Matt D

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?

Danny Hodge was probably a truly great pro wrestler. We have plenty of reasons to think he was and no reason to think he wasn’t. I really hope some day we get lucky enough to find out for sure.

Maybe he'll be visited by three ghosts tonight? Anyway, I'm glad for this place, and not just for the footage everyone has found over the last two years! I hope everyone has a great, safe, healthy, happy Xmas and New Year.

I’ll gladly take recaps of those other ones as well!

I actually just played Odyssey with the 8 year old. She controlled the hat. I controlled Mario. It was surprisingly engaging as a co-op experience despite that. I actually couldn't imagine playing the thing on my own, though of course, most people experience it that way. New Donk City was indeed great but it'd have been better if it was the whole game and about ten times larger. Very fun time. Now she's doing great on the Link's Awakening remaster, which is her first Zelda game.

I’d almost rather have Brody no-sell things completely than his usual bullshit of bumping big and jumping back up to completely invalidate the very meaning of pro wrestling offense. The worst.

I am shocked at how good the Bibi/Bernaert team got in 60. Shocked. Also Phil, keep posting reviews and your thoughts in general. We love to see them.

So many years ago that it was Cena.

I watched this yesterday and it took me by surprise: Primarily, because I've been watching everything we have available from 89 AJPW chronologically and Kobashi's only shown up once or twice (a handheld where Nakano takes most of the match comes to mind and I can't think of anything else) while Kawada's been in high profile stuff against Yatsu/Jumbo (as well as Footloose tags up and down) all year.

Because nothing about Randy Orton in and of himself is interesting, I think all of this is more interesting as a way to distill some universal metrics from Dave.

I listened to a little of that, and putting aside that there's literally no video proof that Ray Stevens was more than Ok because that's a personal bugbear, it's interesting the things he lists at the beginning are ... "All of his stuff looks good, his timing is good, and he doesn't make mistakes." Basically just mechanics. It's also interesting when he goes about what makes for greatness other than that. What are the list of great matches? Does he draw a ton? Does he make anyone on the roster look great? Do people get excited and think "oh man, this will be good" when he comes out?