blueminister

They did put Ryback over, he manhandled the champion and press-slammed a ref into the outside cell wall from inside the ring. That he didn't win the championship is just good sense as he's a genetic freak who isn't ready to carry the show and may not even need the championship to stay over. They also further cemented CM Punk as, you know, a real conniving dick who seems to find a way to come out with his championship intact, which whether you agree or disagree with that booking turn is probably not something they need to abandon before the culmination of the angle they've been building to for months. There's lots of things WWE does wrong and will continue to do wrong until Stephanie McMahon no longer walks the earth, but I can't say that not betting the farm on Ryback being a much bigger deal than he appears to be is one of them.

Wait, so panicking over TV ratings and interrupting a long-term angle featuring one of the few truly over guys on the roster by hotshotting the title to a booker's pet whose overness may or may not be entirely dependent on a winning streak gimmick is... the opposite of the dying days of WCW?

Why did Iago wait so long to fuck over Othello, he could have stabbed him like any time! lol @ WWE still being jittery about saying the name of the referee during the immediate post-match angle.

Who cares about who wrestles week to week? (not the booking committee hahaha amirite) There has never been a time in the last five years where HHH and The Undertaker weren't continuously promoted as huge stars and the cream of the crop. That there are months and sometimes an entire year between their matches is immaterial. The same was true of HBK (minus the months between matches) and Flair (whose star was on the decline, but that was the whole point.) The same would be true of the Rock if he wasn't a legitimate celebrity. It's definitely a sign of the times, but "nostalgia show" is no less a mislabel when the players in question are the people that fans and non-fans alike think of when you think of "pro wrestling."

No, it's a show that's promoted co-main events with wrestlers who have been popular for fifteen years or more. The Rock was still in his thirties when he main evented this year and HHH, Flair and Taker had been major players in the product within the last five years of their main events. No need for sloppy terminology unless you want to argue that, like, half of all major events of the territorial era were nostalgia shows.

Calling Wrestlemania a nostalgia show because it occasionally features co-main events with active veterans is... a bit of a stretch.

To be fair, Jesse is more an MMA writer that happens to help out at Cageside. He's been doing this long enough and tackles it with enough bravado that he should at least have the basic terminology right. (okay then again if cageside seats stopped being stupid at this point id be kind of disappointed sry dude i like your stuff okay)

To his credit SK is slightly more knowledgable than Rick Scaia who had one glaring error per "Ask The Rick" column back in the day -- or Jesse Holland, the resident Cageside wrestling history guy who seems to be a teenager that looks up shit on wikipedia and doesn't understand that "went over" is the opposite of "job."

I think Bischoff giving Hall and Nash raises as a response to the Fake Deisel-Razor angle is semi-verified, but I'm not sure they had to sign an extension or anything. I believe it was just Bischoff's horribly inefficient and dumb way of showing that they were WCW company men who weren't about to jump ship. (This is the guy who gave relative unknowns Guerrero and Jericho swank six-figure contracts off the bat without them even really having to ask.)

I don't wanna get political but while objectively I hold your prognosis of her qualifications to be accurate she lost her first race in a period where, in the absence of extenuating dumbness, all you had to do was show up with an [R] by your name and say mean things about Obama to get elected to national office. The campaign seems to feel very strongly that old youtubes are an albatross for them.

Oh man, they wish it were a wash. Terrible trade-off in the long term that keeps their ad-rates down and gets them low-balled on TV contracts considering their ratings and demographics. Also will probably go a long way to costing Linda McMahon two expensive Senate campaigns. edit: although tbf we're getting more into the area of Russo-ism for continuing influence as it's not like the guy was holding a gun to VKM's head and forced him to keep doing lots of tacky and stupid stuff

Russo will be remembered by the unworked as the guy whose ideas helped cripple the advertising revenue of one promotion at the height of its popularity, sunk one promotion, and kept another from being a viable competitor for the better part of a decade. To his credit he did advocate Foley and Austin at a crucial juncture, but even then he was one voice among many and he faced little real opposition.

That would indeed be ridiculous if anybody were doing that, yes.

When has he -- when actually booking and not just working an interviewer -- demonstrated any of this? What about his WCW or TNA tenure would make you say "this is a man with good ideas about writing episodic tv?" When has he demonstrated any sustained ability to make anybody come back the next week except out of morbid curiosity? You (and to be fair, a lot of people who should know better like Meltzer) keep trying to sell the idea that this is a clever creative mind that just doesn't translate to the wrestling booking context, where's the evidence of that? Wrestling is the only community dumb enough to give Russo creative control multiple times. He would be dismissed, rightly, as a cheap con anywhere else.

If Russo wrote and directed Godfather II, instead of getting an abortion Kay would have miscarried as an indirect result of something Michael did, the plot would abandon gangster high drama in favor of dwelling on the miscarriage as a plot point in an awkward and unseemly way for the first forty-five minutes with the presumable goal of making Michael sympathetic, and then after that Kay would reveal out of the blue that she was never actually pregnant and that she faked the pregnancy and miscarriage to get revenge on Michael for reasons that are never clarified. After that point the miscarriage plot would never be mentioned again and the movie would begrudgingly make its way back to gangster action through a desert of boner and weed jokes only the climactic action scenes would be filmed in shaky cam close-ups and low contrast lighting that would make it impossible to establish any idea of spatial placement or put together any mental sequence of who's shooting who. Larry "Bud" Melman would emerge as King of the Gangsters in a shock cameo at the end as a publicity stunt even though he wasn't that popular a public figure and anyone who stuck around long enough to see him had already paid to see the movie.

Yeah. The only time Russo was involved in product that wasn't demonstrably terrible was when he was filtered by a committee headed by the most successful promoter in the history of wrestling and had his heavily-edited material performed by a group of the most talented mic workers in the history of wrestling. The product reached its artistic peak in 1997 before he achieved the height of his influence and improved markedly after he left. Conceivably he could be not terrible yet again were these unique historical circumstances to reoccur, but the many chances he has been given to mold a wrestling promotion to his heart's desire suggest a man who is simply not good at his job and has only the foggiest conception of what his job actually entails.

seriously why does anyone still think this, how many years of terrible product does he have to be responsible for before the "Russo has redeeming qualities" meme dies he is the complete opposite of "has some good ideas of how to write episodic tv"

This is wrong. What Russo lacks is understanding of the basic fundamentals of narrative. It's not because he isn't especially a wrestling fan, he just has no grasp of how stories on the whole are supposed to function or why. He is a man who has never thought about, say, a movie or a book in a structural sense because he thinks the spectacle is the draw and that spectacle is something that occurs naturally when you shake up the bag of marbles often enough -- and therefore something he is capable of creating (as opposed to the reality that he was a mere lucky witness when Rock, Austin, and Foley got their moment to shine.)

That's really cool. I'm still worried about the WWE just saying "fuck it" and filing a flimsy lawsuit anyway out of spite a la the "We're Using Our Hegemonic Position In The Industry To Force Bubba Ray Dudley Into Using A Fire Pro Name" deal but it's great that they already have done the homework.

Yeah, when Dylan said that just then I immediately wondered if it was a sort of deal where they'd reached a separate peace with the fan-cammers sprouting out of whatever weird arrangement Heyman had in the 90s. If that's the case I'd be pretty concerned.

It may have been covered (I really waited too long between listening and talking about it -- sorry) but is the deal with the WWE for permission to be able to use fan cam footage of ECW shows? If so, that's incredible.

It's been a bit since I listened but while the guy had some very interesting stories I didn't feel that, apart from the crazy interview backlog, the uniqueness of the undertaking was communicated at all. Really? That's very interesting. The usage of the ECW tape library seems to be locked down by the WWE and I would assume unless they're counting on WWE being incredibly good sports fan cams would be as well, so how does that work? Forever Hardcore skirted the issue with XPW and indie footage.

This is no diss to anybody involved but you might want to consider doing another podcast about this because the first podcast completely failed to get across how this would be different than the other ECW docs and considering all the unnecessary and vague disses towards Forever Hardcore (a movie which many, including myself, find to be an entertaining experience if not "educational" in the strictest sense of the word) I would say that is what is needed at this point. Tell me why I should shell out money for this documentary instead of saying "heh, I can't tell you about that" right when you're on the edge of distinguishing your product. Accept that this is a extremely niche product that will be unable to use to the original event footage and be a little less coy about the content.

I think, for a lot of people, the dilemma changes at a fundamental level exactly because of that.

So if Marv Albert dropped dead during the NBA playoffs the show would go on? You can't have it both ways. Seeing as the post you quoted just outlined how they aren't comparable situations I'm not sure why you're accusing me of trying to "have it both ways." It's not like I'm saying it would be cool if ROH did it because they're scrappy underdogs who have a duty to deliver pure wrestling every night just to get that dollar or whatever. I mean, you at least agree with me that actual sports would have a different set of considerations owing to being anchored to greater economic stakes and perpendicular real world schedules than a fake weekly wrestling show, right?