Matt D

WWE can afford to waste a guy who is actually over? As they have so many? IT's their job to figure it out. They get paid ... how much do the writing team get paid?

He was hot back in March and they failed to figure out how to capitalize on that. In part that was the nature of the Mizdow gimmick. It couldn't survive the split. But they had months to figure out how to do it.

Match finder has Four major Casas vs Satanico singles matches 1995-03-05 Arena Coliseo 4 of 4: Satánico © b Negro Casas [CMLL MIDDLE] 1998-10-19 Arena Puebla 1 of 1: Negro Casas b Satánico [hair] 1998-10-27 Arena Coliseo 5 of 5: Satánico © b Negro Casas [CMLL MIDDLE] 1998-12-02 Carpa Astros, Tlalpan, Distrito Federal 1 of 1: Satánico © b Negro Casas [CMLL MIDDLE] None of them look like they made TV. Were any of them taped somehow anyway?

There was definitely some sense of live reactions for Total Divas on TV/PPVs last summer, though. I'd call that more anecdotal than anything else, but it was there.

Wow. He had a good match with Mil Mascaras. I should probably stop joking around.

I was looking at some of the random tough enough entries and one woman said that she was inspired by the hardyz and lita, so there you go. Still relevant. No one ever answered my question from the original post though, about Lauper.

http://www.dailymotion.com/nitroe Lots of JCP/WCW and WWF TV. He's been posting Pro NY from 92 this week.

Conversely, the Satanico Feud is so terrific you can't write Dandy off without having seen it, so you have to watch it, yes.

I await the six podcasts you guys will do on fake pro wrestling.

I kind of feel like this match should be embedded in the confirmation e-mail for the forum. "Welcome to the forum. Here, check out this match."

Of all of my really hilarious blindspots and areas where I just know nothing, I think Tenyru is the most hilarious. He's a different human being than Tenzan right? It's not a Mutoh/Muta thing. (It's nice to finally have a post where the Bobby Davis avatar pays off)

One of my favorite part of these is when someone's doing an extended Dusty impression and it goes on long enough that I forget who's doing it and can't figure it out. (It was Kris)

Like anything else in modern WWE, it gets more interesting when Vince stops paying attention to it.

I'm buying that thing if I can figure out how. I made that decision earlier today actually. You can ask Loss. I bugged him to check for me.

Bill, Steven, etc, is this on your radar yet? http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv664s_mil-mascaras-ultimo-dragon-vs-earthquake-john-tenta-billy-gun-stan-lane-1993-japan_sport It's surreal.

The biggest impact the video store had for me was around 98. During the summer of that year especially. For VHS they had a 5 dollars for 5 movies for 5 days deal with anything that wasn't a new release and that's how I filled in the gap from the time I wasn't super interested in wrestling (93-97 basically). They had a lot of PPVs but not a ton of CV videos. A few Supertapes and what not. Mostly the Hulkamanias which I didn't have a big interest in. I tried to apply there to work the summer after high school before college started but times were tough or what not and I ended up working at a Borders instead. As a kid it was probably more important for renting the WCW NES game than any actual video, but I'm sure I got Survivor Series 90 from there a bunch of times.

I've been on the Earthquake train for a while now, at least since I did my WWF rewatching in 09 or so. I didn't come in looking for anything. That's when I came out with my appreciation for Demolition and Earthquake. I think he's got the best match in both Summerslam 90 and 92. I still think that values in at least part of our community have changed and moved away from workrate dogma to structure and pacing and selling and less flashy but more effective offense. Quake is a guy who (like Mark Henry) was good at knowing how much to give and when and basically everything he did looked hugely credible. Wrestling didn't change so much as we changed.

The Breaks match is great. I love how he starts cocky and playing the mind games but as the match goes on Breaks is just unrelenting and dogged and you can see the toll on Street with his physical appearance and body language. Then, after he's forced to submit he goes back to the prancing as a feign. It's a very strong performance. I'll watch that tag later.

It can't be said enough that the highest ratings during the Smackdown Six era (or maybe JUST after it) was Al Wilson/Torrie Wilson/ Dawn Marie.

I couldn't pick Strong out of a line up either, but I still think he's having a great year. I don't know if that hurts or helps Parv's case.

I mean the 2012 Survivor Series. That crowd was hot for him and he came in with a lot of fire. And then he got Barrett and then was pinned like it was nothing and that was that.

I actually think the crowd really wanted to cheer for Miz at that Survivor Series and he got one big offensive flurry and then just became another guy in the match. If they had given him a meaningful, dominant night that night things could have been different. Maybe not hugely different, but at least different. Thinking about all this actually bumped up Cesaro on my GOAT list for having that miracle feud with him.

Dave always showed surprise with how poorly Batista did in the voting, but he just wasn't set up to wrestle the sort of matches that the WON audience has been conditioned over the years to appreciate. He was the sort of wrestler that they have always traditionally railed against. So, it doesn't really matter that he was probably a much better candidate from a drawing perspective than most WWE guys from the 00s, he never got a real look. That's a generalization but it's got enough truth in it that I feel comfortable saying it to you.

I think a JBL/Booker T comparison might be interesting. I wasn't really watching as much during their main event WWE eras though.

One thing that's I saw on the newz sites today is that the WWE writers really like this PPV every two weeks format as they can set up a feud and go home with it without having to write four weeks of TV and basically go through the same motions every month. At face value, this is nuts, because the conventional wisdom has been that a big problem of WWE PPVs is that there are too many and they don't have the months to build to things like they did in the 80s. Having seen so much in the way of territorial wrestling, I'm wondering if this wouldn't actually be so bad. It'd be like building to the Monday night Memphis shows or Tuesdays in Portland. That said, they can't cycle talent in and out like in those days.