Death From Above

At least the DDP/Jarret/Arquette three way super duper cage match was entertaining. Since Arquette just spends the whole match running away so it's basically a singles match anyway. Silver linings and all that. Thin, thin silver linings...

I remember Stasiak having one decent match, on a PPV with Booker T during that period he was stuck with that ridiculous GI Bro gimmick. So... pretty out of left field. Other than that, I've never seen him do anything that didn't bore me. He had a good look, but just couldn't put interesting matches together. The old dudes being the faces in the old vs. young thing sealed WCW's fate for me in hindsight, even if I did keep watching. The concept was probably doomed to failure either way as it drew too large a line (we're not going to have old people feud with each other? really?) but making the rich, power hungry veterans the faces was a colossal blunder of ego that not only reinforced the fan perception of one of the company's core problems, it emphasized it in their face directly. Just a bad idea. Having Awesome come out against Nash was a huge blunder, as it instantly kills Awesome because Nash is just so big, which ruins half of Awesome's aura. At the risk of being pelted with rotten fruit... I sort of enjoyed the Kidman vs. Hogan stuff, for just the utter bizarreness of it. But I was kind of a Kidman mark in the WCW days. And I'll admit part of it is probably "Well... I'm watching this anyway, I might as well find something to take amusement from," as opposed to it being actually good.

Yeah a lot of people bitch that players in baseball/football/basketball/hockey are overpaid in north America, but those player's unions do actually serve a purpose. I mean if your team generates $500 million in revenue during a season between TV, gates, merch etc... the unions see that about half of it go to the athletes responsible. I, personally, don't have a problem with that. It seems fair and right, more or less. I mean sure you can question whether there should be as much money in sport as there is. But the money is there whether you like it or not, so it might as well be split in a way that protects a lot of the fringe players and at least gives them their cut. Fight games of all kinds never seem to work that way. I guess maybe it's a natural by-product of the everyone for themselves mentality of those sports, but the guys at the bottom of the TV ladder are really getting screwed.

Yeah... gotta be some context to that... surely?

I hope that McDonald's thing comes off better in context than it does out of it, because that's a seriously fucking stupid point of comparison beyond both things involving "someone that has a job somewhere".

Baseball has been more international than cricket for absolute ages now. Snooker is good, but it will never catch on. Though claiming it's more international than baseball would take some serious recreational blow.

No input on current matches. Just best wishes for your health and your soul in this future endeavor.

Yep. It's the monthly three day break I guess.

Iron Mountain sounds like a henchman villain in a kung fu film. You know the one. "Iron Mountain Kang". The really big muscly dude who looks like a Chinese Scott Norton with an amazing Fu Manchu mustache that can punch through walls and tables and shit, but is finally felled by a groin punt followed by being airplane spun and thrown off a bridge into the Yellow River. "No Mountain can stand against the might of the river! Hahahaha."

Seems like in the current climate of technology there should be no good reason to have to destroy master film anymore to make major editing alterations, but I speak from a position of less than total education.

At least we know where Vince's bunker will be if the zombie apocalypse happens now.

The Steiner run on top was great but I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't surrounded by plenty of garbage. Then Greed happened, it ruled, and so the company died. Of course.

I haven't seen the 85 match. Should probably correct this life failure eventually.

To me Steamboat is an automatic. Steamboat's character was too sugary, yeah. But DEM MATCHES. The Flair/Luger matches tended to be good more often than not, but are booked badly in that Luger never, ever gets over the mountain. They really fucked up not having him win at Starrcade that year they did the blood stoppage, in my opinion (or not having him win a rematch). The Sting matches have better booking on the whole (well, Black Scorpion aside), but I never really saw the definitive great match from Flair and Sting you would have expected. I can see the argument for and against each. I still firmly believe Luger could have been the third biggest star in wrestling other than Hogan and Flair, and maybe for a time he was, but for whatever reason bookers wouldn't put the ultimate faith in him. I never watched enough NWA/Georgia at one time to get as burned out on Dusty as some. I like seeing him and Flair go at it a lot, and I also think Dusty's GAB '86 win is a pretty great match. I love the Flair/Funk stuff there is but it feels really short in the context of this discussion. Still... Hogan should be here, but isn't, because it was just a political clusterfuck plus both guys were on the decline by the time they were in WCW. WWF wasted the chance entirely. I still like some of their stuff, but it's not an all-time feud. There's at least as much dreadful stuff as there is positive, quite easily. I might be the biggest fan in the world of the Flair/Garvin Starrcade 87 match, but it failed out of the context of the wrestling. The fans just didn't dig Garvin as champion. I can't call it a great feud, even if I love that match to death. I really like the Flair/Kerry I've seen but would need to see more to really give a serious rating. I'm pretty limited on Texas, personally. I haven't revisited the Savage/Flair WCW stuff in a million years and also feel like I don't remember enough about it to rate it properly. I guess I would take Steamboat, Dusty, and Funk. Two long burns and one really good short one. Luger should be one of these three but the booking undoes the big picture story for me.

Juggalo Championship Wrestling should come before either of those.

I've honestly never quite got the commentary hang up. I mean, the majority of wrestling commentary is "he hit that guy in the face/he slammed him to the mat". Not singling anyone out for saying this. I've heard it regularly for... God, I don't even want to say how long now. ;-) It just never bothered me. Ditch's old columns are indeed a tremendous starter for this sort of thing if you need the push.

The problem with (most of) their stables is that they don't build individual characters enough that seeing them unite is an event. The nWo worked because people cared about Hogan, Hall, and Nash. The idea of them uniting to destroy WCW was compelling. Not because the nWo itself is this amazing idea that works out of context. Even WCW missed this point when they added like 4000 people to the nWo because they decided the brand would stand on its own, and it didn't. TNA treats stables like the new tag team: just package people together and hope it works out for the best. Too many variables for this to be a reliable method. This is not an exclusive TNA problem, but it is one they do repeat with alarming regularity. It's a common flaw in wrestling booking: most of them seem to think you can have a "good stable" brand, and just attach Dude X to it, and Dude X will thus improve his overness. But there's very little evidence to suggest successful stables can pull this off in any sustainable way. You might get a short term hit but if the worker doesn't interest the fans, it is gone very quickly. Instead it tends to dilute the value of the stable name. People don't really reminisce about the Paul Roma version of the Four Horsemen. People don't really reminisce about Mideon's time in the Ministry of Darkness. And I'm not sure TNA has ever had a stable as compelling as even the Ministry of Darkness, because they have never had an ace to build around that people care about as much as Undertaker.

In fairness I avoid a lot of forums, not just wrestling ones, because they aren't generally that good or constructive. A lot of arguments over nothing where people don't listen to each other, just post the same response ten times. So it could be a much wider trend than I'm giving credit for. Places where adults can actually disagree with each other but still get on with their day are sadly much rarer than they should be. DVDVR, for its size, is pretty good on that front really. This place is also excellent in that there's a very wide range of opinions but it's rare that someone who brings anything to the table is flat out shot down.

Kitao comes off as a real dick here if you know what's going on. He's prepared to attack Tenta until he realizes Tenta is going to fight back then suddenly he's lost all his courage. So you get a standoff where Kitao knows there's no real going back but he's not prepared to actually be in a fight where he might get hit back. Tenta doesn't really want to fight but he's not about to let anyone take advantage of him either. Granted, Tenta isn't really a guy I'd want to get into a street fight with. But Kitao still comes off as a coward who's only willing to jump Tenta without warning and, like most bullies, not someone that knows what to do when pushed back. Trying to shoot armbar a guy out of the blue is pretty low, and Kitao really is lost when Tenta was ready for it. Bizarre, but I must admit I found it strangely entertaining as a one-time viewing in its own way. Nothing you ever need to see twice though.

I was a huge Sabu fan as a teenager so I hear you. I mean when I first saw ECW when I was 16 (in the days of paying $$$ for individual bootlegged shows on VHS, lol) it was so absolutely different from WWF and WCW that it, by default, seemed like the coolest thing. And Sabu was all of that, in spades.

Funniest thing anyone ever wrote on DVDVR was the guy that called Stacy Keibler "an average blonde". I mean I know it's DVDVR, and any time someone says they find a woman attractive it's part of the code that someone has to be contrarian to show how cool he is that he hates girls and loves comic books, but Jesus Christ. Also, I hated almost everything about this show other than Norman Smiley and 3-Count just doing what they do. I agree going over this stuff, Luger had a lot of cool promos and out of the ring stuff, but I find him really hard to watch as a wrestler at this stage. Also, I think Vampiro sucks, so there's that. The main event isn't very good, but at least they were sensible enough to keep it short. The Booker T match is really bottom of the barrel stuff, and I felt sorry for him being stuck in this program. I know you don't think as much of him as a worker El-P as some did, but the fans really wanted to give a shit about him and for now they just weren't getting any reason to. And The Maestro cut a promo on this PPV so bad it had to be seen to be believed. Flair and Funk I love but they're too old to be asked to pull off that kind of match, though bless them they certainly tried. Funk really didn't get over a ton in this period. Tank Abbot and some dude punched each other a bunch, and I thought it might have been one of the three best matches on the show. That's more because I hate almost everything else than because I'm defending Tank Abbot or something. I think you've officially lost your marbles if you thought that Mamalukes vs. Flair/Crowbar match is good, though I'll admit it's an entertaining clusterfuck. Plus there's a hilarious moment where the athletic tape breaks while they're taping someone down so they just have to pretend it worked anyway even though everyone can see it didn't. I thought this show was really in the depths of despair. Way too many matches, very little of it worked, and it really felt like a company in real trouble to me. All the older guys don't have any upper gear anymore and so much of the rest is just "ok... this is happening? Really?" They felt pretty bottomed out to me here.

The Swiss cheese meter on that logic doesn't pass grade to a point. If TNA were interested in signing Joe and pushing him based on his indy rep (which they obviously were, since they did), why would they not be interested in signing him after a WWE run, even if that run was a complete bust? I can't think of any examples where this occurred. Either way he winds up in TNA. What shape his career there takes, who can say. Considering they've done nothing with him forever, but they keep offering him new deals, it doesn't seem outlandish to say that if he goes to TNA later that he sticks there. Even if the scenario that "Joe goes to WWE and bombs" occurs, he is still a guy that had a huge rep on the indies at one point that everyone knew TNA wanted. Considering they also loved to make backhanded references to their own competition, they would be handed a tailor made "held down by the man but ready to show you the real deal" gimmick. Considering that they pushed Joe as The Man before he got fed to Angle and basically emasculated forever more, seems more plausible than them simply saying "Joe? Yeah we were hot on him 18 months ago but now no thanks". TNA going down that path would require them to go against the grain of their own thought process on too many fronts.

I've never got the impression that Sting is a guy who keeps working because he needs the money. That could be a faulty impression. But he strikes me as a guy that is really happy to be a big fish in a small pond for the sake of being a big fish, and that he has enough money put away that when that loses its shine he can go home. He might have made some good coin in WWE doing the Sting vs. WWE Legend Series. Plus a DVD, maybe two. One for Sting pre-Crow and one post-Crow. But I think he'd rather just be the big fish in the small pond, and if he's happy, so am I.

This is the first thing about Joe that always comes to mind for me too. Don't get me wrong. I understand why people thought this way. Part of it was just a real belief in Joe, people who enjoyed him, who really needed to believe he'd be one of the things that made a real difference for TNA. Part of it was people that wanted to see a real alternative to WWE succeed, and again on optimism wanted to see Joe succeed for those reasons. Both noble enough desires for wrestling fans. Part of it was a lack of belief in the Umaga gimmick or that it would have long term legs. There's no way to know how that would have played out with Joe in the role, or where he'd be now, but it's fair to say he would have at least had a good run. How old is Joe now? In wrestling terms you haven't been around that long if you haven't been around 15 years anyway. Is there any chance he could still wind up in WWE now?

No... that's Mick's bullshit explanation. In reality, he was suppose to keep getting up and eating more. The whole thing went according to plan. He was quite pleased with himself afterwards. It's only down the road that he started to reinvent it. I can buy that.