S.L.L.

There is definitely a "what have you done for me lately" attitude amongst a lot of fans regarding their views of someone's career greatness, where whatever is most recent ends up defining someone's entire career, even if it's logically silly. I mean, Giant Baba is one of the best wrestlers I've ever seen, and general opinion of his work has improved a lot over the years. Still, we are not far removed from a time when no one would even consider that possibility, because he wasn't that good as a crippled old man in the 90's, therefore he couldn't possibly have been any good in his physical prime. I have seen precious little prime Solie, but I get the sense he suffers from the same problem. Most recent widely available Solie was half in the bag much of the time, and didn't give you much reason to be impressed. But to judge his entire career based on his post-prime should be an obvious mistake. Hey, I am listening to The 80's Channel on Shoutcast, and they just started playing "What Have You Done For Me Lately"! Synchronicity!

I forget, were they still pushing Billy as "the best pure athlete in the WWF" at that point? I'm still trying to figure out what that claim was based on.

It's an observation I've made several times, but I may as well make it again - the quality of The Rock's work seemed to improve in inverse correlation to how how much he actually needed wrestling. You'd think a guy who didn't really care about wrestling would have been phoning it in a lot more once his movie career kicked off, not getting better. A lot of professional wrestlers are failed football players. I don't think it really proves anything.

I would like to split the difference and say "people who fetishize women wrestling with the exception of the WWE Divas, whom they relentlessly bash to the point you wonder if they have some IRL issues with women". AirRaidCrush immediately comes to mind.

"I've got a widdle wed wagon. . ." Dave should stop being mean to Scott Keith because he's just twying to do his wooooooooorrrrk!

If I had to guess, the 1% plus wrestlers exaggerating for dramatic effect.

For some reason, I read this, and I think of the scene from "A Mighty Wind" where they introduce the Fred Willard character, and he's cheerfully talking about his old sitcom and spouting off his old catchphrases, and in the middle of it they cut to a shot of a Variety headline reading "Sitcom Canceled Due to Complete Lack of Interest From Anyone".

A little while back, I was talking about CHIKARA and the merits of comedy in wrestling on another board, and I said this: Obviously, not something that's ever really happened, and considering what often passes for humor in wrestling, not an idea I have any faith would work in practical application. But I do think it's hypothetically possible.

Hey, Loss, as long as you've brought it up...who do you think Flair's best opponent was? I mean, I'm still inclined to say Steamboat, but he's wrestled so many people over so long a period of time, you probably could make a convincing argument for someone else.

WWE brass saying one thing and meaning another? Blasphemy!

Wait, people said this? I did not hate the Flair/Taylor matches nearly as much as my Segunda Caida compatriots, but those are some of the Flairiest Flair matches I have ever seen.

Yeah, I have long been of the understanding that "Strong Style" and "King's Road" were just their respective promotions' way of saying "Sports Entertainment". All three are just terms coined by wrestling promotions to refer to their take on pro wrestling to separate it/put it above every other form, but the phrases themselves don't really mean anything. Not that there aren't certain stylistic similarities that tend to form amongst wrestlers within a single promotion, or that some of those similarities don't tend to stick within that promotion over long periods of time, but I think assuming these names were given with any real major overarching stylistic vision in mind is probably giving crazy wrestling promoters too much credit.

Does that even mean anything?

Loss, I feel it is my civic duty to crosspost this this to the original DVDVR thread. Just letting you know.

ok...my turn... To be the man, you have to beat the...heroin charge? I was looking at Velvet Underground lyrics hoping for a somewhat obvious Flair joke, but I got nothing. So I guess that you just don't know...yes, and I guess that you just don't know..... When I'm rushin' on my run, and I feel just like [Ric Flair's] son. I knew it was in there somewhere. Except...I guess that I just don't know...oh, and I guess that I just don't know.....

I believe Bret himself made the observation that if he had a series of moves that he did well and that had proven effective for him, why wouldn't he use them? Like GH said, the only thing about it that really seemed weird was him going for the pin, usually after the elbow, even though he never scored a pin off of it, and even that's a pretty minor quibble overall.

Some years back, I read a Christian theory on evil (don't ask me where or which denomination...I'm looking all over Wikipedia and getting zilch) that I thought was interesting. It said that evil stemmed from three personal qualities: 1. Holding others to impossibly high standards 2. Not holding yourself to the same standards 3. Being indifferent to your own hypocrisy The last one seems especially important, since if you actually noticed/cared about what you were doing, you wouldn't be able to live with yourself. So being evil would mean believing what you were doing was right - or at least justifiable/acceptable in some way - because if you really seriously thought what you were doing was wrong, you probably wouldn't be doing it. That said, what an individual thinks is right may not mesh with what humanity at large thinks is right, and in some cases it might clash rather violently. It's kinda hard to imagine that, for example, Jake Roberts at the height of his heeldom felt his actions were "right" by the same standard that Chris Jericho feels his actions are "right". Both are ultimately in it for themselves, both are willing to achieve their wants and needs at the expense of others in situations where most would consider it unacceptable, and both would probably lead happier, more satisfying lives if they came to terms with the various psychological issues driving their actions rather than going on trying to find some other solution outside themselves that just doesn't exist. But Jake was definitely open and even accepting of the base and antisocial nature of his actions, whereas Jericho has deluded himself into thinking he has the moral high ground. It's not that Jake thinks he's "wrong", he's just got a very different take on what constitutes "right".

ok...my turn... To be the man, you have to beat the...heroin charge? I was looking at Velvet Underground lyrics hoping for a somewhat obvious Flair joke, but I got nothing. So I guess that you just don't know...yes, and I guess that you just don't know.....

I thought this might make a good spin-off thread from the wrestling mythbusters thread and the KENTA vs. Nakajima thread over at the DVDVR board. So I'm kinda well established (I think) as a guy with a major narratology fixation. I'm interested in storytelling, how it works on a structural level, how we build on that bare-bones structure in various ways, and the narrative language we've developed over the three millennia (at least) that we've been doing this. Pro wrestling is no different from any other form of storytelling in this sense. I think there's a very bare-bones structure that works, and since Joe Acton and William Muldoon in the 1870's - if not before - we've been building on that structure and fleshing out that narrative language, taking universal storytelling tropes and bits from other genres of fiction and adapting them for wrestling, watching those narrative phrases evolve into new ones, etc. "Good Trope/Bad Trope" is a bit of a misnomer, I admit. Very few tropes are truly good or bad in and of themselves. It's mostly a matter of execution. But some are easier to execute than others. Some have been executed poorly, and for whatever reason, that bad execution becomes popularized to the point that it's almost part of the trope itself. Some tropes are timeless, but some rely on novelty. Some get overdone to the point that we lose our taste for them. So there's room for debate on these. To that end, I thought I'd bring a few up and see how people felt about them, whether they were liked or disliked, why they might fail or succeed, how they could be done better if they're being done poorly, which ones have worn out their welcome, which ones could do with a comeback, which ones we can't do without, which ones are best used sparingly...whatever comes to mind. So, to get the ball rolling... The Five Moves O' Doom Since the main jump-off point for this was the discussion of whether or not Bret Hart was any more or less repetitive than any other wrestler ever, and if that was necessarily a bad thing, I figured this was a good starting point. Basically, I'm talking about the tendency for certain wrestlers to rely on stock sequences that they roll out in most every match they're in - Bret's five moves, Flair's big bumps and the countering of his Figure-Four (and inability to counter anybody else's), Hogan's comeback sequences, that sort of thing. I'm not applying this to individual moves that a wrestler uses regularly, more to extended "scenes" of a match. The Evil Commissioner I'm aware that most commissioners of real sports leagues aren't particularly popular with the fans, but it seems like ever since the "Mr. McMahon" character hit it big, you can't hold down a job in the upper management of a wrestling promotion without being a malicious bastard to your employees. Well, unless you're Teddy Long, I guess. But seriously, what gives? The Finisher A strictly dramatic development, providing a handy cue to the audience that the match is as good as over. Well, unless they kick out, in which case it's a handy cue that the guy is a real gutsy bastard. Of course, this is a generalization. The real efficacy of a finisher varies with time and place. Sometimes it's established as a one-hit kill. Sometimes it's established as the only way to win a match for the most part. Sometimes it's just a prominent signature, one that could feasibly end a match, but has no real guarantee of doing so. And then there are guys like Nigel McGuinness, who's finisher is pretty much "whichever lariat actually wins me the match" or "whichever time I apply the London Dungeon and my opponent actually taps out". Of course, in real life, most fighters' finishers are "whatever I happen to beat my opponent with", and I suppose there could be some merit to that in certain wrestling contexts.

Well, it's like I always say (or at least like I always think to myself), there are no bad ideas, just bad execution. I guess what it really comes down to is that chases are a fine idea, but all chases must end someday. The questions are, when it's all over, will the fans be happy with how it turned out, and will they pay to see what follows.

The more I think about it, the more I think I've been approaching the whole "money is in the chase" thing from the wrong angle. It's not that there's no money in the chase. There definitely can be if you do it right. It's that the chase is really a tangential issue to the real source of money: the man. Like I said before and JDW pointed out again, Austin proved that actually having the belt isn't always necessary to be a big draw. What I think is important is being perceived as "the man", and the fans being happy with that. To that end, it helps to be... A. The champ, and... B. A face... ...but the latter is really more important than the former, because usually, your long-term draws are the guys fans actually like, whereas actually being the champion isn't always necessary to being the star of the show. That's why the NWA could get away with - and in fact benefited from - having long-term heel champions. The NWA itself wasn't really a wrestling promotion, at least not in the way we think of one. It was an umbrella organization for a bunch of other actual functioning wrestling promotions, and it recognized one guy from all of those promotions as World Champion. But while the NWA champ was "the man" in a certain sense, he wasn't the day-to-day star of any of the actual functioning promotions (not strictly true, I know, but bear with me), so having him reign forever wasn't a problem. The focus was always on "the man" in any given promotion, and the NWA champ provide a good aside every now and then, putting "the man" up against "the other man", and usually the action confirmed that the local "man" was the real "man" in the eyes of the fans, while the NWA champ got to retain his "official man" status because he hit "the man" in the balls/threw "the man" over the top rope/just barely held "the man" to a time limit draw/etc. so he could keep traveling the world fulfilling his function as wrestling's most high-profile plot device. It's OK, because that guy is gone, and your guy is still here being the man. Sure, Kerry got shafted out of the NWA Title by Flair again, and it sucks, but we can't worry about that now...The Freebirds have struck again! It's also the reason Baba could get away with drawing out very long title chase scenarios without losing the audience. Yeah, Kawada and Kobashi chased Misawa forever, but it's not like the fans were in any great rush to abandon Misawa as "the man". Same with Jumbo/Misawa. Yeah, people booed when Jumbo got too rough with the Super Generation Army, but I don't get the sense that the fans at large were genuinely eager to see him unseated as "the man". I'm sure they wouldn't have minded, and I'm sure they expected it to happen in time, but I don't think Jumbo Tsuruta was Hollywood Hogan.

Also probably worth noting, when talking about the territories, that the heel world champ wasn't actually there 24/7 like he would be in a national promotion to rub his seeming unbeatability in the fans' faces. The NWA could afford to have long-term heel champs because the territories usually had their own babyface stars to act as the center of attention on a day-to-day basis.

I hadn't thought of the Hogan/Sting feud. That does seem like a rather obvious point in the myth's favor, and kinda careless of me to overlook it. That said, it's a point against, too, because Hogan and the nWo never relinquished the top spot for very long, and the faces kept chasing them as the company started losing money and heading towards it's grave. Again, I certainly wouldn't say that you could never have a heel on top - especially when said heel is as effective as Hogan was in '96 - but that's a strategy with it's limits, and it's not a good long term plan. Not something you could do for two years or more without starting to alienate the fanbase, and odds are against even holding it that long.

This one is really, really easy to figure out. All you have to do is ask yourself one question: what does the general public prefer to see...the good guy win, or the good guy lose? Yes, I realize there are dramatic benefits to having the bad guy win every once in a while, but I think one would have to be pretty deep in denial to claim that people are more likely to pay to see their heroes lose day in and day out, maybe occasionally winning the day, only to have their victories snatched away from them shortly thereafter, than to see the opposite. What's particularly galling about this one is the way it's so often trotted out without any evidence to support it because it's seen as such common sense, even though the slightest critical look at it causes it to break into a million pieces. I mean, even ignoring common sense observations on the tastes of the general public, don't the careers of Hulk Hogan and Steve Austin - the two biggest money draws of wrestling's modern era - expose this one pretty badly? Of course, as Austin's career also proved, it's probably more important to be perceived as "the man" than to simply be the champion, but kinda hard to be the man when you're always trying - and usually failing - to beat the man. Maybe somebody should ask Lex Luger just how much money is in the chase. You'd think he'd have outdrawn Hogan and Austin put together if there was anything to that claim. Incidentally, does anyone know if I'm correct in my assumption that this obvious myth is a byproduct of 80's smarkdom's hatred of Hulk Hogan and love of Ric Flair? I'm hard-pressed to think of how anyone could have come up with this one logically, but people blinded by fandom desperately searching for reasons why Flair was objectively better than Hogan during the 80's boom seems feasible.

According to Bix, I posted one of the greatest things ever written on the internet about wrestling in that thread, so it can't be all bad. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?s=&a...t&p=5438353