Matt D

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?

My big regret in my GWE ballot was tying Henry and Michaels together kind of as a gag so I could put Henry one spot better than him. If I could do it again, I would have put Henry where he deserved, about twenty spots better than Michaels. As for Taue, one big reason I'm not submitting a ballot for 2021 is that I feel most big AJPW matches past 92 go about 5 (10, more) minutes then they need to and it gets frustrating for me to watch so I have no desire to revisit them, but even I probably couldn't rationalize putting Taue higher just because he didn't have the physical ability to go to the same level of excess as the other three pillars and thus was better able to avoid doing so. It's not all about output after all

Hunter/Hayes came off like the best team in the world. They really transcended the footage in the last match we saw with them. It was very much a "could main even in any arena" sort of vibe.

We just saw a really surprising Bibi/Bernaert performance from 60 actually. It was surprising because I generally agree with what you just said.

Not far off from me. I think it was the Main Event in October 90 before Survivor Series. But I had gaps of a few years here and there at least!

And lost Jose Lothario matches?

Oh man, if we get an on screen Bix stand-in heel manager.

Still ways to get there. They can have Drew take Roman to the limits and Roman get himself DQ'd, then, with Jey, beat down Drew to an extreme degree post-match and Miz cash in. Drew wins the Rumble to get revenge on Roman and take his belt instead.

I can see his act popping Vince.

The project was based on footage for 70% of the voting base. Period. It was just poorly named.

@Alan4L@InYourCase So I have no idea exactly what's going on with this, but I saw something through the grapevine. I'm not sure where the hub is or the timeline or anything else. I assume social media since that's how you guys did GME? I do have a few helpful thoughts though. Feel free to repost parts of this elsewhere or not 1. It's absolutely imperative that you guys define your criteria. I'd suggest something extremely simple such as "This is based on in-ring work as can be proven by footage." Otherwise you get people putting down Dusty for his promos or Hogan for his drawing or someone like Danny Hodge when there's barely enough footage to know anything at all and you just get a mishmash of confusion. That said, "how good a wrestler is in ring" can be informed by interviews and other things because they help you see patterns. For instance, I think each and every one of you (Stace, I'm looking at you), should hold the last few years of NXT against Michaels, but feel free to give Arn a few points for coming up with all of the best Cena finishes (like the Batista LMS finish). 2. I'm happy to update the master list of Segunda Caida New Footage Friday over the next couple of weeks. I think it'll be pretty useful for you guys trying to figure out what new footage has come out since mid 2018 as 75% of everyone's lists are people who haven't been active since the last list. http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2019/09/new-footage-friday-master-list.html 3. As for the French Catch footage (the biggest footage dump since the last GWE), use the master list on PWO. It probably makes the most sense to look at the wrestlers who show up on the list the most times. Delaporte and Bollet certainly have a case. Guys like Labat/Sola/Leduc/etc probably deserve a look. Petit Prince, though there are less matches. Plus the ones where we have footage elsewhere like Lasartesse. You need enough matches to make a case and there's only so much time, so prioritize. 4. Vote Bock! Here's my previous case for him, that I wrote probably too late to sway voters, and it's only been made better by the few new matches we've gotten of his: 5. Look, I really enjoyed GWE and wish everyone the best of luck but most likely, I'll see you kids in 2026. Part of it's time. Part of it's that I'm deep in some other projects, but a lot is that those projects mean that I could rank Tenryu but not Misawa and that just feels weird and unpleasant to me. Part of it is that I'll probably be more willing to engage with people on social media then. That said, I'm happy to talk anything over with anyone. Feel free to reach out.

It seems like they push all of the pre-WWE content to behind the paywall as much as possible.

I’ve been catching up on this and I’ve hit April or so. Once the pandemic hit the 2010/2015 shows get a lot better because Arn actually goes back and watches things so instead of making general comments, he gets a bit more specific. For the Q+A stuff it’s a little baffling when they’ll do the same question in the span of two months but that’s on Conrad being overstretched.