El-P

Name please ! BTW, you all know that Eric Bischoff and Triple H basically share the same name, right ? One in German, the other in French. They are both bishops : Bischoff comes from Der Bischof / Lévesque comes from L'évêque. Always got a kick out of that one. No idea if they know that themselves (although I heard Eric rightly correct Conrad about French pronunciations before, so he's familiar with the language).

Rocky Romero & Ren Narita working Elevation tonight. I'll sure check those out for a change (really haven't checked either Dark for a while now, apart from a match here and there).

I chuckled at this as I don't remember hearing of anyone being called Guerrier, but actually it does exist and really sounds funny as hell only in relation to this fucking Warrior deal now ! Like you said, it doesn't seem to exist in English, plus we all know it comes from a gimmick wrestling name, and a goofy one to boot (not like Steve Williams changing his name to Austin or Page Falkenberg changing his name to Dallas Page), which is what makes it so cringe for the wife and kids to be called this. But anyway, this is a detail, there's much more cringy stuff in the actual doc.

At least it was pretty damn honest about his mistreatment of Liz and the ridiculous stuff with the cam in Gorgeous George (and her sister)'s house. Of course WCW was never successful, or only for 5 minutes and only because they stole WWF stars, but you'd expect that. I watched the Macho Man one because it was said to be interesting. I probably should have waited for some feedback for this one, but I was curious also to compare it with the Dark Side episode. But yeah, Dark Side is not perfect, but they have really hit several homeruns especially since S2 (Benoit, Pillman, Owen, Snuka, Road Warriors). Like I said. Cringe. And really, should have been Jim Warrior or something. Can you believe the daughters are named "Warrior" ? How dumb is that ?

And so, the A&E doc about Warrior IS a puff piece poorly disguised as a non-puff piece. The entire narrative, from the very first minute, is about making the viewers feel sorry for Jim Hellwig, a poor little insecure kid who did not had a relationship with his father and searched for a paternal figure all his life. Sure, they spend about 5 minutes at the end talking about some of the horrible stuff he said for years, but that's washed off in about 5 seconds by Dana saying she was very disappointed but hey, you can change. And then it's an unbearable whitewashing tearjerker for the last 10 minutes with the daughters, the friends and the HoF (ohhhh, he was my hero when I was six) and the death. Dana comes off like she's doing a PR piece for the "brand" (she calls him "Warrior", which is cringe as fuck) of her late husband (remember that ridiculous and offensive tweet a few years back ?). You get a numbers of generic, useless WWE "contributors", you get the official biographer who gives me HUGE douchebag vibes (look at me, I've got a PhD and I am really interesting when I speak), you get Vince Russo despite the fact he pretty much never worked with the Warrior (he was still doing the magazine when he had the cup of coffee in 96), of course the WCW stuff doesn't exist. Oh, there's Miz sucking up to his boss too, for some reasons. I sure hope the Dark Side episode is gonna be better than this, because this is pretty transparent to me. Tearjerking, piss-poor two bit coffee table psychology, a narrative that is designed to make excuses from the very first minutes (all-along BTW, including when he's spewing hateful shit, it's because he was looking for a new paternal figure in conservative radio editorials, ya see ?). Please. The one thing I learned is that he already was an unprofessional prick during the Blade Runners days which is why him and Sting basically split up if you believe the story told here.

That was one issue with the ARSION tapes, they were really clipped as all hell after the first year or so. Also, these are 20 years old memories, pretty much, I have no idea how I would look at it now (well, I can pretty much guarantee I would love Yoshida, Fukawa & Yagi just as much if not more today).

Kayfabe, man, kayfabe.

I know people have said before that this was pandemic time and it did not matter, but I still wonder how much the awful EVIL push to the top with these main events overloaded with run-ins like it's WWF in 1999, followed by the single push of a stupid gimmick on a crappy worker like Great O-Khan have hurt the perception of the product. Cards who used to be loaded with great matches are now one match shows with one usually great main event (if EVIL isn't involved) and a useless, boring mid and undercard. Stupid americanized gimmick matches and angles (the Bea Priestley stuff which, again, reeked of WWF 1999) probably haven't helped either. Gedo has had an awesome 10's, but he totally seems to have lost the plot since last year. Yeah, he can still book a mean Dome Show and G1 for sure, but if the booking sinks for the rest of the year (not to mention ill-advised decisions from the business side to book TWO Dome shows in a middle of a pandemic while running a cold product), it won't help.

Like I said, the spirit is alive and well.

*facepalm* pro-wrestlers Fuck this, give the title to Shingo already.

And the entirety of "Where is my mind ?". Hey, if I could do it 16 years ago, drunk in a karaoke bar in Shibuya, you can do it at Double or Nothing.

You realize everybody here wants to see you chant "Judas in my mind !" on cam, right ? You have no choice.

They really spent way too much time on the whole Scorpio vs Hawk stuff, like there wasn't anything more interesting to say about being in North Korea than a bunch of anecdotes that you'd hear on an RF Video Shoot interview from 2005. Like, it's where Sasaki & Hokuto met and got together ! That's more interesting folklore ! It really feels they were struggling to tell a focused story, going into Rikidozan for a while then going back and forth with the Scorp/Hawk stuff. Very cool that they got Inoki at least. Norton was interesting but the best one was Bischoff. As much as he came off like a good in the Pillman episode, I thought he was the star of this show. As a matter of fact, his Conrad podcast about that show is really awesome and I'd recommend it to everyone who wants to hear more about this surrealistic story. He told the "running in the streets" story there, and he manages to convey the eerie feeling it must have been. I love his conclusion too, about how he can say he was at a bigger wrestling show than Hogan ever was, too bad no one paid to be there ! Overall an ok episode but a bit disappointing honestly. The Gage episode was a waste of time. The guy comes off like a mark for himself and fancies himself as some kind of tough dude because he cuts forehead of guys with a pizza cutter *without their consent* in the middle of a pro-wrestling match ? Ok. Whatever. Mox was really funny, but I couldn't care less about that Gage dude (whom, from the few times I've watched him, always displayed exactly zero in term of compelling working ability). The Pillman episodes were awesome. Right there with Benoit and Owen as the best of the series. Pillman Jr. stories about his childhood after his dad passed were heart-wrenching. That Kim guy was maybe the best interview of the entire series thus far (and he was incredible on Meltz's show too). The next three episodes should be really, really interesting, but I dread the Grizzly Smith one.

I have no idea how you get the sense it won't be a puff piece from that preview. It's all full of excuses already (the guys was so complex ya see, he had so many layers in him so there must be a good reason he was a hate mongering asshole for so long... this is so lame and pseudo-deep bullshit, yeah, he had layers, like every human beings) and playing the emotional chord with his daughters telling the audience he was tucking them so gently at night. You can be a good father and be a godawful human being to other people, that's absolutely not exclusive. Plenty of horrible people are good fathers to their kids. On this topic I've only watched the Savage one because I'm not into, well, puff pieces and revisionist shit and this one I knew was more straight forward than the Austin one (domestic violence = doesn't exist) or the Piper one. I have no idea why useless guys like Bubba the fucking Love Sponge was on this spewing usual stupid bullshit or why there was a random "WWE superfan" and random WWE guys who had nothing to say, but on the other hand, they did not sugarcoat how poorly Savage acted with Liz and even worse Gorgeous George. That part I had no idea about (and Meltz mentioned it's only part of the story), so yeah, Savage did not come off very good at all and really like a manipulative abuser. Lex, as usual, came off as honest as anyone can in his situation. He could probably be a story on Dark Side.

Meat still employed ?

Seven months away from it, actually.

So, he's *really* another version of Test then (although much worse in the ring, Test could be decent, W. Morrisey managed to have a boring match with Willie Mack so that tells me about as much as I need to know about his current level) Not clear, although I believe the booking was pretty much mostly D'Amore and Callis was more of an executive guy in term of talent relation and overall direction of the company, something like that, but I could be wrong. As long as D'Amore is doing the booking, they'll be fine to me. Callis can be put into the color guy position in AEW and would automatically be the best guy announcing there.

So, it seems like Don Callis is not an Anthem executive anymore, so he's only gonna be a performer for IMPACT from now on, before I guess moving on full-time for AEW. That's a loss for the company for sure as he and D'Amore together really have re-built the company in impressive ways (creatively I mean, while also building the relationship with AEW and NJPW). The last few weeks have been quite enjoying. I'm glad to see Taylor Wilde back, and she looks like she hasn't lost a step. Moose is the one who should get the belt off Omega (how, I have no idea), they have done a masterful job building him over this last year. Very cool to have El Phantasmo on the show too, and Omega of course brings another level of work whenever he's around. On the other hand, after just a few match, it's very obvious W. Morrisey (aka Cass) has nothing to bring apart from being tall and sticking syringes of steroids up his ass (Why do that to your body ? Yeah, he's cut bit his skin looks repulsive and it's gonna leave marks forever). It's not like Matt Cardona has showed anything apart from "I was a WWE guy for 15 years and I can't do anything different", but Morrissey just hasn't evolved one bit in term of in-ring work. Why bother.

I must admit, seeing Dario again was cool. I will check out where they go with this.

I get a kick out of them taking two weeks (it was two weeks ago that he debuted the theme, right ?) to figure out Onita did not actually come out to the Troggs but to the cover by X. Also, it confirms 1000% that it *is* an Onita tribute so yeah, I marked out again. That made the episode for me (I mean, I enjoyed most of it anyway, but it could have been the only thing on the show and everything was awesome already).

She certainly did not anticipate the social media digital revolution. Why couldn't she keep the Bloody Phoenix moniker instead ? Plus it sounds so fucking cool. Or Naomi Kato, which is a good sounding name anyway. I would always call her Miss Naomi Kato back then for some reason, probably because "The Bloody" did not feel right. Yabushita & Sakai the judo girls were cool as hell. And Yuko Kosugi as La Hija del Megumi Kudo was quite a promising worker too.

Cursed. Must be quite serious to be forced to vacate the title. What is Gedo gonna do now ? Back to Okada ?

Three of my cult favorites back then ! I loved these girls. Jd' was a different kind of promotion, for sure. Wait, Tamada ? Damn, from memory she wasn't very good at this point. Yagi was awesome. HamaKINO were great rookies (AKINO was insane) and the Apache sister went from sucking and being green as hell when the company started to pretty much ruling a few years later. Fabi Apache probably still rules to this day (she was great a few years back in AAA). Yumi Fukawa is the one you should watch, although she retired in 2001 because of a neck injury, but her stuff with Yoshida is just amazing. Okutsu made a great comeback in 98, but she did not sustain the same quality of work very long. She was probably too banged up (she came back from her retirement, which this this day is one of the most emotional event I've seen in pro-wrestling).

Damn Schneider. Congrats ! I hope you put a LCO match in there somewhere.