Matt D

Ease of access then. I just paid up for the lucha set today but in general I'm a total shameful freeloader relative to the sheer amount of stuff I watch and at least half of what I watch now is from before 1990. I bought some comps and what not in the 99-01 range or so when I just got to college but you could count on two hands the non-commercial tapes I owned.

Footage being more easily available makes a big difference, not to downplay what you guys have done. The idea that I'd watch 150 AWA matches (and probably double that with all the extra watching I did) would have been outlandish five years ago. He has less positive things to say about Robley since he was brought up.

I will say this is why, as a kid, I absolutely loved Survivor Series. There's a third element to this i think, which is continuity over years, something really rare in today's WWE. I feel like it takes a wrestler to actively care, like Big Show seems to, to make mean something.

Gold star, Kelly. I did a screen grab from a (still Prince) Curtis Iaukea match on youtube. So far as avatars go, I'm fairly pleased with it.

I watched the Garea/Martel title losses vs the Moondogs and vs Saito/Fuji. Martel was really over in both, enough that poor Garea got outshined in the Moondogs match. The Saito/Fuji match is legitimately very good. The Moondogs match has way too long a shine though the tandem armwork is a lot of fun. It had the stronger hot tag too, but the loss vs Saito/Fuji was better at just about everything else. The shine's good but a reasonable length. Garea really gets the fans behind him as FIP. Saito looks unsurprisingly great but Fuji could still go better than you'd think and the finish is awesomely timed. Worth tracking down and checking out.

I don't have much to say about it but I do love the Fuji-running-a-marathon stuff in the build.

He is talking about two other matches (Usos or PTP vs. Shield and Ambrose vs Ziggler) for the PPV.

To be fair, I am rarely affected by atmopshere/big match feel, but the way they dedicate a whole show to that match and make it seem almost as special as any match in the history of JCP matters. I still think it's a great match with a double FIP but if I had seen it without the build it may have been different.

HHH should come out on Monday and dock Daniel Bryan part of his payoff for the match due to what he and Armstrong did in order to pay for this.

I am the world's biggest fan of Demos vs Rockers and I'm not sure I put it above the RnR vs Russians title change.

I bet a Memphis stalling wrestler could beat a boxer. They'd just roll out of the ring until they could get the boxer to chase them. Then they'd roll back in and put the boots to the boxer when he rolled back in after them. How the fuck did Scott LeDoux beat Larry Z?

I always meant to see the first Cannonball Run since I never have but they always had Cannonball Run II on netflix/on demand/tv instead

How much credit do we give to Bill Dundee? I'm kidding. Regal's background in British comedy and what not is probably as much an influence.

Few bullet points on Monster Roussimoff vs Strong Kobayashi -His headlock takeover are just amazing. They're just huge and the amount of air he gets dragging Kobayashi over is nuts. -I love how they start from the headlock base and build to the headscissors counter. It matters a lot when it actually happens. -I also love how pissed Andre gets when the fans say he's cheating on the top wristlocks. He's like king kong rampaging as they take all the pictures of him. -Andre already has a lot of the Andre-isms, including the big set up to the nerve hold, etc. -The slam is pretty huge but I love how it just pisses Andre off to lead to the first fall's finish. When did he stop using the tombstone because Andre the Giant fucking tombstoning someone is the awesomest wrestling thing imaginable. -Kobayashi's attempts to find a way to hurt Andre are pretty great. The slam didn't work so he goes to the hand. That ultimately fails as Andre is able to start the nerve pinches again so he goes to the midsection. -The "Choke in the ropes" spot is great. It's nuts heel Big Show doesn't use that. Would it not work with the WWF ropes? -One of the most interesting things in the match is that Andre isn't Andre yet so there aren't all of those proscribed "Things you cannot do to Andre" rules that seemed to be in there by 1980 and mandated by the NWA and Vince, Sr. Here there's the old "Hanging on to the bottom rope as my opponent grabs my legs and pulls me out so I can take a bump" spot which would never happen to later Andre. -He's already got the in the ropes tie-up spot down, and I loved the over the top rope bump. -I really like the big TIIIIIIMMMBEEEER spot too and the epic battle for the crab. -Andre's stooging with the handshake towards the end was great and the countout finish was beautiful.

What do you think of Watts as an announcer, Will?

I can't listen to the Titans show since I'm too unfamiliar with the specifics of the material. It's stuff I might pick up some day though and if I do I'll be sure to listen. For now I have to miss out on that part of the Johnny Sorrow Michael Winslow comedy review.

There's never really been a Paul Lynde-based heel, has there? The Hooded Claw would have been a perfect Chikara character, but I think a Lynde-styled manager would have gotten tons of heat in certain parts of the country during the territory days.

It is a bit funny how Arn's super-agent powers only ever seem to make Cena's matches awesome, and everyone else either doesn't need his help or are beyond helping. Well, to me, and I don't know how Dave frames it, it's like Patterson. Patterson received a lot of credit for, let's say, Hogan vs Warrior at WM VI. Obviously Hogan knew a lot about how a match should be framed by 1990, but Patterson still gets and probably deserves, a decent amount of the credit. It's a pretty well known theory(fact?) that for a number of years Anderson has been Cena's personal go-to Agent. We're not sure who else he works with heavily except for Punk, so I tend to give him some credit for both of their matches. I don't know how much to give him so I say "some." I could be wrong but I don't think Patterson was spending a lot of time laying out matches for mid-carders. The only example I know off the top of my head was a throw away tag match with the prime time players on TV which (per rumors) got Dustin fired due to a botched double powerbomb type move. There is this: The difference between me and someone like Dave is that I give Cena a ton of credit for what he does by way of execution (selling, timing, presence, effectively using his power, crowd interaction, and effective nuance, etc). When it comes to the match layouts/calling them, I don't know. Why did something like Cena vs Rock or even Cena vs Bryan which were considered to be "video game matches" by some, look so different than a lot of his other PPV matches of the last year or two? These are things I'm not sure we can get an answer for but I like to keep them in mind because they're interesting to me.

Johnny's Stu impression is awesome and the Patterson one's pretty great too but I'm not a fan of the Vince one.

Tyson would have killed him and eaten his liver. I kind of want to see late 80s Tully vs Tyson. Would Tully be able to use ref distractions to cheat?

One exception would be the Buck Zumhofe-Bobby Heenan series from the AWA in the early 80's. They had Bobby dominate the offense in several of their matches, with a stip that if Heenan couldn't beat Zumhofe in ten minutes he would get stuffed in a weasel suit. The gimmick that they sold (and, to their credit, consistently throughout the existence of the belt, the "didn't make weight" stip made many bouts non-title over the years to set up "at weight" rematches) was that Heenan weighed so much more than Zumhofe that it would make a significant difference in who would get the advantage in the bout. And, they booked it that way, with Buck being on the defensive against Heenan in their bouts, with Heenan throwing the kitchen sink at Buck trying to get the pin and avoid the Weasel suit. Heenan could actually wrestle so him showing off an offense was ok. He was a very credible wrestler. With most Managers this would not have worked at all. I agree with your initial assessment overall, Heenan-Buck is just an example of how an exception to the concept can actually work ok. How did they work the Pringle vs Von Erich matches?

It starts with Survivor Series 94 when he's the only Hart eliminated. He was eliminated after crashing into Bret who had his bell rung and was walking around the apron. He comes back out at the end of the match but refuses to celebrate with them. There are a couple of weeks of frustrated Owen promos after that until they have Bret make an announcement that he's going to end his singles career and focus on a tag wrestler with Owen for the rest of his career. In order to bring the family back together, he's going to rededicate so that he and Owen can win the tag titles. They have these promos where Bret says something then Owen butts in front of him and says that he's going to carry Bret to the championship and now that they're together Owen will lead the way and nothing will stop them. Bret looks kind of bemused but tolerant in the background. The best one of these is after Marty and 1-2-3 Kid win the titles on Raw when Owen is passive aggressive and pissy that their title shot vs the Quebecers at the Rumble is no longer a title shot while Bret is congratulatory. Owen, at this time, is handing out the pink shades like Bret, etc. It comes to a head at the Rumble where Bret's leg gets hurt and when he starts to come back he goes after the Quebecers instead of tagging in. Eventually the ref stops the match and Owen destroys the leg post match. All in all, it's a well done angle. The biggest problem is that they lost Lawler right before Survivor Series and given his animosity with Bret he would have gotten the angle over better than anyone. They lose Heenan right after Survivor Series too so you have Stan Lane and Johnny Polo and Bruce Pritchard (and for one Raw, Cornette) trying to sell the heel side of things behind the booth and it just doesn't work as well as it would if Lawler was there.

Parv, Go watch the match again. In the meantime: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?showtopic=15575 My comments are the last post. Charles' are the first. they make for a good bookend if you don't want to watch the match. Isn't the yearbook section great?