Matt D

Are there any stakes to this Best of 7 series?

Not posting my longform reviews to everything but I will on this one:

No, Uncle Hunter will make Nakamura a star.

Isn't there a very valid argument that Vince hired away everyone else's stars in the 80s? Tito was an ethnic main eventer in Houston before he main evented shows for Vince. Hell, Boesch put him over Bockwinkel on his big Anniversary Show.

An interesting comparison is to look at what heels old Verne fed to himself in the 80s relative to what heels old Fritz and old Watts fed to themselves in the 80s.

I forever feel that he should have turned Greg in response to Martel getting the belt.

Even when they do something like a call back to Wrestlemania, it tends to be more of an idealized, symbolic Wrestlemania. The Platonic ideal of Wrestlemania, as opposed to anything that actually happened.

My gut says that this is an ol' Parv special where you're fixiated on something, here the idea that a booker should always defy the crowd and that everything that's happened to make wrestling something you no longer love is based off of that, and you're trying to quantify and classify it, using a number of other metrics to muddy the water so it's not so blatantly clear this is what you're doing (though it is) and also because you do honestly and earnestly find all of this interesting. You roll a rock down the hill. It becomes a snowball. You still want the rock to get there though. You have completely dismissed that there are times where going with the crowd is the right thing to do in the short, medium, and maybe even long-term and actually, seemingly, punished promoters for doing so.

Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, to some degree, go back to the medium changing. It's an age of binging. It's not about creating shows to be sold to syndication where you want any episode to be evergreen. It's about selling to things like Hulu and Netflix where people can watch whole seasons at once. People consume media differently in a digital age (And a DVD age before it for a lesser degree). Vince has always had a product which was capable of that, where there could be continuity from year to year and build to greater things. It's weekly. It's serialized, like superhero comics. It's basically one of the only three forms of fictional media in the world (that I know about) like that, with the third being Soap Opera. You can absolutely get that from watching old Memphis, which very often lived with its own history over time. The story always goes, however, that Vince can't remember minutia from a few months ago so he figures the fans wouldn't either.

It's not current but I don't care. There should be a national holiday for when dataintcash starts uploading again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0DRaG2LSQ

Make sure to watch Baby Doll steal the horse.

All the credit to Andrew for pledging to go back and rewatching to comment, by the way. That's all we can ever ask for.

Show your work.

I want to reevaluate Studd actually.

I can absolutely see people clinging romantically in a few years to 2013-2014 with Shield six-mans and the rise of Bryan.

I thought we were talking about the NXT crowd chanting "Fight Forever" here.

There is no Post-Bryan era. We're still in the Post-Benoit workrate guilt era. Except for that there's a new generation of fans who didn't really live through Benoit, which was 9 years ago now (the difference between, oh, let's say 79 and 88 if you want to look at wildly different periods) and really longer if you factor in how one key element of Benoit was being a fan of him in the late 90s when Hogan and Nash were on top of WCW. He was made into a symbol then. Nine years ago.

There's a cultural discussion about violence and bumps and spots and workrate and concussions and "fight forever," in a post-Bryan world. It is, in fact, the only thing that I think could make this thread more painful.

Come on. It's basic hero's journey stuff. Osprey, the young protagonist, smug and full of hubris due to his age, skill, and the facile praise he received from blind adulators. crashed up against the end of the second act, flying too close to the sun. Now he has to reexamine his world view and broaden himself as a person in order to rise once more and face his true enemy, the nefarious Pete Dunne. Obviously Vader is just Thunderlips in all of this. He's the storm that Osprey tried to conquer when he should have been focused on the affairs of (small, flippy) men.

Can't they just send the Briscoes to Arena Mexico.

I watched Sting vs DDP from 99. I forgot how pervasive signs that were about the people who made them were back then. The self-aggrandizement of wrestling fans has gone from irritating signs that have nothing to do with the actual wrestling in the late 90s to people with far too little fulfillment and accomplishment in their real lives running Twitter gimmicks.

Everyone will be glad to know that the Big Skye vs Van Hammer match that I remembered as being surprisingly good is actually surprisingly good. Part of that is the hot 93 crowd but still.

Lots of Florida here: https://www.youtube.com/user/4WrestlingFans Lots of Stampede (including Heel Marty Jones for people who care and haven't seen it yet) here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaSaeqaILNyHNtIlJnHDaSA

Melissa Joan Hart is a big fan. She's probably a secret Stu niece.

Obviously the real enemy is Martin Luther.