Matt D

Tito vs Windham is super fun too.

http://board.deathvalleydriver.com/index.p...all&st=1860 Better than HHH!

I can't even imagine having this discussion with someone who doesn't admit how good Dustin was. There wouldn't be enough middle ground to even begin to have a useful discussion. It'd just be frustrating for all parties. Which doesn't mean you don't have a point. It's not what we're doing here, however. I think even the strongest Michaels supporters in this note respect Dustin's abilities and matches.

I want to talk about the build to WM IX at some point, but I was going to do it on Jae's 1993 WWE note on DVDVR (http://board.deathvalleydriver.com/index.php?showtopic=54630). I hadn't seen it before and it really surprised me since I HAD seen the show before and I didn't realize just how deeply some of the undercard was built. But I think i's great how the feud was Heenan using Luger as his replacement Flair.

Honestly, Hennig's initial WWF run is hampered by the fact he's forced to work 1990 Kerry for a huge chunk of it. The Rooster match is good, the Piper match is borderline great, the Hart match IS great, and he's super broken down there. Also, around 90 a lot of the secondary footage (Boston, Toronto, Philly) dries up so there are less matches available than there would be otherwise.

Honestly, 3 more Superstars type matches a week is a good thing

I freaking love heel Rich in memphis while Lawler was out in 80-81. I know the babyface turn is sort of classic, with his mother and all but the heel stuff is just great.

Seriously, Vader got a video game pop. The kids knew him from the game. Sid hasn't been in one of the WWE games.

For some reason it's always striking to me just how quickly they went to the blood in Magnum vs Tully. And also how nice a dress Baby Doll had on.

So baby in fact happened Sunday night, but I did finally watch the Shawn/Bulldog 95 MSG match today. And there were things I liked a lot and things I didn't. Shawn came in with a massive energy and Bulldog fed on it, bumping big and making Shawn's offense look surprisingly great. Sometimes it's too much. He does a bump at the beginning which is just ridiculous. The story of the match was basically one of comebacks and cutoffs. I thought it was pretty well structured. I didn't like the chinlocks though. What I learned by watching a lot of old WWF is that it takes two to chinlock well and while Bulldog shifted the second one a little Shawn basically just laid dead in both. A guy like Flair or Eadie can make a chinlock interesting and there are plenty of guys who can work from under on it and make it look engaging. It's okay to have a chinlock in a match. You don't need crazy submissions/grinding moves unless the match warrants them, but at least look like it's hurting or like you're trying to get out, or if you're doing it, that you're trying to hurt the guy. Maybe he'd have tried harder on them if it was a taped match. Obviously I didn't love the triple kip up. I didn't completely hate it though. It was clever and self-aware. IT fed into the cut-off story of the match. If one kip up is believable, then three are sort of believable. And it didn't lead right to the finish Cornette was great. I've seen very little of him with Bulldog/Owen. Really, in my mind, the biggest difference between pre-and-post comeback Shawn is the match structure shifting to backwork post-comeback, and how the kip up operates. Yes, after he turned face again, he always had athletic superman comebacks, and it's partially problematic given his relative size (and how guys that size are traditionally portrayed in the WWF; context is king), but when they were smart and didn't automatically lead to forearm, bodyslam, elbow, superkick, like they later did, it's not quite as much of a concern. The back work structure is a lot more damning later on. Here, the triple kip up was a little bit clever but I wish they had come up with something ELSE just as clever that didn't involve Shawn shrugging off two pretty killer clotheslines (sometimes his selling actually damns him in trying to tell a story,if that makes any sense). It was engaging and clever but made everything around it resonate less.

Would Christian's 2009 work for this? It wasn't that his work was THAT much better but it was that he had the opportunity to showcase it on a weekly basis.

Barring crazy things like the imminent birth of my daughter, I'll try to watch Shawn vs Bulldog tomorrow.

As has been stated in this thread (or the other one - don't remember which), this paints Michaels in the worst possible light. Michaels, for whatever reason, was generally greater than the sum of his parts. His best quality was putting together entertaining matches - that or athleticism, but I'm aware that you don't put much stock in that. Most wrestlers were better when paired with Michaels, and not just because they were given opportunities to have longer matches or anything like that. I'm trying to think of someone who was worse when wrestling Michaels. Maybe Bulldog or Jannetty - I guess Bret Hart could be here, although it's not like his matches with Michaels were garbage. Anyway, an attribute-by-attribute checklist for Shawn Michaels would probably make him look worse than he was, but I guess that's part of the problem with him. If your strongest point is entertaining a live crowd, and you're not excellent at any of the small underpinning stuff, then you've kind of set a ceiling for yourself. The output probably won't be boring, but it'll be devoid of a lot of what makes people connect emotionally, especially on the second view, third view, and so on. Are those matches ultimately hollow when broken down and analyzed then? (and I'm honestly asking. 96 WWF is a hole of mine, as I fully admit).

You obviously need to learn to do the cartwheel out of the way instead

Instead of just randomly spouting out guys and the occasional match, would it hurt to go over (again) the qualities that Shawn did well and did not do well?

Which is ANOTHER thing I think we're long overdue to really think about.

His 92 has a lot going for it, including the miracle Snuka match, but I'm sure there are better. 88 has the Demos match I love, but that match is all Eadie. You can see how clueless Michaels was in his nutty complaints about Demolition not giving them enough in the match.

Re: Hogan. One thing I fully believe is that Hogan in WCW would have been coaxed into agreeing to something in advance and then the day of come in and say, "hey brother, that's not going to work." leading to last minute rewrites. Yes, wrestlers/bookers/whatever said that, and they're never the best sources, but I completely believe it.

I still don't think that "great matches" are the end all. How a wrestler deals with different (even difficult) situations, how well they can show they can "Get it" in every thing that they do. You learn different things about a wrestler in a squash match, and a six minute studio match, and a 14 minute House Show Match that was never supposed to be taped, and the house show match in a different town two weeks later, than you do in a 25 minute match PPV match. But all of these things are part of the equation.

I feel like we really haven't had a good Dusty discussion. And especially Dusty in the 80s. When athleticism has gone past. I was watching Dusty vs Arn in the cage last night from 1/86, and was thinking how differently he did things from Hogan and if Hogan would even be the best point of comparison.

I've seen very little of Shawn in 96. I never make a list like that since I have so many blind spots

Well in a month or two it's going to be out there because I will be SHOCKED if the AWA Set does not really shine a light on him and the Portland set will expand it. That would be the "little bit" I was talking about

Honestly, I think discussing Hennig's peak should wait a little bit. As for Eaton, if I ever did another project again I'd want to look at Eaton's singles run in 91. I've had that in my head for a while, but I'm not sure if I'll ever do it.

Really? I'm generally a big picture guy but part of that is internal coherency and moves and moments mattering to the greater whole. A structural underpinning. Things not dropped.

I have serious conceptual problems with Flair when it comes to his grasp of how wrestling works relative to my own, and Flair's a guy with great offense who can make a 20 minute arm hold interesting, both giving it and selling it. When I have the same sort of problems with a guy like Shawn whose strengths fall even more into the ACTION category it becomes a heck of a lot trickier to rank him.