Death From Above

I remember back at the time being really amused that Sunny got a segment on Inside Edition about her massive celebrity in the early days of the internet becoming popular. It was the only wresting segment of any kind I remember ever seeing on that show back when it was one of the things on afternoon TV here.

I am not the guy to talk about Bockwinkel or the AWA as neither is really my area of expertise. But David Bixenspan put this angle out there on twitter today in tribute and it's a really great one if you've never seen it. This promo is prime pro wrestling:

Does anyone actually like Randy Orton? Does anyone miss him when he's away? I don't even mind HHH as a worker, per se. But he might be my least favourite promo in the history of wrestling especially since coming back to rewatch WWE he opens every RAW by killing the crowd heat with a 10-15 minute ramble. But there's really never been a period that I've watched the company where he could talk.

How have we made it this far without mention of Rocco the puppet managing the Legion of Doom?

Back to back tournament matches using the same "guy eating offense wins with flash finisher" less than half an hour apart. Come on man.

Adding: Announcing run-ins with theme music. Jesus Christ is this horrible.

I stopped watching WWE for a while during the Attitude Era and went full WCW when they did the angle where Terri Runnels took a bump that caused a "miscarriage". It was the last straw of Russo inspired distasteful angle that I just didn't want to see anymore of. The angle made me uncomfortable, it was inappropriate for wrestling in general, and the whole show at that point no matter how high the ratings were was terrible. This may have actually been on the RAW where Mankind beat Rock for the title vs. the Fingerpoke of Doom Nitro? I can't remember the whole timeline, but anyway I didn't watch RAW regularly after that. So of course then WCW hired Russo. Great. Just great.

There's actually a good chance to elevate someone without putting the belt on them right there, if The Authority offers them "support" and they turn it down. The rest of it I'm sure you can connect the dots on in your mind. Of course, it won't play out THAT way if they really did it. But it is a good opportunity.

Cthulhu

Was that lucha show on the air live? I mean, nobody died, so I'm going with "that was great please don't do that again".

I've been watching the last couple weeks for the first time in ages. NXT is great. I enjoy that. It's also it's own separate island. Initially I'm actually really impressed with NXT. On RAW? The long promos are so, so, so bad. Whoever is scripting them needs to take a long walk off a short pier, and on top of that roughly 95% of the roster as far as I can tell really shouldn't be speaking. It's a sad state of affairs. The actual in ring action isn't that bad though my God, the my-turn-your-turn formula is so dead with the crowd. A lot of matches in the first couple weeks of my watching have lacked drama because the fans aren't buying it. Michael Cole, years after I first complained about it, is still giving away every single false finish with THIS COULD BE IT. Stop doing this.

I think my favourite thing about that UK WCW show is the total randomness of a heel Flair/Luger vs. a face Vampiro/Hennig team. I don't remember anything like that actually being on WCW TV, probably because it might actually be entertaining or at least odd enough to be memorable in some small way. For me it's Sting/Hogan '97. I never saw Sting wrestle growing up, so basically Sting was the Silent Man That Stalks Hogan for like the first year I saw WCW and it was the coolest angle ever. They blew it totally. The Fingerpoke of Doom was real bad too but the Sting one bothered me even more personally, I guess just less desensitized to WCW doing dumb things at that point. Thing people forget about the Fingerpoke was WCW giving away Mankind winning the title on the air to try and spoil the WWF's surprise switch, which backfired and cost them a bunch of viewers, many of whom never came back post-Fingerpoke. The more I talk, the more I'm talking myself into saying the Fingerpoke was worse... Along those same lines, the angle where Bicschoff kept calling out Vince McMahon to fight him on some PPV, then having a "match" on the PPV where Vince (obviously) isn't there and Bischoff wins by count out. This was just bizarre. There was several weeks of build to this, grandstand challenges etc with no potential payoff. Even if you were into the angle, you'd switch over to WWF to see if Vince had any response, which of course he didn't. Just ego-driven nonsense that hurt business, though not as full blown a mess up as the above. Back Scorpion in the early 90's was bad, that angle got really messed up and they ran out of outs. FMW did some really bizarre shit when Onita's power dwindled as time went on. Involving porn stars in big angles and whatnot. It didn't do them any favours.

I watched just the main event, which is pretty much the only thing I've seen this year aside from part of Wrestlemania. Lesnar is pretty much the only guy in WWE in 2015 that moves the needle for me at all, which is unfair to plenty of I'm sure other talented people, but does speak to their larger promotional issues right now. I enjoyed it. Really liked the mat ripping sequence because it was something so weird and different you just don't see. Undertaker has finally slowed down a lot, but still knows how to work within his confines and I was glad he didn't look too bad here. I also dug the doctor stoppage tease leading into Lesnar going kind of berserk itself. But it was two giant movie monsters throwing bombs, which is what I wanted to see. Nobody tuned into this to see guys exchange holds and given where Undertaker is at this point in his career this was probably better than I expected it to be. I have no real thoughts on the post-match angle because I'm not enough in the loop to really have an opinion. It seemed fine to me out of all context but the crowd was pretty dead which is sort of a red flag.

This is finally where Andy Kaufman reveals he is still alive and reclaims his rightful place as Intergender World Champion. This is the only explanation for the entire history of TNA that I will accept. It's all an elaborate Kaufman performance art prank.

If we're talking useless, it's hard to top WCW Fall Brawl War Games 1998. You remember this right? They put DDP, Piper, THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR, Hogan, Stevie Ray, Bret Hart, Nash, Sting, and Luger in the cage, had a totally bloodless, pretty much violence-less match, and then Stevie Ray did a job for DDP, and that was the end. This is also the show where Davey Boy Smith got his back destroyed by the trapdoor for Warrior's MAGIC SMOKE entrance, so it also ruined a human being's life. Semi main event was Scott Hall jobbing to fucking Konnan. Jericho beat up a Goldberg impersonator, and we never got a real payoff to this angle, because WCW. Goldberg wasn't on the show at all despite being the hottest act on the planet. So that's my nomination.

This thread is amazing and I wish I remembered my dreams more often. I only do so extremely rarely. Almost always when I do it's a nightmare too. I remember like one pleasant dream I've had in all of 2015. Can't actually remember a wrestling dream and I'm sad because this thread deserves more. :-)

Mr. Pogo's scythe thing was ridiculous, but at least as his endless feud with Onita went on they would do that bit where Pogo would swing the scythe and Onita would block it using a table as a shield, so it was at least ridiculous in a somewhat cool and creative way. I actually liked that spot, even if the rest of the scythe stuff is basically the shits. I like the HHH vs. Taker match at WM 17 as much as the next man, but sledgehammer is pretty bad. Spare tables under the ring always struck me as pretty dumb because they're only there because wrestlers need tables. But I still say sledgehammer, yeah. That shit would kill you.

Yeah as I said last night on twitter when the Ace engagement broke... I made my case for DDP, it was a good case, but it's over. Ace wins.

Maybe it's what he had on his wall in the office until he replaced it with the dinosaur skull?

Sometimes you just have to be good to yourself or no one else will. Way to go Vince, you did it!

Although getting all those names would be great, I think we'd also have to consider that if all those guys come in it's also likely someone has to go back out either due to a lack of spots, or out of McVengeance. Maybe part of the question is who does Vince go after in return?

Atsushi Onita, one of the cornerstones of the relatively unimportant AJPW junior heavyweight division, blows out his knee jumping off the apron to the floor of all things in All Japan. Retires. Somehow hatches the idea for a vision of FMW in his brain, comes out of retirement to be the ace of his own company that does fairly well for a while and pisses off a lot of All and New Japan people. Takes a bunch of old grudge match concepts and turns them all up to eleven, and invents some really weird bullshit along the way. Ends up inspiring a multitude of knockoff companies, which at least in the case of Big Japan (and I guess in a way CZW) still exist today. So I guess a what if is "What if Onita wasn't clumsy"? FMW was a really fun outlaw company for a while there, even if it turned to shit by the end. And it was a genuinely innovative product in terms of showing people some stuff no one had ever done before. Hard to think anyone else could have pulled it off quite the same way.

Diamond Dallas Page is a decent one. Breaks in as a nightclub owner/part time wrestling manager. Did some commentary work. Then the AWA folds. Had a tryout with WWF for an announcer role, doesn't get the gig. Drops out of wrestling and goes back to the nightclub thing for a few months. Ends up in WCW as a manager, only comes into being a wrestler relatively late getting fully trained at about 35 years old and has a big run in his 40's. Gets popular enough that he gets put over by Randy Savage, has a pretty respectable WCW run from then on given all the nonsense that went on. Goes to WWE as one of the few noteworthy signings when WCW dies, and basically becomes a jobber becasuse WCW Wrestlers Must Die. Retires from wrestling and goes into the DDP Yoga/motiativonal speaking thing which seems to have worked out pretty well. It's kind of a weird run, but it's a good one.

If nothing else that theme "song" is worthy of preservation.

Jumbo Tsuruta putting over Misawa's little facelock thing was pretty bizarre, especially given All Japan's aversion to submission finishes. It wasn't long until it was reduced to a basic transition hold.