Death From Above

Sorry double post.

Man that is obscure. At first I misread that as Mantaur, which is another very short lived... thing... that is hard to explain. Good lord this is hilarious:

Robbie V wrestled Raven in WCW once when he was (I think) Scotty Flamingo. Kind of a weird bit of ECW foreshadowing. Actually come to think of it I am not sure those two even had a major match in ECW, which makes it even stranger.

This is more of a general comment than anything, but I wish one of the earlier more successful shoot style companies had used U-Style's ruleset where they had the 15 minute time limit. It really encouraged a lot of action and, despite being a company that was basically built around one guy and never really went anywhere, produced decent matches. (Note: I've seen very little RINGS on the whole, so I may be off the mark that no one else was doing this.) My biggest criticism of UWF-i is that there are way too many 20 minute plus matches that basically have a 10-12 minute legwork sequence that really means absolutely nothing, goes nowhere, and is pretty boring on the whole. The U-Style time limit discouraged this sort of match structure quite heavily. This isn't to say I don't/haven't enjoyed UWF-i, as that wouldn't be accurate. There's lots of great workers and matches there (and it's a much, much better overall company than U-Style was, which is honestly a relatively minor and unimportant company in the big wrestling picture), but I do think it's a valid criticism that a ton of those legwork sequences really blur together if you watch like 10 UWF-i shows at all close together.

Was Pritchard also the guy that had the very briefly lived interview segment they did with the western/farm theme? I am having trouble searching it because the details are so hazy now. Only segment I even remember from it was a Shawn Michaels/Razor Ramon confrontation. It was not on TV very long.

Terry Gordy getting like 2 months(?) in WWF in 1996 as The Executioner, and quickly being fed to The Undertaker then disappearing, as basically a small add-on to the Mankind vs. Undertaker rivalry. How long did Brad Armstrong last as Arachnaman before Marvel threatened legal action against WCW and the gimmick was dropped? Pez Whatley having at least one match in UWF-i is pretty goddamn random. FMW had that weird little window where they had some sort of relationship with the WWF. Shawn Michaels did a guest referee spot, and they also ran a Vader vs. Ken Shamrock match.

Yeah the brilliance of the early nWo is (at least in part) how it played off the southern wrestling marks' fears that Hogan and friends were here to turn The Holy Southern Wrestling into New York. The path of the nWo is sort of like a rock band that early in their career "stood for something" but later on sold a million albums, and once it became all about t-shirt sales, some of the early fans say "they're too mainstream for me now". I guess what I'm saying is Rage Against the Machine is pro wrestling.

If people think Vince McMahon being revealed as the Higher Power in 1999 was silly, imagine how great it would have been in WCW when it turns out to be Brutus Beefcake! I also think, in hindsight, it's actually a little surprising that WCW did the Fingerpoke of Doom before the WWF did. It would have absolutely right in the wheelhouse of the whole Vince McMahon megalomania lift off with him winning the Royal Rumble, the Higher Power angle etc. It probably would have still stunk like hell of course, but I somehow doubt it would have been as (relatively among the company's fanbase) toxic as it is seen by WCW watchers. Man alive, 1999 was a strange year.

I can't believe it's been 20 years. I just rewatched this for the first time in a long time. It still totally blows me away. Wrestling peaked here. I'm happy with that being the hill I'd go out on in wrestling. I miss Misawa very much. He was a special person.

Also if you're into old school 2-D fighting games, there's a chance at this point you know about MUGEN, which is an open source engine where people take characters from basically every fighting game ever and put them in a blender. It's a pretty neat hobbyist game/program but you do have to put work into it because you have to download all the characters, stages etc yourself. Someone did a CM Punk in that. I actually haven't seen too many other wrestlers done in that which is, in a way, pretty surprising. http://s21.photobucket.com/user/seanaltly/media/mugen32-2.png.html

There's a great SNES game that dances around the edges of copywright law called Jikkyou Power Pro Wrestling '96: Max Voltage. Years and years ago I wrote a partial FAQ on it for GameFAQ's dot com just to help people that may not have a translated ROM. There's also a more-or-less translated ROM floating around out there somewhere. Anyway, it had four federations. One was New Japan, but with Mitsuharu Misawa added. One was UWFi and I think a RINGS merger. One was a sort of FMW/IWA Japan merger, then there was a US company including the obligatory Hulk Hogan. I remember New Japan was called Super Japan. UWFi was called REALS. FMW was called BOM. The US fed was called WWC. It's also a noteworthy game because it had unique alternate rulesets for the time. You could do UWFi fights with knockdowns and rope break scoring. Also had electrified barbed wire exploding board deathmatches. I got a real kick out of running Atsushi Onita vs. Antonio Inoki in a deathmatch. The AI in the game is pretty soft, but it's a great little multiplayer game that even a lot of big time wrestling fans don't really know exists, so if you're into completionism, there you go.

Whenever I now hear a discussion about how That Thing That Happened In Memphis Was The Most Important/Greatest Thing Of The All Times I just basically have a narcoleptic reaction at this point. Then again I basically have zero interest in current wrestling at all. The current product is nearly globally unwatchable. I like Japanese wrestling from the late 70's through about 2000 and that's it. And that's fine, I guess. I'm that grumpy person with nothing nice to say to people that like current WWE and hate matches over 15 minutes, so I stay out of the way and let people have their fun. The IWC has mostly passed me by. Truthfully I fell off being a wrestling fan pretty hard after Misawa died and at this point it's clear to me that it is never coming back. It's all nostalgia and backstage intrigue for me at this point.

Was Alfred Hitcock's Psycho a rip-off and a terrible movie because the star gets murdered somewhere other than the predictable time it usually happens in movies?

Is this a joke question? You are so far off the mark on this it just absolutely boggles me.

Kensuke Sasaki is a guy that has some really, really good high end stuff, and whole chunks of his career that are just a total waste of time. Sort of a weird career where he has some cool stuff early on, drifts just aimlessly for years, then had a good run in the early 2000's. Not "most disappointing ever" but if he hadn't kicked it into gear, he probably would be. Shows some real flashes in the early 90's before he wandered into the wrestling jungle for a while. Jinsei Shinzaki struck me as a guy that has all the physical attributes to be something big but he doesn't really have a ton of must-see singles matches other than his Tokyo Dome match with Muta and at least one super-awesome match with Gannosuke in FMW. Most of his singles stuff is "okay but nothing I need to see twice". He did some cool shit but often in the most baseline way possible. Yuji Nagata having a theme song called "Mission Blow" is a really unfortunate choice, in hindsight. As far as singles matches go, Takao Omori went from career AJPW midcarder, to one really random and fun run to a Champion's Final against Kobashi which was a pretty wild match, and then... pretty much nothing. Just never was able to put it together in a way that people really wanted to see. Decent tag team with Takayama but his singles resume is non-existent.

Sandman is pretty easily one of the best heavyweights ECW ever had. I'm not really sure how he'd be classifiable as one of the 50 worst heavyweights to have worked ECW.

Boogie Woogie Man

Partnering the service so it's available with Rogers only in Canada isn't going to win them any friends. But this is clearly the new warfront in the Canadian telecom game. TSN has a Bell-only online service, WWE now with Rogers. There are probably others but as a sports fan those are the two obvious ones for me. My rural internet is so crap here that honestly I haven't even kept up much with the technical features with the network, because it's not even relevant for me, personally. If I actually move back to civilization I'll probably look into getting this, though considering how much fun I've had arguing with Rogers reps over the years over my "you live in the middle of nowhere and you'll take whatever interwebz we give you" package, I'd really love to break from them someday.

I never tire of posting this when sporting teams I don't like fail, so I might as well apply it here. http://youtu.be/Jonf4JMK81k

Some of his early All Japan booking was sort of bizarre too. Mike Barton got a huge push for a while there. I get that he was thinking "maybe I can make this guy a thing", but... no. That time he brought Kronik in and they crushed people and it sucked. Then poof they were gone. I dunno. Muto's just one of those people you take the bad with the good and deal with it, in all things. He's certainly had an interesting ride through it all.

Literally not a single analyst in their right mind believes this is going to happen. Maybe around when Germany is destroyed by a black hole created in a Hadron Collider accident and Brazil crushed by a toxic waste rainforest mutant.

For me it depends on if you rate soccer in general being strong, or the MLS. The MLS is a C league. That's not going to change because why the fuck would more than a very rare sample of top prime players give up Champion's League money in Europe to come play for Salt Lake and maybe play some random team from Guatemala in the Fake Champions League. But it's also a lot better than it used to be too, and is clearly a league with a really strong fanbase in a number of markets at this point. If people are waiting for the MLS to become the new La Liga before they'll call the sport #2, good luck with that. But really I don't even see how it's relevant. All the real power is in "what are people watching on TV" at the end of the day. Meanwhile though the Premiership's game of the week will draw four time the global audience of the Superbowl routinely, and clearly the audience has grown tremendously for the game in general here. Hell I'm poor and I've got a specialty channel just to watch the Bundesliga. It's not exactly hard to access whatever you want in 2014. As for upswing here, sure World Cup 94 was a huge part of it, because MLS had to be created as a condition of getting the event at all. But don't underestimate the media impact David Beckham joining LA Galaxy made. I openly mocked the move at the time as being a complete waste of money. And I was wrong. The north American media's treatment of MLS altered radically almost from the day he showed up. His celebrity really did do a ton for the league, sort of a mini-Gretzky-in-LA effect. Kids have always played the game a ton here. All the Canadian hockey kids need a summer sport and it swung from usually being baseball to soccer like 30-40 years ago, but the professional game just didn't take hold until more modern times. Soccer destroys the NBA on TV completely here (well, what doesn't, product is next to unwatchable), and has been in really good shape for years.

If TV has proven anything during the history of itself, it's that quality of the show is utterly irrelevant in this sort of discussion. Quality of show has never shown any sort of direct connection to drawing an audience. Issue you're fighting against isn't "is the show any good" it's the stigma that pro wrestling is pro wrestling. The uncool factor it had during every era that wasn't the Monday Night Wars (and even then your audience was more high school and college kids than their parents). That's a hard barrier to break. Then again there was a time the idea of a prime time network cartoon was considered impossible, before The Simpsons happened. So what would be wrestilng's Simpsons? I really can't think of what it would be offhand but it's interesting to consider. Vince's idea about "sports entertainment" was to move away from the idea of calling wrestlers legit athletes because he realized in comparison to legit athletics he has nothing to sell. Figured he had a much better shot selling it like any other TV show. Would changing that help now? I don't know. And even if you want to change, I'm not sold on which direction (more towards "regular show" or more towards "sports") would be better. I would never say never though. TV has thrown some weird curves in terms of trends. Did anyone ever see Dancing With the Stars coming? Hell's Kitchen? Is wrestling in any meaningful way worse than those in a contest of intelligence? Probably not.

Modern hairless chipendale wrestlers (which seems to be at least three quarters of the current TV crop) couldn't look less intimidating if they all crossdressed. In fact a good chunk of them would look significantly more intimidating as drag queens than they do as men in speedos. I literally know of no other subculture but wrestling where bodybuilders are considered a tough guy look, but that's Vince projecting his fetishes for you.