Matt D

Sami's working a Cuban Assassin gimmick.

You just keep going on with that TNA gimmick tonight.

They have a ton of time between now and Mania right?

My mind: Hey, handcuffs. I wonder what Bossman would be doing if he was still alive. He'd be a good guy to bring back for legends things. The old guys were really pared down with all the deaths. He, I wonder why they don't use Barbarian. Hey, they should put Meng and Barbarian in the HOF.

The biggest thing on the line in this match is EverRise's shirt sales.

Just caught up. Lots to go through. It was interesting just how many people were in there through most of it. @El-P complained about lack of stories but Billie Kay carried the first half of this. Her trying to team up before getting in and being torn about the Iiconics pose and trying to be friends with three people/entities, etc. Jax and Moon looked pretty bad. Mostly everyone else looked really good. I liked the Alexa stuff, to be honest. She's playing her character in the ring and changing up the way she's moving and reacting. The character may be problematic but Alexa's doing well with working to it in a setting like this. Blame Prichard, not her. Lots of great little moments, like Victoria hitting the widow's peak after Peyton did it or the Naomi/Bianca stuff or the Nia/Tamina stuff and Lana's big moment. I like how they cycle through the "legends" and you get people you haven't seen last time. I saw the WWE Rewind (or whatever) thing with Bianca featured earlier today and I'm pretty happy for her because she put in such a showing last time, even better than this one, I think. I don't know. I enjoyed this.

I love that their response to this was Bad Bunny

Goldberg likes MMA stuff. Use some holds. There's a story you could tell that wasn't that. Something with narrative and build and a payoff. Of course the other option is just to not fucking book it? It's a style and a pattern, not just one match.

The WWE "Good parts only" finisher spam sprint title match style is the most bankrupt title match structure in history. Just hollow and pointless.

There’s a “2x speed” joke here somewhere.

The only reason they might do the opposite is if they decide they can coast any go lighter on creating new content and just decide to dump already processed and converted things, so the people happy to get readily available things like Challenge might do well but people wanting more Omni shows still wouldn’t.

If anyone really wants to delve, the other Phil (Being Rippa) posted a bunch of road reports and I imagine Phil shows up in a number of them. http://deathvalleydriver.com/1001_otr/

I'm far behind as things have been crazy lately, but thanks for the Herd interview. It's interesting. Our understanding of WCW is like a blind man touching an element. At first, we just have the text, what we see. Then we have Meltzer/Keller/Beverly and the sheets. Then we have the early RF shoots from wrestlers. Eventually, we get books from people like Ross and Flair as well. We got the later era shoots like the long Flair one. Then we finally get things like Bischoff's podcast. Each time, it paints in the picture a little more, contextualizes things, gives us different perspectives, different things we can choose to believe. The elephant starts to take more and more shape as it goes. That's exactly what we got here. It gave us reasoning for things we took for granted before, gave us a counterpoint and some emotional underpinning to someone who wasn't a person so much as a caricature previously. We believe what we believe and toss aside what we don't, but it brings us closer to a meaningful truth.

Kayfabe 350 lbs and over? You don’t want guys like Hogan (303) or even Hansen (321) in this in my mind, but you don’t want to lose Bigelow at 390. and second the vote for Herd.

We’d spend a year debating what the criteria of a “big man” was. There would be acronyms: “A.N.D.R.E.”

This is a tough one especially if you're going on star ratings or personal feelings or what. Like, I almost bet it was a Hogan vs Slaughter match from 91 because so many of their series was so strong, but i don't remember anything but the finish. The star rating challengers would be: Angle vs Benoit - Royal Rumble 03 Undertaker vs Brock (cage match) - MSG 9-20-03 Styles vs London - ROH Night of the Grudges 6/14/03 Rollins vs Brock vs Cena - Royal Rumble 2015 Nakamura/Dillinger vs Aries/Samoa Joe - NXT 10/8/16

He said it on the podcast apparently: https://www.ringsidenews.com/2019/10/07/eric-bischoff-reportedly-has-no-input-on-wwe-fox-smackdown/amp/

I don’t know. That had me feeling pretty bad for Eric. They were running the mystery assailant Roman Reigns angle while Eric was there and that felt a lot like something with his fingers on it. It was a breath of fresh air. The “real story” behind the catering bit is funny. Great recap.

Did you read Kieron Gillen’s run? I liked that more than Morrison’s.

Great recap. It’s pretty fascinating he was so open with his money problems. That doesn’t feel like him.

They never use these legends shows to run big angles while they have a few extra eyes.

Pittance for paupers.

I get a kick out of Killraven and Deathlok but you wouldn't exactly call them even. Warlord too.

It's funny that the zeitgeist here has been so thoroughly in the 70s. I was wondering why people weren't reading either the big 80s Marvel runs (Simonson on Thor, Byrne on FF, Gruenwald on Cap, Stern on Avengers/Dr. Strange). Or some of the big Post-Crisis DC runs (Ostrander on Suicide Squad, Giffen/Dematteis/Maguire JLI, Grant on Shadow of the Bat, Byrne/Stern on Superman, etc.). The 70s runs are good but there's just so much more to hang on to with the 80s runs.

We're probably all lucky that they haven't thought up the idea of the Fiend possessing Orton yet, right?