Robert S

Big enough, though as I don't remember that specific scene I assume that during the translation process the joke was changed drastically.

Trying to shoot / stab / ... someone will still get you thrown in jail.

So he will be back just in time for Wembley.

Disregarding why Jungle Boy should get the shot, this is also on paper a bad match-up stylistically.

Canek's mask would also be in that league, I would think. Dos Caras maybe a step below that, I guess? How would Mistico/Caristico rank?

More like "peak Shah shittiness" considering he moved to the US in the late 60ies (I think).

As we Austrians like to say: Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.

I think the closest counterpart to the Holy Roman Empire in pro wrestling was the NWA. Either that or you find a three letter promotion where all three letters are wrong (as the Holy Roman Empire was, as the saying goes (apparently initially by Voltaire), neither holy nor Roman nor an empire).

Or they should stop doing 4 hour shows.

Can someone explain to me what they see in Wardlow? He sucks in the ring, is not that big (at least not very tall) and is average at best on the mic. AA "biting" off Luchasaurus thumb was about as dumb as Rey "losing" his eye a couple of years ago. I could have also done without the TNA special at the end of the tag title match. Two refs getting bumped with gimmick shots without a DQ, a manager trying to physically prevent a ref from entering the ring, people getting thrown out of the arena without leaving etc.

I know a song from Beck that would be a perfect entrance theme for Cody...

Hmm... I thought this was going to be a Dusty finish, but I guess the title change stands.

Trish should tone down the spots she is doing as she can't hit most of them anymore.

There are other guys who are always at the same spot in the first row, for example for a year or so there is a guy with a Trinidad & Tobago flag. I would not be surprised if the front row is pretty much locked with the other people just not being that recognizable.

Gotcha, I am just allergic to all those oil / blood money fueled nouveau-riche clubs and react negatively anytime I read anything positive about them.

How the hell is Manchester City 2023 considered to be an underdog team? I would assume that their budget is multiple of Milan's.

Considering the numbers WCW had even at the very end, no cable network would throw them off the air in 2023.

In which way was HHH behaving risky when he was younger? In the ring he was working very safe, I don't think he was known for partying irresponsibly (no matter the crowd he was hanging around with) and politically he is the second smartest man in wrestling.

This is a "WCW everybody" moment for sure. I think half of the black shirt ends up next to the trash can so when Sting sets fire to the can, the fire gets a bit out of control. And it seems to take forever for someone with a fire extinguisher to turn up. I mean you put up a fire inside a building and you don't have a fire extinguisher nearby? Classic WCW. By the point Hogan threw in the Observer, the fire was already put out.

Having watched this the first time in decades (probably since it aired initially), I thought Flair did a surprisingly bad job on the apron. He strutted around a couple of times, but for such a long heat segment, he should have done more. He missed to do the obvious things like pounding on the turnbuckle to get the crowd the clap along or better chant something like "let's go Sting". As a result the crowd died down a couple of times at the later points of the heat, something that should not have happened.

Besides the stupidity of the angle at the end, is there any rationality of doing this gimmick besides "wrestling fans are white trash, what does white trash love besides wrestling? monster trucks!"?

Are there any indications on how big the crowds at the Iraqi shows with Adnan Al-Kaissie were?

Gunther? 0.0 (outside of the people watching WWE right now). Wanz was a pretty good self promoter. While CWA did not have any TV deal or anything and mostly ran in Vienna, Graz, Linz and a couple of shows in smaller towns, i.e. you only got "Catchen" when you lived in those cities, at least in the 1980ies Wanz was present quite a bit on TV like on game shows, variety shows etc. You have to realize that at that time there were only two Austrian TV channels. If you lived close to the German or Swiss border (like I do), you might have got three more German and/or a Swiss channel. So if you got on TV, that was a pretty big deal. I knew who Otto Wanz was long before I knew what professional wrestling was. He was using the tearing-apart-phone-book act and that's what I knew him as. Among the people let's say 45 and older I would assume he has a pretty good name recognition. The big name before him was Georg "Schurli" Blemenschütz who at least in Vienna might have been a bigger name than Wanz ever was. I don't have exact numbers but allegedly in the 1950s, he drew a lot of 10.000+ gates at the Heumarkt. Blemenschütz wrestled well past his peak (he wrestled until he was 66), towards the end of his career he was known as the "mummy from the Heumarkt".

I am about as far through the book as you are and am actually a bit disappointed. The stuff about Vince's childhood is really good, but apart from that it is really shallow wrt Vince's stuff. It jumps over from Vince's highschool time to the Ende of the 1970ies within a couple of pages and afterwards it is basically retreading the ground of Hornbaker's book about the death of the territory system than being a real biography. I the author did his own investigations about the NC time while afterwards he was relying on other sources. The Dr. D stuff for example, relies a lot on the corresponding Dark Side episode.

The Funks are 3 for 3 w.r.t. WON Hall of Fame, hard to beat IMO.