ohtani's jacket

Why would Vince let the booking stay the same? He's hardly going to market the rasslin as the rasslin is he? Besides, Vince as marketing genius is a very post-territorial, job-for-life, DVD talking head point. We used to throw it around a lot in the Mon Night Wars era when folks took sides, but it's overplayed.

Vince wasn't faring too well himself in 1992 and he certainly wouldn't have booked WCW any way their fanbase wanted to see. WCW was a national company that only went national because someone with money and a TV station bought it not from it's own volition. It was amateur hour all the way.

Tell me how many people lived in the world during JYD's peak. Tell me how many countries there were. Tell me how many wrestling territories there were within those countries. Tell me how many fans within those territories gave a crap about JYD relative to their local heroes. JYD was one of the biggest draws in the country pre-national expansion is probably praise enough.

That Phil Schneider is a funny bastard as we say back back home. I want to know if there's an AWA equivalent of Prince winning over the Minneapolis crowd in the third chorus of Purple Rain.

What I was angling at was the difference between a fleeting draw and a permanent draw no matter how successful said draw is. If New Orleans and the South is the "world" then I guess that's a fair statement, but I kind of wonder if the world was paying attention to JYD at said time. Well, I guess that clears that up. I can understand the negative connotation, but I tend to think that my childhood and teen years were made up of a series of fads and tend to look back on them positively.

But Watts and Ladd pushed JYD initially because he was black just as Vince pushed Hogan because of his look. The fact that neither promoter could replicate their success with similar looking workers indicates that Hogan and JYD were special, but you can be special and still be a fad. The implication from you guys seems to be that a fad is something superficial, but I don't think that's necessarily true. My point about not being able to replicate the success of JYD is that the fans wanted to see JYD not a black football turned wrestler. If the fans had been interested in seeing black wrestlers main event then it would have been a trend. I don't think Jerry/Parv intended to diminish JYD's drawing power in any way, I think he was was simply trying to explain why so many people jumped on the JYD bandwagon. C'mon, everyone of note gets obits when they die. Saying he wasn't forgotten anymore than any wrestler of his level of push in the WWF expansion isn't exactly high praise for a guy who was meant to have been an important draw. Sure, but we don't know what would have happened in 1985, 1986, 1987, and so on. And we know by 1993 that he couldn't get booked in a national promotion anymore. Again, I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that his time in the spotlight was temporary by any measure. Chiggy and Dump were the draws. They over time left, and the Product was less interesting to the Fans. Business went back up to even higher levels when the Product was something that drew in fans. The schoolgirls didn't care about the product. They cared about Lioness and Chigusa. If they'd cared about the product they would've kept watching to see what new stars emerged. When my parents went to watch wrestling in the late 70s/early 80s when I was a child, they didn't care about the product. It was because wrestling was popular and a fun date. When my classmates got into wrestling in elementary school it wasn't because of the product it was because everybody was watching it. When people started taking interest in it again during high school it wasn't because of the product it was because it was suddenly cool again and there was nostalgia value in it having been big in elementary school. Japanese girls stopped watching wrestling after Dump and Chigusa retired and never returned despite the Matsunagas' attempts to create new idols and new villains. It was a fad, the Matsunagas knew it was a fad. They tried to replicate it, they lamented that no-one was able to get over like the Crush Girls and eventually they changed tact, but it was far more intangible than the product, which I think is a fair point that Jerry raised.

I thought Watts tried to capitalise on the prominence of black sporting stars by pushing a black wrestler as a main eventer. Watts saw a trend, created a fad, and kept trying to replicate it with black football players. JYD may have drawn a melting pot of fans, he may have even been a cultural icon for a time, but he was largely forgotten by the time he died. We don't know if JYD would have kept drawing in Mid South, but in any event it didn't happen and it doesn't make JYD any less of a fad. There are plenty of reasons why fads end and plenty of reasons why they could've kept on drawing if things had been different. Wrestling booms are generally fads where wrestling is suddenly more popular than usual. If a ton of people are going to the wrestling because they're into JYD, then JYD leaves and people stop going, that was a fad. It's no different from Chigusa retiring and a whole bunch of schoolgirls not giving a shit about wrestling anymore. If she hadn't been forced to retire, she might have kept on drawing, and she pretty much flirted with returning from the second she left, but that doesn't mean girls were listening to her records in 1990.

That gives more weight to JYD being a fad. If other black wrestlers couldn't draw then it shows there was no trend of black wrestlers drawing. I don't understand why fad is being given negative connotations in this thread.

Does fad have a different usage in the US? Beauty Pair was a fad. The Crush Girls was a fad. UWF was a fad. The WWF's mainstream appeal in the mid-to-late 80s was a fad. The WWF's international appeal in the late 80s was a fad. Austin's popular was a fad. The attitude era was a fad. In the Junkyard Dog's case, it's difficult to know whether he was a fad or not because he was pinched by Vince before it was apparent whether he was another Bruno or not.

Why do you keep engaging him in conversation? I can't be the only one who finds this shit painful reading.

The major tennis venues are usually open to the public or to members during non-tournament times.

Excellent.

Why do people care about the undercard so much when none of the matches will get enough time?

C'mon, Jerry, on one hand you're saying wrestlers are very good actors or performers and on the other hand you're saying that in the 80s the workers were able to adlib everything. Scripted needn't mean scripted word for word, it could simply mean bullet points, but it's fairly obvious that not everything you saw on WWF television was adlibbed, especially the angles they used to do on Piper's Pit and the other talk show segments. If you watch the opening few minutes of Wrestling With Shadows, you can see Bret fumbling over his lines and having to do retakes in front of a camera guy. If he was just improving he wouldn't be trying so hard to remember his lines. Since most of that backstage stuff was pre-recorded, how do you know how much was improv and how much rehearsed? The other day I started watching the Paul Bearer/Cornette shoot and Bearer was talking about what an abused human being Howard Finkel was and how they shot a vignette with Finkel and the Bushwhackers where Finkel was made to eat sardines over and over again. That was a rib, but still retakes had to have been common. As was Vince standing behind the camera directing. Older workers are always going to claim that they adlibbed everything, but improv is rarely neat and tidy. Think of Piper's Pit or a Warrior promo. They tend to be rambling in nature compared to a perfect thirty second promo.

Marty Jones vs. Giant Haystacks (6/5/85) I guess I'm only watching this to be a completest. The size difference between Marty and Haystacks was significant. We talk about guys who got away with being bad, well Haystacks is a prime example. Once you get past his size, you realise that's all there is. His heel schtick was bad and he was a poor promo. I'm not sure why they fed him the Mid-Heavyweight champion here, but Marty was starting to topple the giant when they did an odd finish that saw Marty hit a cross body press from the top and get rolled to the outside, where he landed badly and was too injured to continue. Lasted about a round and a half and had me wondering what the point was.

You can say that. But to me this is also why I hate the current format so much. Whether you hate it or not is a separate issue from whether it needs writers. I haven't watched RAW in years aside from what I've seen here or there on youtube, but I think it's pretty clear that it needs writers. Others have touched on the real issues -- the quality of the writers they'd had, writers who don't know the business, Vince not wanting writers who know the business, good writers (if there have been any) not lasting long because they were fired or found a better gig, and let's face it most of them are probably aiming for better jobs in TV. People who follow the WWE closely will know better than I do, but since they're forever messing around with people's pushes, I'd be surprised if a fifth of what they come up with in creative ever reaches fruition.

Do we get to hear on Bret's new DVD which of today's workers compare to him and who throws out little nods to him on every single show? Goodie, goodie.

I don't care for the backstage vignettes, but if you're going to have them (and let's face it, they are) then they need writers. It's not supposed to compare to quality film and TV. I thought you had the same argument about Ted Dibiase and Orson Welles. Any wrestler who can talk well, sell well and has their act down pat is a quality performer in my book. You love that period of WWF you grew up on, to the point where maybe you're still justifying the inordinate amount of money you spent on WWF home videos , but a lot of that was stuff was hokey. You love it because it's kitsch. Today's stuff will probably be kitsch in thirty years time. Besides, if you really go through that stuff you'll find there was a lot of bad acting and a lot of scripted promos to boot. Wrestlers who couldn't talk were told what to say. Quite often it looks like they're reading it off auto cue. Prime Time or TNT was a different television format from what they do today. Heenan could adlib to his heart's desire because he was the type of quality performer that apparently doesn't exist in wrestling. Today's commentators have so many stock lines they're supposed to utter that I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of Commentators Bible floating around. I thought the question was whether wrestling needs writers. Wrestling has been having opening quarter hour promos since 1998. Why are you railing against it in 2013? The thing about WWE today is that if there is something good, say the Cena/Punk match, you can easily find it online. You don't need to watch the other two and half hours of programming. What you're describing is an angle, most of which happened in a tiny television studio, not in a sports arena, and led to weeks upon weeks of the same promos. As fans we have a tendency to remember the past in a "Best Of" fashion, but I don't think a hell of a lot has changed over the years. RAW has been doing the same basic format for donkey's years -- opening interview sets up the main event, main event ends with a cliffhanger, etc., etc. Even the backstage segments aren't that original. The problem isn't the vignettes as such, it's that they're not clever and the comedy isn't funny. When they first started doing them as a regular format in '98, they were clever. The whole story line where Vince was injured and Foley went to visit him in the hospital and Vince was riding around in that electric wheelchair for a while, that was good stuff. The current stuff is built around a punch line or some kind of sophomore humour, but since it's basically sketch comedy sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. How many years did Gene spend sucking in WCW? If you were going to get rid of the modern format, you'd have to replace it with something new not a 1980s nostalgia act. People bitched about WWF when it didn't have any good wrestling at the height of the attitude era and they bitch about it now because the TV isn't as fresh. Unless wrestling somehow gets hot again, the TV's not going to be especially compelling no matter what way you format it. The current in-ring promos aren't much different from that.

Forgot to mention, when I watched the Flair/Luger Starrcade '88 match I saw a lot of the build-up and the interviews were amazingly repetitive even back then. Even a great talker like Flair can only say the same thing so many times.

If they were just cutting promos then I could buy the improv argument but the way the television is formatted with backstage vignettes, sketches and quarter hour long interview segments they absolutely need writers. Producing all those backstage vignettes without a script isn't a professional way to produce TV. The in-ring promos are almost 100% scripted, I'd say. The top guys might not stick to it, but I'd wager most of them do. It's not that difficult to memorise 10 minutes of dialogue when there's so many breaks and pauses and cues. Most retakes on a film set are for coverage or to get the performance the director wants, not necessarily because an actor can't remember their lines. Wrestlers get a bad rap for their acting but a lot of them are quality performers.

All right, I think it pays to watch some of the more highly touted stuff before dismissing a style completely. I also wonder how lucha isn't kitsch.

How much does that amount to?

Oh, Jerry, lucha is not guilty of anything. There is lucha that feels choreographed and lucha that is exhibitiony but a magnificent display of skill, just as there are matches on the AWA discs you like and matches you don't. It has more to do with the quality of the workers than lucha itself, as lucha isn't a style per se but a name for a particular region of wrestling. There's as many ways to work the mat in lucha as there are match types. The idea that all lucha is crazy Dos Caras submission holds is a stereotype. You have this extraordinary habit of rushing to conclusions based on one or two matches. I wonder what you'd tell your students if they reached similar conclusions about literature with little or not supporting evidence. Mil Mascaras in Japan is not lucha. Having said that, I wouldn't recommend you get the lucha set as it's obvious you're going to like it about as much as you like jazz.

So you're trying to tell me that you can tolerate Hercules Hernandez's awful matwork because you've somehow talked yourself into believing it fits his character, but you can't understand the asthetic appeal of undressing a hold?

Most of the high end lucha from the 80s is brawls. I can only think of four or five significant title matches from the available footage. I can't really reconcile how someone who likes crappy US gimmicks and soft US matwork can have a problem with believability, though.