PhilTLL

Note that this means he ostensibly changed from a tuxedo during the outside interviews into a full costume here. Missy is also in a costume, I guess, although it's hard to tell as Madusa continues the hilarious evening dress trend here. Paul E. ~~was indeed on every show leading up to this~~ (he wasn't! I forgot I had skipped a lot the last two weeks leading up to the PPV) pretty much looked like a jackass on a regular basis, but who cares? This is one of the best "debuts," storylines, and stables of the era.

Larry Z, who has sadly stopped commentating to go full time in the ring, interrupts the Brickhouse Bonus, Pro 10/19/91: "Hey Jack, whaddya know! You can still read the old prompter!" "Hello Larry, good to see you, I'm glad you were able to make bail." Nowhere near as dark of an old man joke as Paul E's unusually brutal rag on Solie the previous week during a show intro: "...and, Gordon Solie is alive and well this morning--can you believe it? On the Power Hour!"

Oh yeah, I forgot to think post-'93, ha. Bret/Austin has a better top two than any of those pairings. However (topic steer!) I would put Flair/Garvin with or above Bret/Austin, FWIW.

Never loved a tag team more I cannot tell a lie: As a rule I'm on the side of David and not Goliath, but it would be a little bit amusing if that cheeky show logo and name got this promotion sued. Anyone know how parody/satire/fair use laws work in the UK?

I could see Hart/Hennig up there if that's more in somebody's wheelhouse, between the multiple '89 encounters and the PPV matches. Rude/Warrior for the "oddball alchemy" factor, though it isn't on the elite level. I've never seen a Savage/Santana I didn't like, though only one (two, but they're from the same point in the feud and very similar) of them really ascends to classic status. As for Valentine/Garvin, there's a Maple Leaf match from a week after the MSG match, but needless to say it's not very different.

Johnny , Sinclair Broadcasting can buy the WWE three times and have changed left over. That is a fact . Do you you think the Sinclair chairman , David M. Smith , is afraid or concerned about the WWE ? Of course not. , he could care less about Vince .. The WWE is a the leader in the wrestling business , but in Wall Street's eyes it is a small oddball company. You should google the WWE stock and Sinclair stock . Than compare the two and see which one you would buy. This isn't relevant until Sinclair starts putting a lot more of that clout behind ROH. More WWE resources are devoted to WWE (read: all of them) than Sinclair resources to ROH. Sinclair *could* be a major threat to WWE if they got serious about challenging them, but that's not the current situation.

Bit of a false dichotomy, as plenty of guys are great at both and mix them well to get results. You mentioned Arn--he had maybe the biggest, best reaction moment ever (Clash 17) and was great at big selling and beatdowns, but he also had one of my favorite "small work" matches ever (Regal at SuperBrawl IV) and was generally amazing at details.

Kung Fu Graham made it to JCP and some other places as well, if I recall.

I think the homework model was rather heavily implied by the "nominate and offer best footage" format. I'm still iffy on voting myself (for whatever that's worth from a half-lurker unknown) because if I don't get enough due diligence done, it won't be a fair vote. And I'm not sure if I can be a fair judge of guys I've only recently seen for a small bit, even if I really like them, versus guys I've followed much deeper and longer. Not out of bias for my faves, it would just be an unbalanced level of analysis.

Between these, his announcing, and his total coward interviewer shtick, it's a bit hard to imagine that Paul will be a manager that can be taken seriously in just a couple more weeks.

That story is amazing and hilarious. I'M NOT RETAHDED, YUAH RETAHDED! DAT'S A SHEWT!!! On Power Hour 10/5/1991, the Freebirds come out to hassle the Enforcers after a squash. Hayes informs them that the only thing they should be "forcing" is "those bubble butts away from the dinner table" and more personally to Arn, "some hair outta that bald head." It is of course ON, and the crowd is going very wild. Dammit, Hayes, you and your shithead charisma... Later that day, on WCW, the Birds dispense with the Enforcers' squash beforehand, allowing the never-amusing unofficial tag match that is treated by all participants like a sanctioned tag match to occur. Anyway, dumbass disbelief-killing conceit aside, the action is decent enough, the heat is there, and Garvin gets a surprise pin on Arn. So we're about three weeks into this Birds/Enforcers bit and it has to be building to Halloween Havoc, right? Of course not. The Enforcers are booked against the fucking Patriots and the Birds are booked to job in singles matches (one of which would never occur). The Birds haven't been all that amusing in two full years and I'm still begging to see them over the totally inert, heatless Patriots, whom the Enforcers gain nothing from beating anyway. Why am I watching all this WCW, again? Saturday Night 10/12/91: Cappetta accidentally introduces Eaton as "three hundred and thirty six pounds" and I giggle. Bobby Eatin'. He and Rip Rogers produce what has to be the most amusing match of the Referee Zenk experiment. Hey, there is a payoff for Enforcers/Birds! But the setup is better than the execution. Ross and Paul E. hype a sight unseen title contract the Enforcers signed with the Screaming Eagles from England. Paul claims he has tape of them and will interview them, but obviously he doesn't. So of course it's the Freebirds in masks, Badstreet blaring, not even bothering with any duplicity but the masks because the contract is already signed. Ross is in his glory mocking Paul: "'Oh, I've got tape of these guys! They're huge!' You should be ashamed to call yourself a journalist." The action is okay for awhile, because these guys could do this in their sleep, but the heat is absent because the Birds aren't trying very hard for it. Then the finish pisses me right off: the Enforcers go straight from toe holding Hayes to keep him in their half to whipping him right into his own corner for the "hot" tag. Stupid in kayfabe and booking. Garvin lazes through some punches and hits the DDT, but is pinned after one belt shot from Arn. Zzzzz.

Piper has a big house on a hill in Oregon and a long-lasting marriage and four kids. I don't think he's ever been _quite_ as frazzled as his public persona, substance abuse problems aside. But yeah, this whole mess is a shame.

Hmm, fair enough. Though plenty of people were shooting to tape in 1979, or at least mastering to it for distribution. Videotape dates back to the 50s and was practical for small commercial operations like wrestling by the 70s. And he doesn't say how much of it is on film, as the inch formats are all videotape.

Oh yeah, there's nothing you can do about the levels in the mix, just the channels. The very audible clipping when Tharpe shouts is just painful. Those poor meters and their redlining.

The stretch job is pretty clean, without the funhouse mirror effect on the margins, so some people might enjoy it in forced 4:3 on their TV/monitor. I watched the second Flair/Wahoo match in 4:3 alongside the same one from the Mid South set and it wasn't all that different. Motion enhance is not my thing, but I'd use a setting like "Smooth" or "Sports" or whatever if it was. The audio mix is a bit more troublesome. Problems here and there include each commentator in a separate channel, the crowd noise in one or the other, the ring noise in one or the other, no sound at all in one channel, etc. A lot of TVs will auto mix these days, which is good, and if you have an amplifier you can use a mono mixdown setting (like "Mono Movie" on my Yamaha) and that should sort out most of them. But you may need to mess with the internal mixer on your PC if you're watching that way.

I get it, I'm a video nerd and a film buff who knew what aspect ratios were before a lot of people--hell, I was buying widescreen VHS tapes when I was a kid. But it's not quite the same bag because the nature of old wrestling production and discovery makes it closer to unearthed home movies than a classic film archive. I'm so used to watching files and discs of many, many good and bad quality levels that it doesn't faze me anymore. Now, I agree that stretching them was completely unnecessary and misunderstanding of his target market, which is more likely to crave correct AR. It just doesn't override the actual footage for me.

I'm 98% sure most of this is from videotape, mostly ringside shoulder mount cameras, not film. Unless the ringside noise is all new foleying and SFX (seems unlikely). Most complaints about "it looks more like film than TV" come from the process of turning standard def NTSC video, with its 60 interlaced half-frames a second, into a progressive format with 30 full frames a second. Even though all the information is there, the perceived temporal motion may be reduced. On the other hand, if it were film, the filmic look would be almost unavoidable anyway, so there you go. HDTV, for what it's worth, is broadcast at 720p/60 or 1080i/60, offering that motion smoothness TV is known for. WWE Network is 720p/30, which is why it has motion blur compared to WWE TV.

(This was just wrong and I deleted it.)

Without looking, I suspect the complaint is that they *are* 16:9, though nothing significant appears to be missing from the frame and who really cares, especially when the picture quality is so well-cleaned. The stereo audio mix (or lack thereof, to be precise) is a bit weird, but easy to fix, and I can't imagine caring at all after I saw the actual content. Holy cow. Forest for the trees. (And the sound that is there is great. Listen to the ring sound and chatter in Andre/Harley.)

The Jumbo match is great, but if this person is open to hour matches already, don't sleep on Clash 6 (the only genuinely long one of the '89 series, BTW). I've never watched it with anybody who didn't get excited. Still, Chi-Town is the most indelible.

After the kid gets hit, the people around him hold the bodywork in the air and cheer. Hilarious (assuming he was not seriously hurt, and surely that would have made some news).

These were picked with the express purpose of showing Flair's range, but they're all tremendous matches IMO. The most accessible Flair/Steamboat, for novitiates, is Chi-Town Rumble (2/20/89).

Chromecast is a little thumb drive size thing that connects to an HDMI port (and USB or AC power) and receives streams that you "throw" from other devices like Android and Chromebook. For example you pick a show on Netflix using your phone, then you click that little window icon and share it to the Chromecast (as opposed to something like Roku, which has its own apps and remote control). .

Solid work here, though a bit too sparing in all facets, especially for a no holds barred match. 1981 wasn't THAT long ago, ha. But what is there is very meaningfully done and the massive heat is well-earned.

"You want to cheer Sid over Hogan? Let's see you cheer for this, assholes."