Matt D

The fans do seem to go nuts whenever he gives someone (Young, Tarver) an absolute mauling though, which is something I never remember him doing much in years past.

I get the idea of needing content for content's sake but ouch.

Hogan didn't do it on TV before early 89 nearly as much as he would a year or two later. Btw, the grapevine (the grapevine being Vic) tells me that the May 24, 1986 Boston Garden match is the one to watch for Savage's first heel run. I haven't seen this yet. Pretty sure this is it though. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8mq1r_hu...-wwf-titl_sport http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8mq51_hu...vage-pt-2_sport Edit: as a kid I didn't see any of 89 NWA, but when Muta showed up in 91-92, when I did start watching, it was always super exciting to me. Like a super special attraction. I was glued to the set and the moonsault was something downright mythical. And that's the impression I had after missing his big run.

I really love Savage/Neidhart from the SNME right after Mania. It was this weird period after Sherri joined up but before he had won the Crown from Duggan and it's the match to give him his heat back, with the maddening concept that for some reason he has to get through Neidhart to get another shot at Hogan. It's really more about Sherri and showing off what she can offer relative to Liz, but it all ends up working really well. It's a smart little match. As for which Hogan/Savage match IS considered the best, I'm blanking. Just looking at the early time period... According to Graham's site, there are 3 MSG matches in 85-early 86 but they all go less than 10 mins, even the lumberjack one. They feuded in Boston in spring 86 with one match that went 13 mins and a follow up that was shorter and paid-off/transitioned with Hogan/Steele vs Savage/Adonis. There's a PRISM taped Spectrum match in mid 85 that went 11 and a 14 min Maple Leaf Gardens one from just about the same time. And I'm pretty sure there's at least one Detroit one that went 11 (think that's on the unreleased archive Hogan DVD). None of that's particularly helpful. I kind of want to watch as many as I can track down now though. (And that Race/Savage match from 87 too. It's interesting watching broken down Harley vs guys who are actually good).

It wasn't even that Savage lost but that he lost after hitting Hogan with everything he had and then having Hogan Hulk Up out of the elbow drop. From the people I've spoken with, I get the impression that the "consensus" tends not to think too highly of the WM match relative to other Savage/Hogan matches, but I do think that Savage showed solid desperation and did a lot of intense brawling and attacking outside the ring. You got the feeling that he was hitting Hogan with literally everything he could muster past maybe a ring bell to the throat. After Hogan kicks out of the Elbow (and god did Hogan ever love that pop. He became addicted to it in the years following), what's the point of watching another match with the two of them. It's already obvious that Savage can't put Hogan away no matter what. Hell, Honky was way smarter than that. On SNME, after he hits Hogan with the Shake, Rattle and Roll, he celebrates like a maniac for a few minutes before trying to pin him so as to protect his finisher. If Hulk rolled out of the way and didn't get hit by it, and then they added Sherri to the mix, they could have run it again, as is, at Summerslam. Instead, we got Zeus.

Hey, that was a Kung Fu: the Legend Continues reference there. Did you watch Time Trax too? I wish we could find Time Trax on bootleg DVD. And I kind of wish we could find Deadly Games too. The wife doesn't like that like she does Time Trax but Christopher Lloyd makes a great Dr. Wily. .. that's all I've got.

I'll admit that I went personal when it came to the tragedies and how they affected one's wrestling watching and what not (I'm sure no one wants to hear me going on about myself there), but I do agree that it's, at the very least, in the back of everyone's head now. That's probably a more useful way of thinking about it here. I had completely forgotten about the Angle/Michaels note, somehow. I'm rereading it, and it's so brutal for the first ten pages until Tom shows back up. You can just see half the people trying to work their minds around what was being said, because there was literally only one way for a huge chunk of them to even begin to understand it: "INDY BIAS!" It was so ingrained in their heads that Angle and Michaels were not just good but great and likely the greatest that they couldn't figure out how and why anyone would say otherwise. It wasn't even subjective to them. It was TRUTH, and you cannot argue against TRUTH with facts, and if you do, you're likely trying to cause trouble for the sake of it. Then Tom comes in and says "No, no, you have it all wrong. There are 24 people better ON RAW better than Michaels!" And then everything explodes again. It's sort of fascinating to watch it all play out. The scary part is that I don't think the argument has progressed much in the last five years. It's become more familiar to everyone but I still get this weird sense that people can't or won't wrap their heads around what the detractors are saying.

I'm late to the discussion and I've said this before, but I feel like a lot of it has to do with the deaths/tragedies in the 00s being a catalyst for people to look at things they might not have otherwise looked at and reexamine things that had just been accepted as "truth" with the astounding availability of matches giving people the means to really delve into things. In the midst of the 00s, it became very refreshing and relatively easy to look back at the 80s with a critical eye and find evidence to dismiss or confirm thoughts from the sheets that had held up for decades without much real examination. It also became easier to look at certain styles that had once seemed simplistic or dull and to find what makes them work and what makes them interesting. I also think that violence for the sake of violence and moves for the sake of moves and spots for the sake of spots are much more frowned upon now given what has happened. They're more apt to be forgiven if they build well as part of a story, if there seems like there's some sort of narrative point to them. If they don't however? Forget it. Excitement isn't an end unto itself for me anymore. Maybe that's hypocritical but I really don't think anyone has ever complained solely about someone having too many moves (as noted above). They complain about the moves not meaning anything, not having purpose, about the moves being a substitute for psychology and story in a match. I'm in the camp now that a wrestler can be great by doing nothing other than clubbering (and not even all that stiffly) so long as it's all logical and has weight and means something. For the first three-fourths of my life, I wouldn't have bought into that idea at all. Now I care way more about narrative than outright action. And I will agree with the sentiment here that the revisionist (or anti-smark, or pro-Role because a lot of the discussion is about wrestlers playing their Role well, or however you want to put it) guys are the ones who always back up their points. They HAVE to. Their points are, on paper, pretty out there, and they therefore didn't come to them overnight. No one wakes up some morning and is suddenly a fan of a guy who's generally thought of as a joke. When someone says Chris Masters is one of the best guys on TV this year, people are disbelieving. It's just a gut reaction. And I bet that Dylan was skeptical too the first time he saw a Masters match on Superstars and it was really quite good. The second time though? The third time? After a while the trends become apparent and the evidence to back up the points becomes ingrained within the points themselves. That's successful revisionism for you. It doesn't come from a vacuum. It creates itself. You first notice the facts and then you put together the theory. It's the people who come in arguing the traditional dogma that just gawk in the face of what's being said and say that X is X and everyone knows it's X and it has always been X and if you say otherwise you're just a troll or a blind follower or outright crazy. It AMAZES me that when people get upset about someone listing the usual anti-Angle and anti-Michaels points (usual in that they come up in almost every argument) there's never any real attempt to argue against them. There's just a sad, bemoaned tsking and dramatic shaking of the head and a Mark Henry joke or two. There were some attempts by people to argue traditional points with evidence in the Owen/Masters note, but it was all vague and intangible in the end. Very hard to grasp. It didn't go very well. That's the great thing about the DVDVR board. You can argue any point in the world so long as you have the evidence to back it up, and if your evidence is compelling, people will accept it. Anything at all is on the table.

I was watching the 2008 Smackdown NWO Elimination Chamber the other day and Cole kept calling the "steel" area outside the ring but inside the chamber "The unforgiving concrete!" he caught himself once and turned it into "Concrete-like....ground," but then did it again at least two times after that. It was funny.

I think the Shawn/JBL feud was praised fairly well at the time, though a lot of that was just how different it was from everything else WWE was doing. No one "bought" it, but people looked forward to see where it was going.

Does anyone know the approx. dates of Frey's WCW reign/run. I know it was in 92 and I know it couldn't have been that long because Watts was in by the summer, no?

I know I've seen talk that WWE in 2010 has almost as many viewers as they did during the late 90s boom, and the ratings are lower due to changes in the system or the number of homes that have cable or what not. Is that just smoke or is there something to it?

I actually saw more than my share of FCW over the last year or two. I lament that it's not being posted online the week after anymore. I thought Barrett was excellent as part of the 3 man announce team down there, for what it's worth. On the other hand, Otunga was super green; from what I saw of Young he was pretty green (though he didn't really have much chance to show off in the tag team with Jackson). Likewise Tarver. Slater'd been around for a while. I don't know much about Gabriel's overseas experience. But I don't think any of them had a ton of experience either on TV (past FCW which isn't exactly edited the same) or working big for the guy in the cheap seats. I could be wrong on that.

I get that, but the narrative ended up being was "no. they can't, but it doesn't matter anyway." They refused Miz. Jericho crashed into Cena when he was at the height of his restored babyface power. Edge and Cena bickered and Edge ate a fall because of it. Edge and Jericho beating on Cena almost cost WWE the match. Miz ran out and KOed Bryan and THAT almost cost WWE the match. And Cena came through anyway. It was a bit wishy-washy. Morrison got a fall. Bret kicked some butt and softened someone up for a fall. It's not like the WWE team failed Cena like some people on DVDVR are saying. The Faces did their part. Even the heels TRIED to do their part, right up to the point where there were miscommunications. Then they acted like heels. Even Miz would have done his part if they just embraced him. So I'm curious what happens next. I still think that they did a great job of getting a fresh, hot summer angle out of a bunch of guys who are super-green, can't talk, and aren't ready for this stage yet.

Basically, you guys summed it up. Though, with Hogan, I always feel that you shouldn't look at his matches relative to the rest of the card, but instead look at them like badminton to tennis, something close to pro wrestling but that is really its own animal. Compare (face) Hogan matches to one another, basically. In that regard, the heavily produced matches that he had between 89 and 91 are really interesting to watch because they all have slightly different (and really, building) narratives, probably because they were so heavily worked out by Patterson or whoever, which is really just an educated guess of mine having watched them and having watched Hogan house show matches from the period. They keep building until they come to a head with the This Tuesday in Texas Taker match (which is all about Hogan avoiding the choke). I'm not saying they have deep storytelling but they do have distinct storytelling. You just have to look at the Hulk Up as something the heel knows is coming, like it's a video game where if one player's character takes enough damage he can use a super-combo or something. That's probably not the most convincing way to put it. I have a lot harder time being engaged by Flair matches than I did before hearing John's theories a year or two ago (and then having them basically confirmed by Flair himself). Things just bug me that I barely even noticed before, because they're on my mind. Granted, I also look for storytelling over "excitement" a lot more than I did when I was younger and a Crusierweight/Northeast Indy nut, which means I might just be making things up in my own head a whole lot. At some point I want to rewatch a lot of Bret Hart matches all at once, because from what I've seen in watching a lot of 88-92 or so, he does a lot of his big spots, but he really changes up HOW and WHEN he uses them. Or more accurately, Flair uses his big spots. Bret uses his big moves, but he uses them to create different spots and to achieve different narrative ends. I could be way off on that, though, or he could do it a lot less as the decade goes on. I'm not sure. It's just something I've noticed a bit in what I HAVE watched.

It just seemed weird to me after hearing some of the Flair shoot stuff over the last few years where it became blatantly obvious that Flair's views on putting a match together just weren't... how do I put this? They were very distinct and did not fall in line with with a lot of people on the boards I frequent feel and/or may have attributed to Flair. This sort of seems a case of that.

Would Flair really care about exposing the US crowds to the Japanese style?

Neither here nor there, but coming back to watching wrestling last year, I was floored by how over Jeff was in the late spring/early summer.

I have no idea who they would have partnered him up with though. Terry Taylor/Ron Garvin as the Bushwhackers?

I think the Flair shootfest that happened in the last year or two proved that he had some very specific thoughts about wrestling and psychology and they don't necessarily sync up with, at the very least, what a lot of other people around here think. Also, I know that at the very least Michaels goes on in his book about how much Arn and Tully taught them. (end of page 137, if the link works). http://books.google.com/books?id=whe0idKbG...ion&f=false .... of course, he doesn't appreciate just how great (and smart) Demolition were in their first MSG match with the Rockers right before the face turn and just complains that they didn't sell the Rockers' offense enough, so maybe that entire chapter is suspect.

Neither here nor there, but they had to put Paul Bearer with Taker in order to make him LESS scary with the kids, right? Because he was terrifying with Brother Love at his side. You would just see the looks on the faces of the kids. Brother Love seemed to become something else entirely when he was no longer the self-aggrandizing grating interviewer and instead this religious zealot who controlled this undead golem of doom.

It's funny because of how much Flair would go on after joining WWE about how they gave him his dignity back after what WCW was having him do in 1999 and how thankful he was to them.

The best thing about Slick is the stuff he shouts from outside the ring. I think Fuji was a lot more effective than he got credit for. He was Worst Manager of the Year for many years straight in WON. I really ought to put together a list of 90-91 WWF matches I think people should see at some point.

I've seen almost everything available online from 90/91 in the last year, and there are a lot of really good matches no one talks about, but I do often think that my standards were warped considerably due to primarily watching a whole lot of 90/91 WWF and little else for a year.

*The* best is a bit of a stretch, but one of the best, agreed. Savage didn't carry Warrior alone, she was the second best worker in the match. She was awesome against Tenryu at the Egg Dome too. Loss, unless you're being 100% sarcastic you've just made the biggest P.O.S. statement in wrestling message board history. The contrasting opinion thing can die now because Loss you've just won. I'm tired of the whole "I show up at the board every few months to criticize you all for not agreeing with Dave Meltzer on every single thing" act from you. That's not even a "contrasting opinion", Sherri got plenty of praise for her work at the time. I have no problem with you disagreeing with me or anyone else here and explaining why, but it's wrong to attack someone's motives for having an opinion, even if you do think it's the craziest thing you have ever read, which I suspect it's not. Sherri won WON Manager of the year in 91 and did she ever deserve it. Anyone looking for spotlight stuff from her ought to check out the SNME match between Savage and Neidhart right after WM 5, the Warrior/Savage cage match from MSG right after Royal Rumble 91 where she dies to let the Warrior have revenge, and the Matador/Dibiase match from late dec 91 which was a MANAGER CAM match and fairly amusing.