Matt D

I'm stuck home from work today due to my own idiocy and this is when i learned, suddenly, that apparently I do not have a package with this channel. Ah well.

It's tricky with Scorpio since he was both so dynamic and so over with the studio crowds. I don't know when he started to be over but in 93 he was basically the most over guy on the entire roster if you just watched TV.

The match wasn't built up much, if at all, though it was pretty surreal to hear Vince talking about the RnRs on Raw. There was no angle behind it. RnRs weren't national since, what, early 90? A lot of the kids watching in 93 had gotten in after that. I was in that crowd and was vaguely excited to see York Foundation member Richard Morton. It was Boston. I think it's not that WWF crowds hated wrestling but maybe that they needed more than wrestling for wrestling's sake. They needed context and for it to matter to them.

I feel like it's tricky because crowds varied, much as they do now, geographically. I'm sure some things would come out on average, but it'd be more interesting to me to look at the Center Stage audience vs the 93 Raw audience, for instance.

1-42 are just Dylan talking about Confederate Railroad, whatever the heck that is.

I think Survivor Series can matter, but it's harder in a day and age where you have more big tag matches on the weekly shows, to the point where it's basically it's own Teddy Long meme. Traditionally, it was always a great way to build a feud without giving away another singles match (when such things, televised, were rare) and to transition one feud into another while protecting a lot of guys and their finishes. I think it'd probably work best now if they had feuds dovetail into each other and highlighted the personalities on the various teams and how they interact with one another, but that'd probably involve some semblance of build I'm not sure WWE is capable of anymore.

It's eerie how it's mimicked the DVDVR one. Also eerie, timingwise? http://www.wwe.com/classics/inside-ribera-...house-26137247/

Someone ran a bunch on justin.tv a few years ago but it was pretty spotty. I was excited though because it was a pretty big part of my childhood. I remember being really frustrated coming home from school and finding it preempted by the MLB expansion draft one day.

I could honestly make a list that would look like Eaton & Condrey Eaton & Lane Eaton & Regal Eaton & Arn I think i'd have a hard time putting Eaton & Koko or Eaton & Keirn on it though. Do we have any footage of Eaton and Gulas?

One show can move the mark that much?

What the heck happened in 2007?

I wonder if we have more or less longer matches now than then. It feels like we have more longer main events and what not but looking at the numbers, I'm not sure if that can be right. As always, well done.

edit: double post, sorry

So in the build up to Summerslam, Christian has gone over ADR twice. I know WWE loves putting guys over in non-title matches to build to contending for a title (where they usually lose) but I can't remember a guy ever going over twice in the build. I actually think looking at his build to the title is kind of interesting, especially contrasting it to what they did with, let's say Swagger who got built up very quickly as well earlier in the year. I don't have time now but I want to break it down later.

Didn't he look like he was juiced to the gills when he was the Prototype?

Were these not already out there or something?

He should do a straight up splash from the top rope and they can play it up that he's hitting guys with his beard. It would pop the crowd like crazy.

This is easily the coolest thing ever:

Am I wildly overdramatic for wishing he'd stop doing the diving headbutt?

That's fair. It's also a little bit misleading since Rey-Christian, giving the performance that they gave that year, might actually be 1-2 in a number of other years. I guess a bigger question, since I haven't seen as much of it, is how good Matt Hardy was in that role in 2008?

If ROH counts, then probably something in 04. If not, it's probably either a NECW show from 02-03 or a random MA indy during Eddy Guerrero's indy run. Once college ended, that was pretty much it for that sort of thing.

Tossing in the congrats. From what I've seen every experience is a little bit different. There were some things really easy about the birth-4 months period when it came to,let's say, watching wrestling, before the baby was too mobile.

I suppose I should say something less flippant. Mainly it's that I probably was thinking primarily about a "working babyface," though certainly, he had a special kind of momentum in 2011, to the point where it was kind of funny to see Jim Ross in his blog trying to deal with the backlash that happened when he lost the belt so quickly and how thoroughly WWE didn't realize that people wanted to cheer him. To me, though, it's really about the 2009 run, and really about his in-ring work from April 09 to April 10 or what not and the way he was able to engage and draw in the crowd when he was really given so little to work with, being on what was presented, more or less, as a throw-away show often bumped from the PPVs and PPV time, working a variety of opponents, faces, heels, green, experienced, and a variety of styles, and being able to build from one match to the next. I honestly think he connected well with the audience too, the audience at that point being a lot of kids that would get behind him and a lot of older fans who a) had seen him develop and B> who shared his "fan" background. What he did that I was always most impressed by out of the ring was the little hand over the eyes sign-spotting and pointing thing which rewarded fans for bringing signs of his and seemed pretty well received. So part of it is that I think he was really good in his role and his role was basically a TV show Ace for something that was left alone by the rest of the company and really in its own self-contained universe give or take recap packages. Part of it is that I don't think there were a heck of a lot of guys in WWE history that have been put in that role, at least not in the modern era. There's a lot of talk about what opportunities he didn't have and what we don't know, but as a performer and on a subjective level, he performed exceptionally well in this one opportunity which very few people have had in the history of the company.