Matt D

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.

US Election's in a few days. Real life is probably going to take precedence for at least one of the parties above for a while more. Check back in a week or two and we'll see about some motion. In the meantime, just stick them in the August folder like GSR suggested or save them for a bit.

All of that is very interesting, and the crossover between the fandoms and the very different focuses are as well. Thanks for the suggestions. There are definitely some interesting histories (I can't, in good faith, recommend Gerard Jones' book, but i will at least mention it). Thinking more upon it, I always deeply enjoy Brian Cronin's "Comics Should Be Good" work on cbr, especially the urban legends revealed, but not just. I've been reading his stuff since my days on Prodigy in the 90s. https://www.cbr.com/author/brian_cronin/ I'm also not going to try to keep up with you because you definitely have some free time I don't! It's a trick to fit everything I follow into my week and the comics sometimes fall to the wayside for a few extra days, especially now that I don't have a commute.

Oh, one more thing to add for now. I am not a big podcast guy and past MAYBE an interview with a creator, I've never listened to a comics podcast. The chemistry, to me, feels all off. With wrestling, you can listen to the backstage stuff in a BTS type podcast but I can't imagine there's a comics podcast that talks about how the editors and writers and artists all felt about each other and how a writer might have jumped exclusive from one company to another in June 1996 or whatever. Likewise, you don't get too many wresting podcasts that really go in depth on the storylines. Maybe you'll get one that really focuses on one angle or another, but a lot of that is focused on the performance. Do you get comics podcasts that talk about how an inker inked or a the trends of a writer in his work over time? I can barely even wrap my head around what a good comics podcast would look like, except for maybe to highlight certain runs people don't know about or maybe trying to make lists, but even then, I can't imagine people are breaking down writers/artists/runs on a critical level using any sort of literary theory or anything else to the level that we do here on the match discussion forum. At best I imagine its a lot of "this had some clever use of continuity" or "this writer really didn't write character x consistent to his previous appearances." I don't know. One thing I HAVE been reading and enjoying is Tom Brevoort's site: https://tombrevoort.com He's probably my favorite editor of all time, someone who I've had a decent amount of small personal interaction with over the years (he gave me my no-prize for instance) and if you go back to the start, it reprints an earlier blog about what comics he read as a kid and a lot of his early work at Marvel. That's kind of where i am now.

I'd like to engage with you guys on this a bit more because I love the community in general. One thing I'd say and one thing that kept me from burnout over the years is that I've always had a lot of hobbies. Wrestling was just one of them. I don't know if it's the ADHD brain or what, but I need a lot of stuff on my plate. Work's a big part of that but I'd say I have 4-5 hobbies at any one time with various levels of engagement. I probably was most engaged with comics In 2004-8 or so, in as I was posting on comicbloc and very into what DC was doing in and around Infinite Crisis. It was surprising to me not that long ago in seeing my own profile from the wayback machine for DVDVR that in that era, I was most active on that board in the comics/books section by a big degree. I've read 2/3rds of the Marvel line (if not more) since the mid-90s pretty steadily and maybe 1/3 (if not more) of DC since a few years later, except for during the new 52-rebirth period where they pushed me away between gutting the continuity and so many artist-driven titles.I read my share of indy comics now and again too but the appeal at this stage of the game is the shared universe and the 50 years of ongoing stories driving things forward as much as anything else. Likewise the superhero genre. I'm not super visually minded, so I'm much more inclined to follow writers than artists. Let me hit on a few things. Re: Starlin's Captain Marvel. As a kid, I really liked Quasar because I could relate to him, the whole notion of being able to wield the quantum bands specifically because he didn't have killer instinct (I wouldn't realize until years later that it was Gruenwald doing a thought experiment of writing a Green Lantern who had fear). And I really liked and identified with the Genis-vell character, especially as Legacy. That appealed when I was 15 or whatever. I think a lot of that stemmed from the collections Marvel would put out occasionally of the Starlin Captain Marvel ("Life of Captain Marvel" were these two double issue prestige format comics). The color scheme, the whole cosmic awareness/protector of the universe thing, how it was surreal but still sort of grounded in his nobility. All of that appealed. I didn't realize (again) that they just put those out to keep DC from getting the trademark for the big red cheese. I don't think I had quite the same connection to Warlock, who was supposed to be more unknowable and alien. Mar-Vell bridged that gap better. Oh, yeah, also, one of my first ever comics was What If Captain Marvel had Lived, which like almost every What If? is horrifically tragic. I swear those comics were set up to help justify all the creative decisions they did by presenting much more tragic scenarios to the fans. Anyway, big connection to every aspect of the Mar-Vell character/legacy, whether it's Photon, Phylla, Quasar, etc. The PAD comic was a big favorite during those gloom and doom ground-level, decompressed days of the early 00s. Re: Hickman. The current X-Books are bonkers. It's an amazing high concept but it's also so impenetrable to a normal audience. The way I'd explain it that we'd understand is that it's sort of having Daniel Bryan vs Drew Gulak main event Wrestlemania. The current crossover is something I hardly believe ever got greenlit. So much of it is based on Otherworld and Roma and all of this crazy Apocalypse mythos that has only been developed recently. On the other hand, the elevator pitch is basically "The X-Men have to gather powerful swords to fight a tournament against the ancient, original horsemen of Apocalypse" which really doesn't do it justice but there you go More over the summer than now, I've been getting my 8 year old into somethings. She was sent, by an old friend of mine, about 10 of the Spider-Girl digests (the DeFalco MC2 ones). Which are good but don't give you a great sense of the MU at all. She's struggled with reading older comics from the 80s because of how dense they are. They just don't hold her attention. I tried getting her to read the Simonson Power Packs because she likes the 00s digest Power Packs that my older kid enjoyed when he was that age. The difference this time around is that I then had her read a bunch of stuff online. The first series or two of Kamala Ms. Marvel. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. The first run of the Sam Nova series. A big chunk of the first Miles Morales in the MU proper stuff (and Bendis is hard for a kid so that was a mistake but she made it through). She's on Spider-Gwen now, but there's a lot less time for it since school is back on. She also reads a ton of prose and has made it to Phase III of the Marvel Movies and through Clone Wars and Revels for Star Wars but that's all beside the point. The plan is to get through Spider-Gwen and then finish up some of the other Champions books (the young Cyclops short series by Rucka, Ironheart, the new Wasp book, Maaaaaybe Squirrel Girl which I'm not a fan of but she might be). And then go on to Champions. We'll see. There are a lot of Marvel books from the last ten years that are great for a girl that age or a little older.

I ran through the Bayley/Sasha match. I think it was the sort of thing that wouldn't work if it was anyone else, but they made a bunch of contrived weapon/prop set up just seem naturally like the moronic stuff they'd do. I'm not sure that's a good thing in the grand scheme, but it worked for the match.

@SomethingSavage Can I interest you in Paris in 1959?

I haven’t been using it to get matches but I have been using it as a guide of key stuff to make sure I catch. That is still there as a cached resource though.

Live vs taped doesn't matter in the least for an empty arena show where spoilers don't get out. I think if the spoilers do get out it changes the chemistry for at least the most vocal/social media driven audience. Whether that can't be adapted and controlled for, I have no idea. There are a lot of moving parts right now in a COVID environment. Plus, WWE at least has been terrible about surprises and twists (both in not going to that well nearly often enough and not making it worthwhile when they do).

Really glad I tuned into that.

I'm tuning in but I'm pretty sure the quick cuts will make me miserable as I've been spending all my time watching 50s France, 90s CMLL, 89 AJPW, and 80s Otto Wanz and not this so I'm not inoculated. Let's find out!

I watched that a few weeks ago, but we haven't been able to slot it into New Footage Friday on SC because it's just one fall (even if it's a very complete one) and we've had other more complete stuff. It's so cool to see Cota and Dragon interact, and I'm not a huge Dragon guy or anything.

He needs a Paul Jones

He is Jimmy Valiant?

Government crackdown on televised Catch in 1961 and we in 2020 suffer for it.

WWE Training camp stuff.

There probably should have been a fall after the tombstone and maybe another during the catapults?

After the AWA set, I wanted to do a project where I reviewed all of Brunzell’s WWF work because he was such a standout. Obviously that didn’t happen. I’m glad we got the Frankensteined hour match with Bock though.