Matt D

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.

A really good, taunting promo from Dunne could fix that.

You really want to watch SummerSlam now after that already overlong Rusev vs Reigns match on TV, don't you ? And to get that cool Demon entrance that you only get to see on majo… ok nevermind. SummerSlam doesn't look appealing one bit to me. Is there a NXT show the same week-end like last year (which was great) ? Yes: Nakamura vs Samoa Joe © Asuka © vs Bayley II Revival vs Gargano/Ciampa Aries vs No Way Jose (you'd find him amusing in short doses) Almas (Sombra) vs Roode Debut of Ember Moon(Athena)?

The argument would be that it was due to the Monday Night War and that we've only seen a return to jobber matches (in very specific situations) over the last couple of years, and really, save for Ryback, just in the last month.

I feel that NXT works, as a territory, on a week to week basis despite all of that and for the most part, despite its fans. I think you're undervaluing structural issues, whether they be twitter, the rise of MMA and sports-driven casuals going that way, or the sheer amount of TV that WWE has to produce now without filler.

Nothing quite highlights the problem with 3 Hour Raws than hotshotting the Demon's debut and Roman vs Rusev two weeks before Summerslam, even in a world where these guys don't have to be on Smackdown.

Three years later and it feels like we're in a different world. Three Hour Raw, Smackdown as its own brand, NXT, CWC, The C shows (does anyone even watch them at this point?) A TNA with stuff that has surprising buzz for good reasons or bad. Two seasons of Lucha Underground with a third starting soon. THREE CMLL shows streamed live a week. An hour of Elite each week. AAA TV A whole NJPW streaming service with a lot of shows live, plus whatever US TV they have. ROH TV and whatever big shows THEY have. Fairly easy access to Mexican indies and to PR TV And what feels like a thousand indies (some of them like PWG or Evolve or Beyond whatever shooting out matches that people are giving 4* + to on an almost weekly basis). That goes without all of the WWF house shows popping up at once or the full TV shows from territories or NWAOnDemand which has ~3-4 matches a week (some of them lost classics) or Stardom and other Japanese Indies (or non Indies like AJPW) not on my radar. And we've got two DVDVR 80s sets in play. Two. Plus the 00s work being done. There's so much instantly available at our fingertips. You can't realistically follow wrestling in 2016 if you have a family and a job. Not in a way to really keep up with the conversation. I tried for a month or so last year to really watch as much of the matches with Catch Point as I could, to catch up with it and keep up with it, and while I enjoyed a lot of it, especially their matches with Chris Hero, it was just too much. If you had given me plane tickets, a hotel room, and show tickets to the SCI a few weeks ago, I would have turned them down. I didn't even want to hear about it. Something that takes up that much real estate and time investment just doesn't fit into the level of adulting I have to do combined with the bit of wrestling (likely relatively small compared to a lot of people here, but still substantial) that I am currently invested in. If I try to take on any more, it all becomes indistinguishable noise.

I love seeing Marty go through classics for the first time. Just dropping that here, especially since he's a young punk.