PhilTLL

Plus, I'm supposed to believe DK was kind and protective towards a disabled kid, rather than the complete opposite? Sure.

Oklahoma City's Myriad, anything from 1984 to 87--only because if I had been 15 years older, I would have been there every single week, and it galls me that I was born in a wrestling hotbed but it died before I grew up. Or Tulsa, but I'm not from Tulsa, ha.

Negative, that was two years later. I will have to watch this, which I didn't even know existed off the top of my head.

It happened a bunch during the nWo and Goldberg eras.

Yes, but it's just stuff that caught my eye or looked good from reviews here, not comprehensive or thematic in any way. I'm not subscribed right now, though.

Still contend this is one of the more overrated matches in WWF history. I have watched it on some live watches and at other points in the past couple of years and it doesn't top out at ***1/2 for me. Also, one of the dumbest decisions ever by a manager for Fuji to walk out on Demolition for Powers of Pain. Aye, but there's two big long 20-man tag matches, the Fuji flip was 1988 and the generally better-liked match was 1987. I would agree that neither is on the level of the other matches mentioned so far. And hey, Fuji was regularly portrayed as just plain dumb compared to some of the other managers, so it kind of fit?

My sentiments exactly. Any old school JCP fans who might want to complain that WWE is reviving and then doing anything negative to the legacy or memory of Starrcade only need go back and watch Starrcade 1999. I can't think of anything WWE could do to Starrcade that Vince Russo didn't already do. Oh heck, there was nothing left for Russo to ruin after: - Nash d. Goldberg - The fake fast count of Sting/Hogan - Hogan/Beefcake as a main event - Two BattleBowls - The Black Scorpion - Turning the year's biggest event into a one-night round-robin in 1989 - Multiple years of scaffold match features and questionable booking in the "classic" era

I imagine some folks somewhere are solemnly holding forth on desecrating the name, but WCW did that decades ago.

Bret Hart, typically eloquent, on Twitter: "Goodbye to another friend. Bobby Heenan has been my hero these past few years. How he battled cancer with such defiance and courage in recent years has mystified me. He was always sharp as a tack, and whether anyone, including him ever knew it, he was the absolute absolute toughest man the wrestling world ever knew. Rest in peace Bobby, nobody will ever forget all that you gave. Bret"

In critical circles or in WWF lore? The company didn't canonize the Boot Camp match like that and I don't know if people talked about it that way in the years '84-87, but it definitely merits it in retrospect. This was heavily canonized by the company for a long time, and also by fans, although that's been reassessed over the years... But this is a better candidate, I think.

To paraphrase from Deadspin, if Mayweather is the promoter as well as a fighter, is setting out to make his opponent look good enough for a rematch, and can more or less write his own match script, does it matter if it's a "work" in the "fix is in" sense? Is there a big difference? This was okay but only "good" by comparison to the Pacquiao snoozer.

Flair vs. SteamboatSting vs. Callous Pillman vs. Liger Benoit vs. Booker series Sting/Flair January title change and April cage match, the weirdo WarGames from July, Pillman/Liger from December, among many things I'd love to see from the "push into Meadowlands" 1991. Lots of Omni stuff from 1991 too, like Flair/Pillman 3 falls in May, and Sting/Rude 30+ minutes from November. They seem to have taped plenty of the Omni shows, so who knows. Flair/Windham multi-cam and complete from Crockett Cup 1987 would be nice. They probably should have done a "Flair/Steamboat through the decades" Network set already. (I guess this is pre-Turner) Anything from the 1993 European tour. Any of the house show hotshot title changes from 1998 (I realize these were almost certainly not filmed). The very stacked Internet audio streaming house shows from LA, Boston, and Tampa 1998 (same).

Weight training holds no risk of concussive blows unless you drop the weights on yourself, but I'll stick with the notion that full-speed sparring of any martial arts is probably a bad idea for someone with 10+ concussions, 15 years of sub-concussive blows, and maybe a brain lesion that causes seizures. I also fear in the long run that "safer" working (at least of any style that involves bumps) might end up being like "teaching kids the right way to tackle" - it doesn't help a thing, but it makes us feel better about watching. I don't think pro wrestling is AS inherently unsafe as football, but it's up there.

I don't think even pure mat wrestling is all that safe, in the scheme of things. Anything north of exhibition pace in any style could be a danger to him.

No contest. Ric Flair, "Easy Lover" by Philip Bailey & Phil Collins (CWF Battle of the Belts II only).

What format then? The dominant pro videotape standards at the time were 1-inch "Type C" and 2-inch "quad" (quadruplex).

Oh definitely. But you don't have to take my word for it; finished #3 in the WCCW '80s poll.

2/3 falls, over 30:00 long? Second Flair DVD set, 2008 "Definitive Collection". There it's labeled 8/24/82 (TV airdate?), but surprise surprise, there weren't two Flair/Kerry matches drawing 18,000 at Reunion Arena in the span of 9 days.

This is part of what I'm asking; when and why the working motives of "have great matches to get great reactions, future draws, and better opportunities" were joined by critical motives like "have great matches as an artistic pursuit, compare and canonize them". Savage/Steamboat and Bret/HBK were meticulous matches, designed to be remembered. Does that make them Art Wrestling? (Was Jerry Lawler only artistic by accident, since he'll happily admit to not knowing or caring about exactly which are his Greatest Matches Ever, as opposed to his biggest draws?)

Probably the former. When it comes to VHS there's not really a whole lot upgrading you can do, as opposed to film. True--but, for the quality we've seen from '80s WCCW so far, and pretty much everything else except Georgia, I would imagine it was stored on a professional standard tape like "Type C" rather than VHS. Their Georgia footage looks like home-recorded vintage VHS. In fact, the few bits we've seen actually look just like the most well-known circulating Georgia set in the trading/torrenting scene, as I recall.

Yes, most Blu-ray players now play a wide variety of media formats directly off of data discs. Just not .iso images of DVDs.

Your mileage may vary on "considerable" expense, but the most popular burners on Amazon right now are in the $50-70 range, and single-layer 25GB discs are about $25 for 50. I only got around to it this year, and was shocked by how cheap the whole thing was. 25GB on there? Do those need to be formatted as DVDs or can the media files be copied directly? Is this a very time consuming process? "25GB" = 23.2, but yeah. Just like DVD, you can put straight data on them with any easy burning software like ImgBurn, or author video files into a playable disc if you have proper software for that. Burning a full disc takes about 20 minutes at 6x, if you run a verify it takes perhaps another 10-15. One thing you can't do is put several standard DVD .iso files on a BR and play them in a BR player, because the universal player standard expressly forbids this operation. You can probably guess why.

Your mileage may vary on "considerable" expense, but the most popular burners on Amazon right now are in the $50-70 range, and single-layer 25GB discs are about $25 for 50. I only got around to it this year, and was shocked by how cheap the whole thing was.

This is a common complaint among all strains of performance, hell, maybe all strains of work period. You never played football, you never made a movie, you never fought in a war, planned a war, etc.

Yeah, I wasn't yet watching then, but this immediately springs to mind. For that matter, Hansen over Luger at Havoc 90 is pretty left-field.