S.L.L.

I....wow....Keller actually wrote something that made sense. I'm speechless.

What is the legacy of the A-Team? Seriously... it meant nothing by the 90s when Todd was an actual thinking kid as opposed to a toddler. "Legacy" was probably the wrong term to use, but I think you're being willfully obtuse here. "The A-Team" was not exactly a super obscure TV show. It was before his time, and he didn't know about it. It was before a lot of people's time - including mine - and a lot of those people do know about it, even if it's modern day relevance is minimal outside of an upcoming movie. It's not Owen Marshall or Delvecchio. Not knowing about it will make some people look at you oddly. Not knowing about it and proclaiming that no one else in your age group knows about it either will make some people think you're out of touch. It's one thing to not know about something that's before your time, but if you're going to speak for a majority, you may want to actually know what the majority thinks. I ignored Rich Man, Poor Man, because I didn't feel the need to go over each show you listed individually. Admittedly, I didn't know much about it. It was before my time, and the pop culture collective unconscious never sent it my way like it did with The A-Team. In reading about it, it seems to have been a pretty big deal. And I can admit to it being a big deal and having been ignorant about it. Todd Martin can't. That's the point, and that's what you ducked. It's not really about what TV show had the bigger impact. It's not about whether or not Martin has familiarity with Old TV Show X. It's about Todd being too much of a pompous blowhard to admit that he misread people's familiarity with an old TV show. If Todd said "apparently, a lot more people knew about the A-Team than I thought, but it was before my time, and I never really heard of it until now for whatever reason," this argument doesn't happen. "TV is a fleeting form of pop culture" starts an argument because it exposes him as a jackass who didn't like getting knocked off of his soapbox, even if it was over something as petty as whether or not the audience would be familiar with the A-Team.

Agreed. There's just one problem: he's not under 8 anymore. When I was a little kid, one of the first shows that I started watching religiously was "Muppet Babies". It was a show with no shortage of references to things a 3-year-old kid would know nothing about. "Scooter's Uncommon Cold" is an episode-long spoof of "Fantastic Voyage", a movie I had never heard of. "Back to the Nursery" is an episode-long parody of "Back to the Future", a movie I had never heard of. "Journey to the Center of the Nursery", aside from the obvious references, gives a shout-out to "Undersea Kingdom", an old movie serial that's pretty obscure even to most adults who aren't hardcore MSTies. "This Little Piggy Went to Hollywood" references "Magnum P.I.", "Star Search", "I Love Lucy", and other shows and movies I'd know nothing about when I was three. When I was four, I got "The House That Muppets Built". I think I might have known who Indiana Jones was by that point, but the references to "American Bandstand", "Jaws", "Animal House", "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", and "The $10,000 Pyramid" were still going over my head. The title of "Elm Street Babies" references a movie my parents wouldn't have let me anywhere near when I was that age. They might have let me near "Plan 9 From Outer Space" - the only thing scary about that movie is how bad it is - but that didn't make "Plan 8 From Outer Space" any less obtuse of a joke to a 4-year-old. And it just goes on and on and on.... And that's just one kids' show. Rocky and Bullwinkle, Sesame Street, Animaniacs...lots of great kids' shows fired shots way above their intended audience and made no apologies for it. Kids ate it up anyway. I know I did. But yeah, you didn't get all the jokes when you were a kid. But then you grow up. And eventually, you start hearing about these things. You start to absorb knowledge about pop culture that may have been before your time, or that you're actively missing out on now, just because that stuff is floating around the pop-cultural canon and it eventually finds it way to you. I don't think I knew about the A-Team when I was eight. They were before my time. Even now, I think I've only actually seen one full episode of the show. But I know who they were, because even long after the show went off the air, it had made enough of an impact on people that I was eventually going to run into references about it and learn what it was. I'm probably far from the only person to have that experience. I watched about five minutes of "Napoleon Dynamite" before concluding that it was not even remotely funny and changing the channel. Never watched any of Heder's other movies. I still know who he is through pop-cultural osmosis. "with TV series, people don't tend to go back and watch them after they're off the air unless it's a really enduring sitcom like the Andy Griffith Show or the Brady Bunch. Thus at least to me TV references always seem much more dated. It's a more fleeting form of pop culture." This is a total cop-out, particularly in an age where seemingly every TV show ever is getting lavish DVD collections made available to a public that apparently wants to go back and watch them. It's even more of a cop-out with "The A-Team", considering the motion picture is right around the corner, which would theoretically suggest that there is some demand from people who want to revisit that show. And while I know you're not really trying to defend him in any serious way, bringing up "Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law", "Delvecchio", et. al....that's a cop out, too. None of these shows left behind the legacy of "The A-Team" or "Miami Vice". It's not an appropriate comparison. Yes, if Simon MacCorkindale ever guest hosted Raw, and Todd Martin knew nothing about "Manimal", it'd be hard to blame him. But not knowing about "The A-Team" is a little odd. It's not unthinkable, mind you. I had a birthday party a few years ago. Before my pals arrived, I set out a little spread, including some Triscuits. Somehow, one of my closest friends had gone 20+ years without ever even hearing about Triscuits. I was a little dumbstruck. Triscuits seem kinda universal to me, something everyone knows about. He didn't. But now he did. We all accepted that he had missed out on a famous cracker for some reason, and now he knew better. That was all there was to it. Todd Martin is not nearly so humble as my friend. For him, it's not enough to admit that he didn't know about a pop culture phenomenon - one that admittedly was before his time - and say that now he knows better and carry on with his life. He has to justify his position and reaffirm that he was right all along. Put him in my friend's shoes and imagine him talking about how "crackers are a fleeting form of snack food culture" and continue to insist that most people nowadays have no idea what Triscuits are, even as everyone else at the party tells him otherwise, and watch how fast I show him the door. Not knowing about something is one thing. Being too much of an intellectual narcissist to admit when you got something wrong is embarrassing.

This. There's pointing out that Jarrett was the main guy running the show - which was true - but he was basically claiming that Russo was being paid to do nothing for no discernible reason - which was false. If he was wielding so little power, why would anyone be gunning for his spot? Was Lester Burnham working for TNA? "I want a job with as little responsibility as possible...." So he hired Russo as a typist? I mean, I have a pretty low opinion of Russo. I wouldn't even let him work the mail room. But if you have a high enough opinion of Russo to hire him at all - and Jarrett and Russo were pretty tight - you hire him to book, since that's the thing he's allegedly good at. Even if it was Jarrett's vision dominating the company, if you look at TNA in 2007 and WCW in 2000, pretty clear that Jarrett's vision and Russo's vision are pretty much the same vision. I fail to see the creative differences that were being squelched by silencing Russo's vision for TNA. "Hey, Jeff! I've got a great new idea for a tequila bottle on a pole match with between Kurt Angle and Christy Hemme, and at the end, it turns out they're brother and sister and they're fucking each other!" "No way, Vince. I've already worked out plans for my whiskey bottle on a pole match between Kurt Angle and Christy Hemme, and at the end, it turns out they're brother and sister and they're fucking each other!" Seriously, the only possible conflict of interest I could see is over what to put on the pole. It was an obvious bullshit claim, and Keller's an idiot, so he bought it.

April 16, 2007:

He is? He's always taking TNA to task for the convoluted storylines and overbooking. Maybe so, but if he's actually blaming Russo for those problems, that's a big new development. As recently as 2007, he was bending over backwards to deflect blame for TNA's failings from Russo onto Jarrett and Mantel.

Russo was talking shit about Keller? Keller is a long-standing Russo apologist. Why would he go after him?

Well, then she'd have to run for a smaller position and move the election headquarters across the street.

Conversely, not enough is given away on free TV. That one has finally started to fade, although not until after several years of long free TV Finlay/Rey/Hardys/Murderer/Christian matches. Wrestling promos shouldn't be scripted. WWE is inferior to [insert promotion here] for [hackneyed reason X]. Fans don't want to see clean-cut bayfaces in this bold new era of 12 years ago. Predictable = bad. Unpredictable = good. Nobody wants to see long-term champions (when a long-term champion is present). Everybody wants to see long-term champions (when a long-term champion isn't present). The money is in the chase.

Seriously, why is "wrestling belts are treated as a prop" used as a pejorative? They're inanimate objects used in a work of performance fiction. That is the precise definition of "prop". What part of that do people like Babbysack disagree with?

I’m not sure how many people understood the reference, but I did so it’s fine by me.

To be fair, he blames Austin's seemingly arbitrary heel turn on driving away fans, which was one of the last nails in the coffin for the late-90's boom period. Not that it makes anything else he wrote make any more sense. And especially hard to create because the word "dynamics", when used by itself, doesn't mean anything. Kinda like most of Babbysack's articles, really.

So, in summation...meet the new Monday Night Wars, same as the old Monday Night Wars, except everyone is ten years older and ten years less interesting? Sadly, these are the old guys I would actually want to see. Incidentally, doesn't this mean that Abby is now part of the "Seven Decade Club" with Lou Thesz, Cavernario Galindo, and Mae Young?

It's probably because he always worked for such talent rich groups where it was harder to standout as being really great. Yeah, he was always great, but even at his best, he was always about the fourth or fifth best guy in whatever promotion he was working in at any point.

Not really. My claim has actual supporting evidence - Judd Apatow is a big name producer/director who's movies make a ton of money, have often recieved critical praise, and who's name has been used to help sell movies as much as any of his actors. Slasher's impromptu survey bears this out. "Do most people know who X is" is inherently a speculative question, of course. But I have a lot of ancillary evidence to support the speculation that, say, a lot of people know who Jesus Christ is, or that a lot of people know who Barack Obama is. Judd Apatow is a big name figure in Hollywood these days, and while I can't say for sure whether or not most people know who he is without asking every single person on Earth, all readily available evidence suggests he's a pretty famous dude. Your claim is supported by the fact that you didn't like two of his movies and you personally didn't know his name until you read it on a wrestling forum. Both claims are speculation. But one is speculation based on abductive reasoning from objective evidence, and one is based on extrapolation of personal experience. The former is valid, the latter, by itself, is not, and that's a lesson you are pretty clearly never going to learn. Res claiming that most people don't know who Jesus is in 5...4....

Wait, he has another TNA concept post? This I gotta see.

If you took a random survey of people, I bet more would know who Judd Apatow is than know who Joe Biden is. I don't now if that's evidence of anything as far as this argument goes, just a thought that popped into my head. That and just because you think something doesn't mean you should assume most of society thinks the same way, but that's a lesson Res is pretty clearly never going to learn.

I can see your point, but what I don't understand is that Christian and other wrestlers do a great job on ECW and yet they don't seem to go to the next step which I would figure is going on to Smackdown. My argument is that I'd just as soon see Christian stay in ECW. There really isn't a spot that good for him anywhere else in the company. It does seem that most of the guys who come up through ECW as of late end up on RAW for some reason. It does seem like they're skipping a step in the hierarchy, which is odd.

Oh, no question that they'll screw it up in due time. I'm just saying that having him as brand ace on ECW in lieu of "giving him a chance in the spotlight" on one of the other brands may actually be the best possible way to use him.

So the big argument I've been making for a few years now (well, one of them, anyway) is that WWE lacks a true, clear-cut identity. A sub-argument of that that I haven't been as loud about is that the individual brands lack identities, and a sub-sub-argument of that is that ECW not only lacked an identity beyond "WWE's AAA league", but that it didn't even have a wrestler on it's roster who seemed cut out to provide it with an identity. Maybe Punk, but I always saw him as someone who would make a name for himself in ECW and then move on to bigger and better things. Didn't see him as an anchor for the brand. In 2009, ECW has really been something of a "model brand" for WWE, because Christian came in and gave them an identity. On ECW, Christian actually feels like the star of the show, and you actually feel his identity - scrappy, mouthy, small-ish guy who doesn't take shit from anyone, who won't back down from any challenge, and who gratefully acknowledges the support of his rabid fanbase - reflected throughout the show. It's something WWE has been desperately lacking, and it's something I'd be disinclined to mess with.

Fans can claim responsibility insofar as they financially support a fucked-up system. No more, no less. I want to say that claiming that wrestling promoters are only interested in wringing money from wrestlers may actually be giving them too much credit, as I honestly don't see how an epidemic of wrestlers dying young is in any way financially beneficial. Want to say they're just reckless, wasteful idiots who put their egos even before their wallets. But I'm not that well educated in this regard...would the cost of keeping wrestlers healthy (or at least something vaguely resembling healthy) really outweigh the long-term costs of grinding your roster into a fine powder so you can make money off of them now?

Well that's...random.

I'm remembering an old Craig Kilborn-era episode of The Daily Show where they were doing a gag built around comparing politics to wrestling, "proving" their point by showing footage of a politician (forget who) delivering a speech, and replacing the audio with Hulk Hogan cutting a promo on Goldberg, replacing all instances of Goldberg's name with "Bill Clinton". Why do I get the feeling that Dave and Bryan would take this joke at face value today?

Also very true. I mean, even without all of that, labor still has to carry some blame just for sticking around in a clearly fucked up situation. But then that means the choice is between "wrestling is the last vestige of the Gilded Age" and "wrestling doesn't exist", so obviously the situation is fucked up beyond belief, and that's first and foremost because of the decisions of management. Some of the blame can be pawned off on others for letting it happen, but ultimately, management has to take responsibility for it's own actions. Which it won't. So...yeah.

There are about 63 wrestler spots currently on RAW/Smackdown/ECW. And a good 630 who could fill each of those roles. Take a look at the current roster. One might argue that Undertaker, Cena or Rey aren't replaceable. But honestly the WWF has booked all of them as though they are. Few paying jobs (fewer well paying jobs) + a large applicant pool + management who sees employees as being as disposable and replaceable as goldfish= an awful enviroment for unionization. This is true. To really do it effectively, it would have to be an industry-wide (or at least nationwide) thing, but good luck ever getting that to happen.