Death From Above

For *just a second* there, my mind allowed me to consider that they might run an 8 v 8 elimination match that would eat like half of this overly long show. Still, 45 minutes before we're done with the sement as a whole.

Well, that clearly explains everything.

Was there ever a reason given why David Arquette turned on DDP?

Jimmy Hart was really discarded post-Hogan there too. Okay he managed Meng but they never really pushed Meng past "kills jobbers, jobs to (flavor of the day)". Hell, I was never even that clear why Hogan was being teamed with a mouthpiece anyway. He was really weirdly used by WCW. I was actually pretty baffled by Hart's seeming status in wrestling before Memphis stuff started being easily accessible on Youtube and whatnot. He's really not a guy I think was ever particularly well used by the WWF or WCW as a character.

That was amazing.

This RAW so far has been... a show that is on television. Yes, it is. The Dudleys and Tommy Dreamer are teaming up against unshaven World of Warcraft cultists in 2015. What a time to be alive.

Just looking over the PPV results of the year, did they make a big mistake turning Bigelow face? As others will say they were so thin for top heels. Basically, they kicked Bigelow out of the Million Dollar Corporation for Sid, but Sid wasn't really around that much longer. Bigelow would have given you at least one other credible, big monster for Deisel, and Bigelow was good in the ring too. Bigelow ended up in that feud with Tatanka (who really seemed to flop as a heel if I remember right) and it just feels like with hindsight sub-par use of a pretty useful piece of the puzzle. I'm not saying this "fixes" the year by itself by any means, but it might have been a bit better as a start.

Necro Butcher is one of the 5 scariest dudes ever in wrestling to me.

Having seen a fair amount of 70's/first half of the 80's Baba one thing I like about him is how he's actually pretty good in crazy brawls even if most people probably think about him more in that old school technical wrestling sense. I really do enjoy Hansen vs. Baba, and yes by extention Hansen/Brody vs. Baba/Jumbo. I would argue that Abby's best AJPW opponent was actually Terry Funk, based mainly off the strength of both the 1977 and 1979 Real World Tag League finals. Those two Abby/Shiek vs Funk Brothers matches are probably my two favourite brawls, like... ever. Baba/Destroyer is an all time classic, I just wish we had more of them working against each other on tape other than the one big epic. The thing Hansen has going for him is a much bigger sample.

- That One Granny that sits in the front row at every show and wants to hit heels with her purse I feel like every territory had one of these.

Yeah I would echo that I love the women busting out all kinds of holds that remind me of the days when Fuchi would stretch Kikuchi into a pretzel in the early 90's. Paige has some nasty stuff.

Loved the main event. HOSS WRESTLING~ Also, there was a dream sequence about Torito in a cowboy hat, and hamburgers. I thought overall this was the strongest Raw of the last few weeks.

Imagine if New Day won a match

This was easily the best of the long Authority promo segments in the last month. By a lot. Thought Seamus was quite good in this segment.

This college QB has serious Enhancement Talent potential with crazy bumps like this.

Owens isn't even that big a dude for a (relative) fat guy on the WWE roster. Like, he looks more like a football linebacker than a lineman. Maybe a CFL lineman, hah, but really he's not even what I would think of as "big" by wrestling's standards. It's interesting, being back in for a month and paying more attention to fan chatter, it seems pretty clear this is a really difficult time to get over as a babyface in the company and actually get a push. All the (men's) belts are held by heels, and I'll admit I'm struggling to think of which faces other than Ambrose really seem both over and credible as top level challengers. A lot of the faces seem to be being forced to be more vanilla than they want to be. Ambrose not by coincidence seems to be the one guy getting leeway to really say and do a few things. This is just a random thing but, again, having been out of the loop, I am kind of baffled why Ziggler seems to get so much hate from online fans. Is this just an overexposure thing? He seems like a pretty good worker to me but a lot of people seem to hate this guy. I actually think in-ring the company has plenty of talent but I do see where people are pretty frustrated at how a lot of it is used.

If it wasn't for The Authority's involvement I could see Seamus having one of those one-day title reigns, but there's no way Triple H is made to look foolish, right?

I think I'd say for me it depends from what perspective. In terms of looking at an overall company, finishes matter, because they're the device that set up a lot of your stories. But even then I think some people really overreact to things like who got pinned on a B-show. On the big shows, finishes do matter. In terms of evaluating workers, I don't think the finishes to matches are swaying me much, because the finish more about them executing what they've been asked to do by the booking staff than a tool to look at their overall skills. Basically I guess I'm saying I think finishes say a lot more about a company in general than they do to me about any individual worker. This is probably a reason I find a lot of the 70's/80's DCOR or DQ finishes so palatable compared to some. As long as the workers get there in an interesting way I am pretty tolerant because those workers are always the meat of why I'm here to begin with.

The only good thing about Seamus' bit at the end was at least, mercifully, they didn't announce him jumping Roman by playing his goddamn theme music. So that was good. Pretty heatless crowd that he got the belt though, like not even booing, just indifference. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if Roman had put together even a brief rally. Like, just give him one big spear for a nearfall just to swerve the fans a little, would have gone a long way. In the month I've been back Seamus has been booked as a midcard nobody, so I'm not sure what to think about all this. They finally got the crowd to pop big for Roman when he speared Triple H and then... yeah... I thought Roman/Ambrose was a match where both guys tried hard but the audience knew the screwjob was in and they weren't buying it. Too bad I thought they worked hard and it was otherwise pretty decent. It's kind of weird that Vince's favourite WWE finish of all time was Yokozuna/Hogan from Wrestlemania IX but that seems to be something we can say is fact by now.

Weirdly I never had wrestling action figures as a kid, but I used every other kind for wrestling. Mainly Masters of the Universe when I was young and later on Star Trek (mostly Next Generation but also DS9 stuff who I just repackaged in my head into totally different characters). At one point Spider Man got involved (and the funny thing is I always booked him basically as Rey Mysterio Jr before I knew who that was), and some GI Joes. That's some serious ingergalactic championship action. And what I'm saying is the answer is lead heel of the jr. heavyweight division Wesley Crusher.

If I was to watch one wrestler for these sorts of small things it would be Jumbo Tsuruta, especially late 80's early 90's Jumbo is just a wet dream of small details, great facial expressions, knowing how to time his trademark taunts etc. His sense of timing and reading his audience is just something else. When Rick Rude would do his hip swivel taunt but then sell how much it hurt his back because of some move he'd already taken. Pretty good chance it got me to smirk. Terry Funk flailing his arms is usually a sign something good is going on.

I salute them on moving from one channel I'd never heard of to another channel I'd never heard of.

Yeah I'm going to go out on a limb and rank that well ahead of Rocco the puppet on general principle.

I would actually argue that WCW basically got the max out of Jim Duggan, considering he won the US title, hung around for years basically doing nothing because he was kind of worn out with the fans, then really late in the WCW game they had that weird period where WCW Saturday Night was virtually treated as it's own universe with the abandoned TV title as the Saturday Night title where Duggan, well past his best but still a tryer, did what he could still do. I don't think we should confuse "guys that didn't become big WCW stars but could have" with "guys that were kind of no hopers to be more than they were". I would say they botched guys like Bret Hart and Hennig way more than a guy like Duggan. I'd even say they probably wasted a guy like Ray Traylor who I've come to appreciate more in the last few years as a decent worker, who if the nWo wasn't just a giant oversized blob that existed to keep Hogan, Hall, Nash, and Savage on TV he could have filled a better role as a bodyguard/tough guy enforcer role that hung around the TV title level. I honestly don't remember him doing much of anything at all as a nWo member. Hennig seemed to be a victim of the politics where any time anything involving WCW or the Horsemen got over the nWo had to neuter it fast, which became so tiresome. Then he became just another meaningless, heatless part of the nWo blob. Hart went from being the hottest act in wrestling to being an afterthought inside 6 months. Warrior is sort of the guy in the middle. No matter what they did that was gonna suck, but whoa nelly did it ever suck a whole lot.

poor old Fred, its like they found a few pieces of costume in Jim Herds old locker chucked him in them and told him to go break a leg. According to wiki WCW attempted to salvage the incident by introducing a new character called The Super Shockmaster. Also portrayed by Ottman, he was presented as The Shockmaster's nephew, and referred to the Shockmaster as "Uncle Fred.". I have no memory of this character Fred Ottman won this shit, everyone else is fighting for second place. How do you beat a fat man, wearing a bedazzled storm trooper helmet, busting through a wall, tripping over a piece of wood, and falling on his face, as a debut? I had never seen the segment for years and when I did I was mind blown at just how really ridiculous the whole setup was. The wall crash is just the big moment people talk about but people forget about the totality of this: - The general cheesiness of WCW props and staging in this timeframe - Flair doing his talk show gimmick which gave him this bizarre, loud, Phil Donahue vibe to me - Sid and Bulldog having a totally incoherent shout-fest where I think the only thing that got across was both guys liked cocaine - Then Shockmaster falls through the wall, helmet comes off, HEY LIVE TV IS FUNNY - Then the VOICE OVER. Oh, the voice over. It's a really amazing come together of "things that are wrestling" that is wholeheartedly memorable for all the wrong reasons.