S.L.L.

You're missing my point. Post isn't about WWE presenting an inaccurate view of wrestling history. Like I said, I assume they are going off of the Toots Mondt version of history. I take that for granted going into it. Have absolutely no expectations that Stecher or Londos are going to be portrayed as being as important as they were. It's a given they will go from Gotch to Lewis to Thesz with no stops in between. Not about history. About matches and whether or not they'll be in full. Bix said... You said... I said... "No Stecher chapter" is a throwaway line. No reason to expect WWE to recognize Stecher's place in history. But if all they have of some of the matches that they've included as extras is clips, I wonder why you would bother to include them as extra matches at all. Not about an accurate portrayal of history. About how WWE has traditionally laid out their DVDs. Extras are full matches and usually some of the surrounding angles and interviews. If all they have are clips, why are they throwing them in a section typically reserved for full matches? Why not show the clips at the appropriate moment in the documentary? Especially if you're going to show those clips after O'Connor/Rogers, which will almost certainly be in full. I mention Stecher/Caddock not because I expect the WWE to pay these men anything more than lip service (would be shocked if the documentary mentions Caddock at all), but because it's a match that, while not in full, is more than just clips, and if you needed an actual match to fill space in the section typically reserved for actual matches, that seems like a pretty good way to go. If you don't want to use that because those guys aren't such prominent figures in the narrative, you can use Lewis/Shikat. Again, we have more than just clips of that one. I wouldn't expect them to point out that Lewis was past his prime at this point, that Mondt had brought him into New York because he had idiotically driven Londos out, or that Lewis' subsequent run there bombed. But if you need a full(er) match for your section typically devoted to full matches, it's there. There are also plenty of Lou Thesz matches that exist in full, and again, if all you have are clips of certain matches, why include those in the section of the DVD typically dedicated to full matches when there are plenty of full Thesz matches you could include instead? I'm not asking for Steve Yohe to thoroughly fact check this thing. I'm asking why they would veer from the standard formula for their historical DVDs when they don't have to, and wondering if they're really even going to do that in the first place.

Of course star power and aura should be inlcuding in discussing how good a match is. If Cena and Taker do the exact same match as Abyss and Joey Ryan, which match is better. Even if it is move for move the same, Cena and Taker just would make the match cooler to watch. Just like having an insane crowd makes a match better than having a shitty crowd. If that wasn't counted, then Rock-Hogan from WM18 would not be remembered at all. Absolutely. That said, those are things that have to come forward in the match itself. I was largely underwhelmed by the aura of Michaels/Taker. More interested in the great aura that Big Show was giving off in the three-way. Thought all three of the legends that Jericho fought had great auras that were more gripping than Michaels and Taker. I realize that is a minority opinion, though. I can see rating Michaels/Taker highly because of aura. Still, not something arbitrary. You can point to ways that a guy's aura is coming across in a match. If he's just saying "Michaels and Taker are famous, therefore their match is better", that's pretty lame. You know, Hogan vs. Andre from Mania III had more star power than any match ever at that point and plenty of aura, and Dave hated that. Is star power and aura something that only started mattering recently?

If they were just going to show clips, you'd think they'd toss them into the appropriate sections of the documentary instead of making them full-fledged extra matches. I say "you'd think", of course, but still you'd wonder why they just show clips of those if they're not going to show any extra clips of any of Thesz's matches or Caddock/Stecher (yeah, no Stecher chapter, I figure the WWE is still going off of the Toots Mondt version of wrestling history, but still) or even something like Lewis/Shikat. There are a bunch of historical fragments out there. I would wonder why they would choose those if that's all they were going to be, especially if they're showing them after O'Connor/Rogers, which will almost definitely be in full.

Nice to see Dave's analysis can still contain common sense every now and again. It probably helps that he's going after one of his favorite targets, but good to see, regardless. Of course, the real revelation is that there are apparently Hogan defenders at Wrestling Classics now.

Like the Friar's Club says, "we only roast the ones we love". I've seen enough roasts to know that people will say some really offensive shit to people they actually like with no hard feelings behind it. It's one thing if the "mean-spirited" jokes were actually meant to be hurtful, but in the context of a roast, I'm guessing that's not the case.

I had them.... 9/11/80 4/23/81 4/3/80 2/8/80 5/9/80 9/11/80 feels like a lock for my top 50, and 5/9/80, while not really a bad match, will probably end up pretty close to the bottom. The other three, who knows. There were matches on the Memphis set that I loved that ended up in the 80's and 90's, so on a set with 175 matches, anything can happen, really.

What I wrote at DVDVR: Disc 1 rankings: 1. Antonio Inoki vs. Stan Hansen (9/11/80) 2. Antonio Inoki vs. Stan Hansen (4/3/80) 3. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Johnny Londos (9/19/80) 4. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Chavo Guerrero (5/9/80) 5. Tatsumi Fujinami & Kantaro Hoshino vs. Dynamite Kid & Steve Keirn (1/18/80) 6. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Dynamite Kid (2/5/80) 7. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Kengo Kimura (9/25/80) 8. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Tony Rocco (9/11/80) 9. Antonio Inoki vs. Stan Hansen (2/8/80) 10. Gran Hamada vs. Babyface (4/3/80) 11. Antonio Inoki vs. Stan Hansen (5/9/80) 12. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Steve Keirn (2/3 Falls) (2/1/80) I think my ballot is going to be weird again. Fujinami is all kinds of awesome, and he is definitely the top worker of the disc, but the Inoki/Hansen feud really landed right in the sweet spot for me.

Rats! And I was this close to being the foremost wrestling nerd on Long Island!

Al has it right. Another problem with the stance is that it's applying a standard (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) to wrestling criticism that gets applied to no other form of aesthetic criticism. Do you suppose Dave ever complains about how people today think "It's a Wonderful Life" is a great movie and overlook "Diary of a Chambermaid" because they're not watching them with 1946 eyes?

Loss laughing at this makes me feel better about reading it and envisioning Kev taking some bad peyote and predicting the whole "bugchasing" thing. Next week, on "Kevin Von Erich: Bigot or Visionary?"...."And there's gonna be this one guy, Perez Hilton, he's gonna be the end of western civilization, man!"

Does anyone know what the extent of the IRL harassment and hatred was for Gordon Jump after playing a pedophile on Diff'rent Strokes? I know his daughter talked about people who actually knew him turning against him because "you played this character on TV, that means that some of that must be in you", but I don't know how far that went. My natural inclination is to chalk this up to a combination of wrestling having an abnormally high number of stupid and/or crazy fans compared to other forms of entertainment, people in the biz stretching the truth (not lying, mind you, just "fish story" stuff), all the stuff TomK was talking about WRT to jobs that manipulate people's emotions, and booze.

You know, I've come up with bizarre, ill-conceived organizational systems like this that I change the structure of on the fly because I don't like the results it gives me. Of course, I have the good sense not to share it with the world unless I can actually make it work.

Well, there's often not much going on on a surface level, or what is going on makes no logical sense. If we're to assume that there's anything to what Dave the wrestling analyst is saying - and there's a good argument to be made that there isn't - you kinda have to dig a bit deeper. Mind you, I agree that Edge is a stronger HOF candidate than Rude. But you can come to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

Kinda surprised no one picked up on the strangeness of this comparison. Edge held the World Title, which, in theory, is supposed to be an extension of the WCW Title...which Rick Rude held. How is this supposed to be the more valid comparison? And you can't even say that it's because it gives Dave the answer he wants, because Edge has held the WWE Title, too, so you can just say he held both belts while Rude only held one. Why this comparison? Is Dave that desperate to prove his point that he couldn't take a fraction of a second to think this one through?

Yeah, I'm really pleasantly surprised by that. 70%? I would never have expected a historical candidate would be able to get that kind of support. I guess it does make some sense. We've cleared out all of the major modern candidates (except for Mysterio, who bafflingly remains on the outside looking in despite having all the makings of a slam dunk pick), so I suppose if you must vote for someone, you'll have to look to the past. There are a lot of good historical figures who still have strong cases for inclusion, so as long as they keep looking past Moolah to actual deserving candidates like Miller and Shire, that's fine by me. Hans Schmidt in 2010, maybe? Maybe not. The R'n'R's should go in ahead of the MX, but still glad to see they finally made it. What exactly is Masa Saito's case? I honestly don't know much about his role in wrestling history. So for all the hubbub about the introduction of major British candidates, none of them got much real support? That kinda stinks. Still, glad they're at least doing it, and I'd think the inclusion of Johnny Saint on the ballot next year will help their cause. And one more thing on the historical candidate tip....I don't know if Yohe did some big write-up for him that I missed, but while Everett Marshall - in the words of jdw - passes the laugh test, he seems like a pretty weak candidate compared to the other fiat inductees from recent years, not to mention a number of other guys from his time like Orville Brown, Maurice Tillet, Steve Casey, and Lou Daro who all seem to have much stronger cases for inclusion. Not sure what gave him the edge here.

I linked to this earlier in the thread, but I feel like I need to actually re-post it because apparently some people still haven't got the memo that wrestling =/= MMA any more than it does "The Wizard of Oz". Prove it. Seriously. I want to hear you back up this claim. Everybody says it, everybody takes it for granted as being true, nobody ever stops to consider what it means. Nobody ever stops to consider if it's really a valid claim. I'm opening the floor to you, Mr. Evil nee Pegasus. Prove it. The makers of The Wizard of Oz tried to draw a paying crowd. A number of alterations were made to the plot of the book to help draw the crowd. The Wizard of Oz used good guys and bad guys, moreso than other sports. Everyone wants to be the best. Dorothy's friends were all about self improvement. And Dorothy and the Wicked Witch kept feuding over those coveted Ruby Slippers. Not a title, strictly speaking, but then the UWF didn't have titles, and if you consider MMA to be pro wrestling, you would have to consider the UWF to be pro wrestling. Same goal that The Wizard of Oz had. And, you know, every business ever. I don't know what kind of athletes the cast and crew of The Wizard of Oz were. They probably don't compare favorably to wrestlers or mixed martial artists. That said, all very motivated people, competitive, similar mindset. As has been noted, wrestlers aren't supposed to get hurt. Neither were Buddy Ebsen or Margaret Hamilton, but it happened on the set of The Wizard of Oz. Things can have common roots without being the same thing. That's a pretty big difference. If wrestling went legit, it would become MMA. That doesn't mean it would still be wrestling. MMA is a game, and as with any game, it's defined by it's rules. It's rules, as you may or may not have noticed, are very different than pro wrestling's "rules". It's necessary for me to throw those quotation marks in there because pro wrestling is not a game, and therefore is not defined by rules. It's a genre of fiction. It belongs to an entirely different categorization of stuff. Like Law & Order and actual police work. Or MMA and The Wizard of Oz. Sure you can compare the two. There may even be real, valid comparisons, but that doesn't make them the same thing. To the people saying that boxing is MMA or wrestling or whatever -- it's not because boxing is just combat where you "only" use your fists. Combat where you use "everything" is wrestling or MMA. Boxing is different though similar in some aspects. Combat where you use everything is street fighting or war. Combat where you use everything within reason is MMA. A genre of theater defined by it's focus on a fictional form of combat is wrestling. Professional wrestling is not combat. It is a genre of fiction about combat. These are two very, very, very different things. Because you dramatically changed something very crucial to it's definition as pro wrestling. Let me put it to you this way. If you could see me right now, you could accurately describe me as a living human being. If you then produced a revolver and shot me through the head, you could probably accurately describe me as a dead body. You took a fundamental aspect of my first classification (being alive) and changed it rather drastically, much like taking a fundamental aspect of wrestling (it's a genre of fiction) and changing that. Would you apply the same logic in this situation and say that a living being and a lifeless corpse are the same thing, or do you agree with me that this is stupid? While the above example may seem severe, keep in mind that it's actually a more direct comparison than pro wrestling and MMA. At least life and death belong to the same classification of things. MMA and pro wrestling are entirely different types of things. One is a form of legitimate combat, and one is a genre of fiction. It's like suggesting boxing and the stories of P.G. Wodehouse are the same thing. Or muay thai and "The Lord of the Rings". Fuck, there's a more direct comparison between MMA and video games about pro wrestling than there is between MMA and actual pro wrestling, just because they're both games. But you can't change something crucial to the definition of something and expect it to be the same thing. In the original book of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wore silver slippers. In the movie, they became ruby slippers, because that would better highlight the use of Technicolor. Are silver and rubies the same thing? If you replaced the cast and crew of The Wizard of Oz with the cast and crew of Roadhouse, changed the setting to a bar in Jasper, Wyoming, changed the plot to something about a deeply philosophical bouncer helping take back a small town from a corrupt businessman, and changed the title of the movie to "Roadhouse", then it would be Roadhouse. Are The Wizard of Oz and Roadhouse the same movie? It doesn't work that way. You don't get to change the definition of things on a whim like that. No, it really, really isn't. Well, okay, more real than The Wizard of Oz, but not even close to reality, unless you're just living in a really fucked up place. If Jesse Ventura's political career doesn't help his case, I wonder if his acting career does? Being an actor and being a wrestler at least belong to the same classification of things, which is more than I can say for being a wrestler and being a mixed martial artist.

I think you're overthinking things here a bit. Sakuraba is in because Dave put him on the ballot and people treated him as if he was a pro wrestler. He ticks all of Dave's boxes if you pretend Pride was pro wrestling. I don't really blame the voters for voting him in, because he meets all of Dave's HOF criteria; he just shouldn't have been placed on the ballot in the first place, unless Dave was honest about turning his HOF into a pro wrestling and MMA HOF, which was the path he started going down. Well, in my defense, my logic was factoring in the whole reason Dave et al. were considering PRIDE to be wrestling in the first place. It's also me thinking a lot about 2000 (I think) when a lot of people were seriously arguing Sakuraba as wrestler of the year for the above reasons (and Dave seemed to be considering him as a major candidate, I assume for those reasons...no successful PRIDE fighter who wasn't being billed as a pro wrestler who was getting that consideration).

One of the weird factors in play is that - as I recall - Dave does have a sort of loosely defined list of criteria that should be considered with HOF candidates. It's just that no one - including Dave himself - really seems to follow them, at least not in any consistent way. Like, Sakuraba is in because he lent "legitimacy" to puro by winning shootfights while being billed as a pro wrestler. So that's rationalized as him being influential, which is a major criteria. But that "influence" isn't really present anywhere - the puro scene went in the toilet while Sakuraba was off giving it "legitimacy", and remains there to this day. But voters liked seeing a guy billed a pro wrestler win shoots, so they voted for him and spun it as him being "influential". Same deal with Kurt - he's in for the reasons TomK went over already, but his amateur career isn't part of the official criteria, so they transfer their feelings about that to other aspects of his career, namely his work, and push him based on that. The old-timers are at least going in based on drawing power and historical significance, although some guys' candidacies are vetted better than others (Toots Mondt outlived most of his peers and got to re-write wrestling history to say that he basically invented wrestling as we know it, and people took him for granted because of his association with Ed Lewis; Lou Thesz outlived most of his peers and got to re-write wrestling history so that anyone who posed a threat to his spot as wrestling's top dog or otherwise rivaled him was completely marginalized, and people took him for granted because Thesz was a wrestling legend, etc.), not to mention the importance that people put on shooting ability in wrestlers from that era, even though the matches were universally meant as works with only two possible exceptions that I can think of, and most shoots of the era were like the aforementioned Zbyszko/Munn match - intended as works, but one guy doesn't cooperate, usually for political reasons. So the rules are there, but people choose not to follow them when they hurt/benefit the cases for certain wrestlers. Agreed. A sufficiently talented worker should be able to get into the Hall on that basis. But I feel more comfortable putting people in for being great workers than keeping them out for being bad ones. If we do the former, and footage turns up showing that some obscure figure from the 30's was actually a superworker, we can put him in. If we do the latter, and footage turns up showing that George Hackenschmidt was a total load, we're kinda screwed. Workrate should be a criteria, but it's a criteria we should be careful with.

A thought about Big Daddy's candidacy: Again, let's use the line of thought that Big Daddy was this really huge money-drawing mainstream star in the UK, but is out of the Hall because he was an absolute shit worker. What happens if - hypothetically speaking - we discover this huge vault of old film reels showing the matches of Frank Gotch, and it turned out Gotch totally sucked? Now, I grant you that Gotch was both a bigger star and more historically important than Big Daddy. He still has a better case without workrate than Big Daddy does. But there are still a bunch of people who went into the HOF not for or even in spite of their workrate, but without known evidence of it. Is it fair or logical to keep someone out of the Hall based on a certain criteria when others go in without that criteria even being considered? Everything I've read about Stanislaus Zbyszko suggests he was a total bore in the ring. He was a big star, but certainly never the star that Big Daddy was (though the "exchange right" may or may not make that a negligible difference). He also had some historical influence from shooting on Wayne Munn to get the World Title away from the Ed Lewis/Billy Sandow camp and back to Joe Stecher. If we had evidence that he was as bad of a worker as Daddy, and applied the same emphasis to it, does he still go in as easily (yeah, I know he went in by fiat, just work with me)? Does he even go in before Big Daddy does? I'm not sure...probably "yes" to the latter, but certainly "no" to the former. Again, I'm well past the point of taking the HOF seriously, but there's got to be some kind of universal standard for inductees. It seems to me like if you're going to have historical figures in the HOF at all, then one of those standards has to be that you can't use a wrestler's workrate as a reason to keep them out. Besides, even if we all think that Big Daddy's matches sucked, it's obvious that are a bunch of other people who must have liked them just fine. Otherwise, why would so many people have tuned in or bought tickets to watch them?

Personally, I think it's just common sense. I mean, really, what says "love" like a crazy Japanese wrestling promoter with a giant chin?

That's true, 80's Perro has been reconsidered (really just "considered", maybe...don't know how many people really gave it much thought before). 90's forward, I think the most praise he ever gets is people saying he wasn't bad in his retirement match with Universo.

Dave and his ilk haven't changed their minds about them, but that's Dave and his ilk for you. Outside of them, there's been a reappraisal going on for a couple of years now. Not sure how big it is, admittedly. Seems to have benefited Universo 2000 and Mascara Ano 2000 the most, as it coincided with the height of the Perros/Capos feud, but it's extended to Rayo and Cien as well (Perro not so much, as far as I can tell). Phil and TomK could probably expand on it better than I could. It might just be us and our ilk. In any case, don't think Rayo deserves to be lumped in with 80's Jimmy Valiant as shitty worker who got by on shtick.

Don't forget "he throws good punches". Always an easy out for us. I don't think anyone's arguing that Jimmy Valiant is a good worker. Does his comedy shtick well, but does everything else poorly. "It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it".....the way Jimmy does a lot of stuff stinks, so I thing the saying holds true. Rayo I don't see the problem. I thought we were past the whole "aging CMLL main eventers of the 90's suck by default" thing.

Yeah, but that's not really an "ironic appreciation" sort of defense. That's a defense of guys they don't actually think are crap.

I don't think you're wrong, strictly speaking. That said, I'd wonder how many crap things that a wrestler could do are impossible to be done in a non-crappy way. It's why I'm a little hesitant to name specific traits in this thread. Unless you go in really outlandish directions (I'm hard-pressed to think of a way that a wrestler could shit himself during a match in a really effective way), most of your notable wrestler "qualities" can be done well or poorly. "The way that you do it" = execution. Also, not a cop out if you genuinely like what they're doing.