mannered Daniel Bryan being fired and freaking out was pretty out of left field too and was WWE Creative's attempt to shock the audience into caring about Bryan after they killed his heat with a botched modern day 1-2-3 Kid losing streak gimmick. Wasn't the original plan for Bryan was to be the Rookie who actually won the competition? I don't know. Either way, this really wasn't that far out, nor is it a particularly big shock as far as shock moves go. This one was at least organic - he had the obvious motivation for his actions, he had reason to be frustrated, and you saw him progress from "mild-mannered" to "freaking out" over the course of the interview. I doubt this is what they were meaning to build to, but it is something that was built to, even just within the segment itself, as Danielson starts out calm, and his anger boils over. You can't say that for Tazz, who turned heel and gave JR a hard time basically for the hell of it.

On principle, I agree with everything you just said. And there were definitely better ways to get Danielson over than what they've done with him. That said, let's consider a couple of things: 1. We know who this geek is and why he's attacking Michael Cole. His character and motivation has been established for weeks now. 2. Despite an obvious surface shootiness, I think it actually wasn't nearly as shooty as I feared it would be when I first read about it. Promo was about WWE's hiring practices. In-universe, the WWE must have some kind of hiring practices, so one can talk about them in promos without it being a Russo-style shoot. Oh sure, it could easily lend itself to that, but consider Danielson's specific grievances: they prefer to hire big guys, and they don't like to hire guys they didn't create. Those are things that can be true in-universe. You don't have to shoot to complain about that in the interview. And again, this is all about hiring practices. Danielson didn't complain about being "held back" because of his size and "self-made man" status like Douglas would have in that situation. He complained about not getting a job in the first place because of those things. The one part other than the weakness of the brawl that I took umbrage with was the line about Vince telling Cole what to say over the headset. Inside joke issues aside, Cole is a face in everything except this one. Painting Cole as a heel toady to McMahon doesn't make a lot of sense. Still, Vince as guy who orders his staff around so that they send the message he wants them to send is hardly out of character for him. He wasn't accusing him of booking guys poorly or anything fourth wall-breaking, he was accusing him of being a guy who spreads propaganda. That's totally in-line with the Mr. McMahon character. You don't have to shoot to say that, although it was inadvisable for other reasons. But nothing he said was necessarily a shoot, strictly speaking. It's stuff they haven't brought up on camera before, but hey, there was a time when Vince McMahon running the company wasn't brought up on TV. You can incorporate these things into angles without resorting to Vince Russo "THIS ISN'T PART OF THE SCRIPT" silliness. Nothing said in that promo didn't make sense on an in-universe level, it's just that they discussed things that had never really been discussed in-universe before. 3. This promo was all about basic morality and exaggerated characters. Bryan Danielson is a gifted young wrestler who wants to make his living on the grandest stage of them all. When he finally gets his chance, he is deliberately undercut at every turn by the egomaniacal "Pro" who was supposed to be helping him, and he's ultimately eliminated not by the vote of the Pros (who had earlier ranked him as the best of the NXT rookies despite his never winning a match), but by management who dismiss him because he's small and because he's not a homegrown talent. In other words, he's your classic working class hero, a tiny, pale, vegan Dusty Rhodes or Steve Austin. Yeah, that's a pretty loaded comparison, but that is clearly what they're aiming for with him. Working class hero denied a job by corrupt management after being hamstrung by an arrogant heel taking out his frustrations on a stuffed shirt who served as corrupt management's public face is a totally valid wrestling angle. 4. If the crowd's reaction is any indication, this didn't go over their heads. It didn't blow the roof off of the place, but pretty clear they were into it.

Not to mention that he's complaining about the presence of lowbrow entertainment on a wrestling show. Does he realize the implication there? Does he actually believe wrestling is highbrow? Higher than commercials, even?

You might be the only person. I was at the show last night, and it got a tremendous reaction from the crowd. Of course, a lot of the audience has changed and probably wouldn't remember the Tazz angle that was like 10 years ago. Yeah, I think that thought needs to be expanded upon. I can see where one would find flaw with this...I don't think comparing Danielson to Tazz really illustrates anything by itself. Danielson's actual "attack" part of the attack didn't look great, but I think Cole deserves some blame for his selling. I don't think Tazz ever actually got to attack JR before Lawler stepped in. Also, the Tazz heel turn and attack on JR was really out of nowhere, and seemed to just be them trying to shock the audience into caring by having Tazz make fun of Ross' Bell's palsy. This angle was actually backed up by something and seemed to successfully advance a character. I mean, you could complain that the promo was too inside and shooty. But it actually wasn't even that bad in that regard. Basis of the promo was WWE's hiring practices, which is something a character could complain about without this NOT BEING PART OF THE SCRIPT~!, and Cole being a poor replacement for Jim Ross is a sentiment a lot of fans could get behind. And it's not like Danielson is a guy who doesn't have a proven track record of quality working an anti-corporate gimmick.

Do it for me, TV Tropes! Bile Fascination Personally, most of the Todd Martin stuff I read is actually just people C&Ping his choicest material to boards like this, but the bottom line is that there are lot of people out there with lame opinions on wrestling that are kinda commonplace and bland. I don't care about those. But someone as stupid as Martin makes you stand up and pay attention. Why? I've got nothing to prove. Not to brag, but the list of stuff I've written online that's not better than the best article Martin has ever written is very short, and it's not like I haven't written a fair amount of dreck when I wasn't writing the Wrestling Death Apologist BINGO Card, my analysis of Wade Keller's new concept for TNA, and the KENTA/Nakajima "reality vs. realism" argument. Granted none of those things got published on WO.com/F4Wonline, but this isn't really about "proving we can make it on there as well". If I sent in a piece to the site, whether it got published or not, Todd Martin would still be a hack. Point of the thread is that the guys writing for the site are, by and large, hacks. Our ability or lack thereof to join their ranks changes nothing.

I hadn't really taken that into consideration, I admit. Gabe adapting his FIP booking to TNA feels like something that might work. I have my doubts about whether or not he'd do that, but if he did, I could see him working.

Everyone is sleeping on the real issue here: Which is the more fleeting form of pop culture: TV or commercials?