Death From Above

The current main page: Also my favourite tweet:

The bubble won't ever burst, at least not totally. We've seen this in other things besides TV. Smokers: "I'm going to quit when it hits $10 a pack. Okay, never mind. $15. Uh... $20... fuck it. I'm gonna quit when it's a bajillion dollars a pack. Promise." Hell, the WWE has sort of made this point themselves. Wrestlemania is now one of the most overpriced events of the PPV year (boxing aside, who have that market pretty well cornered), and the money just keeps rolling in. One of the things WWE has learned over the years is how to get closer to maximizing their revenue even when in theory the business hasn't been in a boom period for years. Live sports tickets are totally out of control at the highest levels, but that doesn't matter because for every mom and pop that get squeezed out, there's some law firm or corporate group willing to step in those seats. The Lakers can charge $10K for a courtside seat, although that's a far out example being as they have an abnormally high number of extremely dumb rich people to draw from in Hollywood. And at this point TV is radically more important to sports at almost all levels. Hell, the Canadian Football League just did a new deal this offseason that doubled their TV revenue in Canada that puts them in a spot where team's operating expenses are almost entirely covered by TV money and everything else is gravy. That's a clear B-league, albiet a very entertaining one, that is just capitalizing on its power in its only real market. NFL teams are doing the same on a much, much larger scale. Baseball is also trying hard to become a power unto itself, though it seems to have a big disparity between the Yankees and Dodgers of the world vs. the Pittburgh Pirates and it seems to be the sport with the most teams in business for themselves instead of the league taking an all-for-one approach, but we can't say it isn't working.

This is one of those years that younger fans in years to come "won't get" why us old folks get so wound up about, but it's going to be impossible to explain to them just how much the internet becoming a thing everyone had access to changed everything. Doesn't hurt this was also a year with so much going on pretty much everywhere. These yearbooks look great. Some day I'm going to have to break down and buy them all and ruin my free time for a couple years.

This is a fascinating little project. It's a shame so little of this sort of thing will ever be done.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/eye-on-b...ith-tv-contract I agree that these deals are cash cows... for the teams involved. Which I suppose is the idea behind good promotion in the first place. TV is pretty much totally driven by sports at this point, whether people like it or not. The amount of money getting thrown around out there has reached hard to grasp amounts now.

The Frozen Nazi thing that got shot down in the "10 WWE Creative Horror Stories" post had more chance of coming true than this.

Just to wrap up the line of thought I was on before about what a-list celebs could bring for photo ops, Lionel Messi is in the news this week for a mix up with a promotion at an exhibition game (basically he said the game promoter screwed people) where they were charging $2500 a pop to meet Messi after the game.

This may really be the moment when the Gods looked down upon us and said "You know what? Fuck it. Let's just relocate to another galaxy and start over."

I thought Test was going to be a really big deal long term when he first showed up. No, I don't really know why either.

I just watched this on Youtube today. Santo is so over it's ridiculous. Gotta love the overpacked arena with fans on the stairs. FMW is my favourite weird company. If I ever dig back into wrestling I should do a thread for them along the lines of the Puerto Rico one. Youtube seems pretty heavy on their stuff so it's probably possible. This is a trainwreck, but it's the best kind. Just so much crazy bullshit that could only happen in pro wrestling. Crowd brawling almost needs the audience to be into it for it to work, and here they are into the show so you get that feeling of "crazy people running around" and lots of chaos which adds to everything. I don't watch much lucha at all so watching Casas take a couple pretty crazy bumps probably has more effect for me than it would for some since his stuff is really fresh for me. That spot early in the match where he gets dropkicked in the ass to get knocked off the top rope and Santo follows with a dive just seconds later is really great. On one hand yeah it might have been neat to see the lucha guys work the FMW guys more but on the other hand... do I really need to see 7 minutes of Santo wasted on Horace Boulder? Probably not, so the way they work the match is probably for the best. The third fall fizzles out a little, but overall this was a lot of fun. It may not be great technical wrestling but that sense of "nowhere else will you see something like this" is still really neat. This is the kind of thing ECW always wanted to do, though to be honest I have a hard time naming an ECW brawl that was as weirdly enjoyable as this. I just had to see Onita and Santo on the same team because it was too bizarre to pass on seeing at least once in my life.

Sorry, I'm incredibly rusty on wrestling these days.

Stampede is destined to be the "lost territory" due to all the editing that went on with matches that made air, and the fact the masters of almost all that stuff is lost. Lots of 20 minute matches where 5 minutes aired. They were one of the companies that really had no clue what to do when the era of TV being more important than the live show became real. They did good live shows (well, what I remember of them) but they did a poor job putting their product's strengths across on TV a lot of the time. Ed Whalen killed everything he touched too. I haven't watched much Memphis but them having Solie when he was actually good is a huge edge. He makes that silly empty arena match with Funk and Lawler seem a plausible and halfway believable thing, for one example.

Its not even so much the setup I dislike, as much as the move itself. It's a silly dance move on par with the worst parts of Ricky Stemboat (and addmitedly, there aren't many bad things about him) where he'd try and do something "graceful" and it just looks terrible. This is not, by any means, an exclusive Rey problem mind you. He's just what came up. There are a lot of modern things about wrestling that look too much like ballet for my tastes. And So You Think You Can Dance has way hotter girls, if dance is what your TV viewing is going to be about.

MMA's very nature precludes guys running up the kind of records you see in boxing where a guy is 35-1 but he really fought 30 nobodies. It's one of the few real praises I have about MMA is that the numbers in the sport prevent that sort of record padding that doesn't mean anything. Silva holding the title as long as he did is pretty amazing. People crying work are, I assume, mostly people looking for that kind of a MMA record they can point to, which is just borderline impossible. The idea UFC would slaughter their golden cow before the match with GSP is just the silliest shit. I don't follow UFC that closely but that's pretty obvious even to me.

People who are thought of as A-list celebs (or even strong B-list, of which I'd say retired athletes on Montana's level often fall into) could make crazy money with this sort of gimmickery, but it's thought of as much too carny and in bad taste in general. Plus if you're really an A-lister and you are hard up for cash, which happens, who cares when you are going to get paid $10 million for your next movie or whatever. None the less I am betting there are A-listers you could charge five grand a pop and still find enough people willing to do business that it could be a thing. Never underestimate the number of people willing to spend money foolishly. It will never happen in a million years, of course.

Rey Mysterio Jr. is 38. When he turns 39 in December he'll be a 25 year wrestling veteran. That's the one that always blows my mind.

I'd say I feel sorry for her doing it because you really know how this day is going to go in terms of creepy moments, but there's like a 50% chance it was her idea in the first place. I'll also not lie. I've probably burned $75 on worse in my life. One has to have a sense of humor about that sort of thing.

619 has always been totally terrible and if anyone but Mysterio had tried to take it big time it wouldn't be accepted, but Mysterio is Mysterio.

Only good thing about Madden was him cheering 3-Count and using it to wind up Tenay, who seemed to get legit angry about it on air once or twice. Probably some kind of in-joke that can never be explained.

TV networks are willing to pay out stupid money *if* they have a guarantee of ratings. It's pretty common knowledge that NFL TV money has gotten so big that they don't really make anything at all for the networks, but the ratings are so huge the feeling is it's worth the loss because the alternative is that the competition airs the NFL which is too much of a status symbol and ratings draw. The NHL is the same way in Canada where they are consistently the biggest money loser for the CBC, but are literally the only thing on the station that draws worth a shit and the internal debate has gone on for years whether letting the games go totally to the competition would be good or bad for the network, but I don't think they've ever really come that close to giving it up. Now, I can't see how that still applies to boxing, because boxing has been a terrible mess for years because of the Alphabet Soup of various commissions with their own titles that have devalued every title match in boxing to the point where belts in wrestling probably mean more than 95% of boxing titles to fans of both. Boxing's popularity has probably never been lower since the turn of the 20th century to now, yet Mayweather and Pacquiao are the two of the highest paid athletes in the world so there's clearly still some viewer interest in the sport. It's hard to see where all the money in boxing is coming from... yet there it is. UFC would be vulnerable if boxing had its act together, because UFC is both totally overexposed at this point from too much TV and the cat is out of the bag that most MMA matches simply aren't very entertaining, on top of not paying fighters. But it's hard to see boxing as the place to be when the business is so convoluted. UFC has handled their business much better as a company so they are probably safe from their only potential competition despite their problems for now.

Naylor always seemed like a nice dude from the time I spent around him on DVDVR (even when we disagreed) so I'm glad to see his WWE job ending may yet have a silver lining. He was a guy that took a big step into a world most of us probably wanted to, so it would be cool to see him make it in the end.

It's astounding how much of this stuff I'd blocked out of my mind. I'm like a government conditioned agent undergoing re-integration. That's not even counting the stuff you're skipping!

Wrestling will never be thought of as real again but that's no reason to break the goddamn fourth wall at every opportunity. I'm not a big fan of modern wrestling because it's written in a way that wouldn't pass a high school writing class. Pointing out its own fakeness is just dumb. Old style wrestling was always goofy and I guess probably akin to comic books, but at least it followed certain rules of basic writing.

Vince challenging an employee to participate in Death Race 2000 makes up for that though.

I wish they'd made that Nazi Cyborg thing as a movie. It's a way better B-movie concept than almost all the movies they've actually made. I don't understand the "writers cannot eat and drink at meetings but the McMahon family can" thing. That's... just strange. The "there's no such thing as sickness" thing is something I hadn't read stated directly before but it fits perfectly for Vince's personality. Sad to think he's got a bit of the dark side of Howard Hughes in him, but maybe not exactly surprising.