Ryan Faulconer

MPro from Jan 96 - March 98 (KDX vs. Sasuke & friends) and 2002 is really strong with the current fave Tomohiro Ishii as one of the worst guys on the roster Toryumon 2001 and 2002 and 2003 ROH 2006 to 2007-early 2008 or just separate those into years and cut out the fall of 2008 CMLL 1990 and 1997 - maybe 2004-2005 WWE Wrestlemania to Wrestlemania 2013-2014 - just going off the TV UWF 86-87 WCW mid 97 - mid 98 WWF Feb 97 - September 98

My opinion is probably slanted due to the microcosm that my wrestling fandom exists in. I don't order PPVs. I don't get live shows in my area. We don't get the WWE Network in Canada until probably the end of 2015. For the period that existed before 2005 it matters only so much in that it often affects the availability and quality of footage that is available. It probably shouldn't matter what or who is drawing in this day and age. We can download legally or otherwise any wrestlers or matches that we want. The popularity of a given wrestler or style doesn't dictate the availability of their output like it did even ten years ago. The most popular stuff is usually the easiest to get your hands on though. Unfortunately there aren't any 3 Disc sets or programs devoted to Fujita Hayato Jr. like there is for someone as insignificant as The Big Show. Netflix isn't streaming any documentaries on the career of Felino like they have for Edge either. WWE takes a pretty counter productive viewpoint on who or what they want to present as a draw. It really isn't worth our time to invest our thoughts on the matter. They put the time and effort into selling us on the fact that the Ultimate Warrior wasn't a draw when they released that goofy DVD a few years ago. That's like ironic or something something.

my iTunes/iPod won't play the episode with glitching either. I have tried unsubscribing and deleting the show completely but that doesn't seem to work.

Matches with intricate sequences that look too hokey for some aren't supposed to look like a real fight or wild brawl. The fight sequences in movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon look awesome because they look so effortless. There are brawls in lucha or the Japanese or American indies. The good ones definitely look different stylistically than they would if they were having a big six man tag. I'm all for sloppy brawling. Every punch in a street fight should not connect. A lot of WWE Attitude brawls looked goofy because everything either landed or was blocked only to be countered and then rinse and repeat. Vince McMahon would probably tell us that they weren't going for realism either and compare it to action scenes in movies. That's an instance where I think most of his wrestlers would disagree if they weren't having their cheques written from WWE. My friends who don't watch wrestling thought ECW was too violent because it actually looked chaotic compared to the carefully planned or somewhat restricted way that they execute their moves (no choking/not much actual cheating/etc). Hasn't there always been a disconnect between what we (as fans) and they (as wrestlers) perceive to be stiff? The matches with light looking strikes are sometimes the stiffest and most violent in the ring. IIRC Jericho's book or Eddie Guerrero's book mentions it at least once.

That's good to hear about Bryan's surgery. You only get one neck A soft brace means it is mothing too serious...but it is your neck you are talking about. I would be less concerned if it was a limb or muscle injury When Bryan had the eye injury back in 2007 it was made to seem like a bigger deal by fans online than it ended up being. It was just after the Benoit murders and a LOT of other wrestler deaths and fans seemed to be on a bit of an edge. He cut some pretty good promos while he was wrestling with the eye injury. They were so much better than whatever they instruct or coerce him to say in his recent speaking opportunities.

WWE should go the way of the NFL and NHL and just report things as "upper" or "lower" body injury. I'd rather not know when it comes to some of the more serious (for normal humans) wrestling injuries. Hollywood doesn't do a roll call of stuntman injuries when it puts out a movie. Heck - they would be idiots to do so but most of us don't think twice about who does the stunt when the movies hit the theatre. WWE informs the audience about injuries for many reasons. They need to inform people who think that it is harmless and/or "fake". They also want to put over how tough the wrestlers are for playing in pain. Reconciling those two viewpoints makes me feel a little more guilty for enjoying pro wrestling. No matter how minimally invasive six to eight weeks for neck surgery recovery is asinine. These guys are stupid for coming back after neck or back fusions to begin with. Trust me. My back makes a freakin' squeaky sound most days that I do more than the usual walking or physical activities. I had a disc fused (winter 2006) after my initial discectomy (summer 2006) only served to make my back completely unstable and almost making me a paraplegic back in 2006. Bryan could go back and use most of his indy moves like the airplane spin or the Romero Special. I'm pretty sure he hasn't done the first but he used to do the second at least as far back as a couple of years ago. The flying headbutt is definitely something that shouldn't be done either. Do the majority of fans really enjoy it that much? It has always been one of those moves that looks far too convoluted to hurt...unless it is done from some ridiculous height. WWE should do away with all the collisions into the stairs and ringside boards. Those moves can't be much safer than the chair shots they now cherish and protect. They think that whips into stairs = cool visual. It makes a "cool" sound but when everybody does it in almost every single match it has the same affects as a resthold. They seem to have found several different ways to throw people into the boards/ring apron/stairs over the past few years too...so you know they think it works. The spear should be mothballed as well. Rhyno had a serious neck surgery. Edge eventually had a career ending neck injury. Roman Reigns' days as a future star have been shortened now that he does it. Maybe they should also look into some sort of policy that prevents half the roster from ripping their pecs/biceps/shoulders/quads. Maybe have some kind of "three strike" rule. That could work. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Has Dustin Rhodes vs Randy Savage been mentioned yet? (it might have been but I'm really fuckin' blind)

Make the cut-off at 1997 and it is a no brainer for me. All that lucha. The best period from the Japanese indies...except for Battlarts unfortunately for this topic. Then there are the US territories or Big 3 in the 1980s. There was more variety from promotion to promotion back then. All Japan was one promotion instead of two large (theoretically) groups and a couple of what seem like vanity indies which run periodically with the same talent. In the 2000s we had four different lucha/Hamada's UWF inspired groups alone with MPro/Toryumon - Dragon Gate/Osaka Pro/Kaientai Dojo. Maybe more if you count the Toryumon short lived off-shoot El Dorado and then there is DDT and the undercards of Big Japan I preferred it when everyone worked in the same one or two companies. A more recent example of diluting the talent pool happened in the US scene - first after ECW closed down and then again when ROH fired Gabe Sapolsky. American indies today and going back to 2008. Do we really need all those promotions that seem to have splintered off of ROH's large talent pool? Yeah - I guess pre-1996 would be good enough too. American wrestling became way too disposable and interchangeable during the Monday Night Wars era and later. There is just so much WWE first run TV every single week in 2014. That would be fun enough if we had the WWE Network in Canada. Unfortunately we don't and won't until the magic wizard blesses us with his special broadcasting gifts sometime late 2014 or spring 2015.

Get the Best Ofs. They don't sell complete shows prior to 2009/2010 and even that is a little sporadic in availability. The first few years has everything that people hate nowadays. Checking out the individual matches on a compilation or the couple of feud comps they have is the best way to go. The quality didn't drop off a cliff until the beginning of 2009...and by that I mean Final Battle 2008 was a great show. Everything after that is pretty shallow in terms of quality matches or characters or feuds. Once Bryan and Nigel leave near the end of 2009 they will never touch the quality of 2004-2008. 2010 is better than 2009 overall though. I think the Summer of Punk ages really poorly. I hadn't seen much of summer/fall 2005 before I picked up the compilation and I sort of regret buying it. The CZW feud is a lot better. The Embassy/Generation Next feud is better. Jimmy Jacobs' run from 2006-2008 is so much better. Punk used to rip on Jacobs on IWA-MS commentary all the time for looking unprofessional in the ring. After watching their respective peaks in ROH I'd say that Punk is the one who looked like somebody playing the role of a professional wrestler. The Milestone Series (4th Anniversary Show to The 100th Show) is probably their best stretch of shows top to bottom. Some stuff like KENTA/Marufuji vs. Joe/Danielson didn't turn out nearly as well as other stuff that they didn't hype as much. After 2009 they start pushing Davey Richards pretty hard. He gets ripped on for doing stuff that others get away with every week so its really just his overall presentation that I think really makes him unlikeable as ROH's "ace". He gets most of the opportunities to have the "epic" or "dream" matches but I'd say most - if not all - of the following wrestlers made or would make a better choice company superstar du jour... Bryan Danielson Samoa Joe Jimmy Jacobs Tyler Black (Seth Rollins) Nigel McGuinness The Briscoes Austin Aries Roderick Strong CM Punk (looking back though they seem a lot more alike than I remembered at the time...although Punk at least has a fleshed out character and can talk) Colt Cabana James Gibson El Generico (Sami Zayn) Low Ki Christopher Daniels AJ Styles Jimmy Rave Alex Shelley Paul London Spanky (Brian Kendrick) Delirious Claudio Castagnoli (Cesaro) Chris Hero (Kassius Ohno) Matt Sydal (Evan Bourne) Richards is about as good as... Rocky Romero Erick Stevens Shelton Benjamin Eddie Edwards Adam Pearce Xavier Kevin Steen Jerry Lynn Kenny Omega Jack Evans/Necro Butcher/Brodie Lee (Luke Harper)/Amazing Red/Joey Matthews (Joey Mercury)/Joey Ryan/Pac (Adrien Neville)/TJ Perkins/Mike Quackenbush/Jigsaw/Hallowicked all should have had better opportunities or runs than they did.

Mattel doesn't watch SmackDown. Roman Reigns choked Brad Maddox with his tie on SmackDown. Look out for "The Roman Samoan" Joe Anoi'a's indy tour this summer. Maybe Daniel Bryan can bring him back as his tag team partner against the NXTers at SummerSlam...or something vaguely yet equally jaded.

If the WON treats MMA the same as wrestling I think star ratings should absolutely be used to summarize the quality of fights. I don't think MMA and pro wrestling should be lumped together so star ratings shouldn't be used to describe the quality of fights. For those who do...go right ahead. All fights (worked or "miscellanious") should of course be rated with Jushin Liger heads. It always looked so cool...even down to using 1/4 or 1/2 or 3/4 of a Liger head. Look it up. This might be an outdated reference for younger or newer fans. Just look up the Quebrada or Mike Lorefice and check out the reviews of individual matches. Keep in mind that most of those matches were reviewed prior to 2005.

I'd say that lucha has always looked to me like the greatest wrestling in the world. I'm not saying Japan and US suck either. It is just so different compared to what we get from the American or Japanese promotions. I used to try and put it into words but a few boards crashing and erasing everything I used to try and explain really sapped my enthusiasm for writing long windedly about it. Now I just watch my favourite lucha or indies while surveying WWE's shows each week to get what I want to out of it. WWE has never looked better on TV on a week to week basis. The addition of the third hour to RAW helped so much in improving the quality of matches. Japanese wrestling has definitely declined in interest among the few boards I read online.

I hope you mean ridiculously AWESOME! It gave Ultimo Dragon an heir of legitimacy in WCW that made him stand out with fans. Most of the other guys in masks or japanese wrestlers or luchadores seem to melt together in the memories of lapsed fans. I search online for lucha info all the time and I run into people who classify all cruiserweights as luchadores or vice versa. Ultimo seemed to stand out because of the J Crown.

Are we sure Daniel Bryan will even make it to SummerSlam as champ? They might still love them some Batista/Lesnar or Orton/Lesnar matchups. Then they have Bryan shuffled down to work with Rusev. Stephanie McMahon sounding more and more like her father is creepy. She is a much better heel and presence on television than before though. I'm not sure if it is less or more creepy than when she got the implants and her voiced dropped to when it sounded like she had deeper a sounding sore throat. She was oddly reminding me of Chyna at that point. It was a real Liberace/Scott Thorson vibe. That says a lot about Triple H's kinks. Add in Vince's leering and you have enough crushed leaves for the whole family...

Have any of our favourite satellite forums (DVDVR/WKO) ever done a Top 100 Promos or Angles poll? It would be a lot easier than doing our match polls. There seem to be a decent chunk of people who would value the promo just as much as the match...not that I want to open that big can of worms - because I would never compare a promo to a match for the sake of keeping some sort of structure for the polls. Most promos and/or angles/skits are a lot shorter than the matches. Has it been done for any of the decades or territories or Year X of Promotion Y?

I don't know about your first sentence. For every praising review by Rob there were two or three Schneider/Tom K./Dean reviews shitting all over the matches. Rob was (is?) very defensive of his opinions and he had a knack for driving people away which is a shame because he was ahead of pretty much everybody else outside of Mexico in discovering new young talent that had a chance to make it big. Ultimo Guerrero and Averno are as guilty as anyone else for NewJapanising lucha libre. You can trace it back to Dr. Wagner Jr. making it big over there in the late 90s/early 00s., and everybody trying to wrestle the big move style to score lucrative Japan tours. At some point in the mid 00's, and for its first time in history, CMLL match falls had to be fitted in certain timeslots for TV to smoothly go through commercial breaks. That's when I started losing interest in modern CMLL. Matches became rushed with no build and as a result I have watched probably less than 20 hours of CMLL during the last 7-8 years. Oh I should have been a little more direct about my first sentence. I meant it more as a bit of a joke since Rob was always the guy that helped me get into a lot of different styles of great lucha through various trades over the years. Mistico did have quite a backlash with some posters. TomK would be a bit more diplomatic while PhilS would be a bit more to the point. There were a lot of long and varied lucha watching threads over at deathvalleydriver's lucha section that are long gone. Those short matches starting in 2006 really made me want to see more older 90s lucha from anywhere. It really felt like the increased speed of workrate along with some of the moves they saw on tours or trips to the US just cut back or removed entirely what separated lucha from American wrestling on the independent level. A lot of younger wrestlers did seem to mix a jangly-hybrid of styles together all over North America. The indy commentators would talk about someone working "the All Japan Strong Style" or some other amalgamation of styles that didn't have as much in common near the turn of this past century. I remember the ROH guys back in 2004 using the setups for double team moves that they either saw direct from lucha or from Dragon Gate or Michinoku Pro. It didn't look right at all to see Generation Next grabbing an opponent with each arm and then rolling them backwards into a double team set up move. It made so little sense.

That Robert Bihari fella is the real mastermind behind the great Mistico spotlight of 2004-2006. That was a fun time for acquiring lucha. With my eyesight Mistico does look a lot like Santo on a second or third generation VHS tape viewed on a 14 inch screen. The trios matches from that period were always so much better than the odd singles match that made tape. Late 2005 it looked like even the older guys like Atlantis started working more like Chikara and less like great CMLL. By the time early 2006 started getting distributed amongst the lucha buying circles the CMLL matches were often shorter than the commercial breaks. I ended up trading most of the 2006/2007 CMLL DVDs I had for 1990s CMLL. Some of it I hadn't seen before and the rest replacing the boxes of useless VHS tapes that don't travel well or stand the test of time.

It was a bit of a culture shock when the sleaze thread attracted an entirely different type of smart fan to the DVDVR board. Then it happened again when ROH changed owners and lost their message board for awhile. That particular period in time frustrated me so much...at the time. That might cross over from "smart wrestling fan" to "annoying internet personalities" and the "internet personality" is something I wouldn't even begin to explore. People with multiple names having flame wars with themselves (it happened at the ROH board for sure). I think the DVDVR WWE threads are some kind of performance art for some people. These days DVDVR forums have more in common with RSPW than it does the original board. When I discovered the DVDVR forum in 1999/2000 it was very low traffic with a few topics popping up over the course of a week. PWO or WKO are really more like the old DVDVR board. There was a group of maybe less than a hundred people who posted there and they never had the conflicts or people trying to get over an internet persona with a group of strangers that they will never meet. When new wrestlers/matches/promotions were discovered people usually restrained themselves from throwing around obnoxious buzzwords to immediately dismiss it. This is going to make me sound like an old dude but it really felt like there was a polite respect for each new wrestling or movie or music topics that were posted.

Good thing WWE shields us from choking moves. I guess it is okay to kick someone's face off or drop someone on their head. I'm not particularly invested in the topic but WWE's random pattern when it comes to "safety first" is just terrific. Thanks for sorta-not-really caring WWE.

Cool - Thanks. I can't remember which episode it was but I busted out laughing with the "Little Man Big Man Best Friend Combo' back in the 1999 recaps. 1999 still sounds as bad as I remember it. It convinced me to focus on ECW and get my first tapes of lucha and puro.

This is semi-related and if you can't find it I won't hold it against you. Is there an active link for the No Way Out 2000 podcast? I think it was PTB 237. I started with 1999 and I'm enjoying the PPV recaps in order. NWO 2000 just won't download on iTunes for me. I've tried going through iTunes and the PTB site. I can't even get the "download" link to work without getting an ERROR 404 response from the site itself. Thanks.

I hate it when Mom and Dad argue. Actually this is more like the great(grating?) DVDVR Foghat vs. DVDVR Hollandaise feud of 1999 than it is any of the other similes we are using. Can they get back on the same page with their wrestling ideologies? Tune in to some sort of hyped mega show where they will come back together and rejoice in...Wrestlemania...if I had to guess a cutoff date for the feud. It is a wonder that we could keep them apart for this long. Cue up someone in a sheep mask barking "Run!" and we're off! I think I'd side more with Will when it comes to the quality and consistency of today's WWE. Whenever I find myself without the internet for any prolonged length of time my tastes become a lot more forgiving and enthusiastic for WWE. Without the internet for much of 2002 I thought WWE was having their best TV in years. The Katie Vick angle barely registered with me. I didn't even know it had any lasting impression until I got back online in 2003.

Now that I've figured out which feed to subscribe to on iTunes I'm really enjoying recent episodes and older stuff. There must be a couple of smokers on these podcasts because there are some gravelly-voiced mofos on the big panel shows and that makes for good radio. The impressions that pop up from time to time are awesome. I don't know whose Dusty is better; Johnny Sorrow or Phil Schneider from the segunda caida shows? The recent WWE PPV podcasts actually make me want to pay for WWE. I'm holding off until network comes to Canada but wide range of opinions and/or fan biases makes them sound pretty good lately. I just listened to the PWO/PTB WCW shows and downloaded the 1999-2001 WWE PPV shows. If I end up revisiting the terrible 1999 WWF when the network comes up here I'll have you guys to blame!

I haven't seen the article in the last ten years. I think it was back on Zach Arnold's old website. It was shockingly scathing when I read it back then. We didn't really have much besides DVDVR/Eyada WON shows/Quebrada/skewed Zach Arnold stories. As much as we read or watched back then the sleaze stories were kind of a goof about about some goofs.