Little questions thread

[thebrainfollower]

I want someone to cover both versions of Doctor Who in this way next. I'd fork out cash for it.

[goodhelmet]

A curious phenomena with these big debates we have sometimes is that I get PMs of support from silent observers. This is the fourth time it's happened now over the past year. I guess not everyone is comfortable posting in such back and forth ding dongs. I can understand that.

If JVK was a Resident Evil sock puppet that would explain a lot. I'm having flashbacks to his mythical surveys.

 

This isn't even close. Two completely different characters. You may not like either one but they aren't even in the same universe.

[KrisZ]

Sorrow brings up a great point about Watts trying to find a new JYD....he went through Brickhouse Brown, Master G, Iceman Parsons, The Snowman, Brickhouse Brown again before finally just saying fuck it Butch Reed is the #1 black babyface.

 

If JYD was a fad then why were they trying to replace him for a year.

 

The Freebirds were brought up here as well.....it can be argued that if it wasn't for the Birds then JYD wouldn't have been nearly as big a star.

[jdw]

Define "quality."

This is the key reason Jerry keeps being clueless when we say "It was the Product, stupid."

 

We don't mean Citizen Kane... which if people care to remember, didn't make huge money when released.

 

We're talking about Product that the Fans buy... and keep buying... and buy some more.

 

Dylan references 1992 WCW as being a Product that he enjoyed and had a good level of Quality. But he also pointed out that his enjoyment and thoughts about it's Quality didn't mean the Product connected with enough fans to be successful.

 

Was JYD a quality worker? Eh.

 

Does it matter? Not really.

 

Why? Because he was a key element in the Product that the Mid South fans bought, and bought, and bought.

 

There certainly were other elements. The promotion was booked in a way that the fans bought. There were heels opposite JYD that the fans bought. There were other storylines and wrestlers that they bought, such as the MX in 1984 and their storylines with Watts (Last Stampede) and the R'nR.

 

What Dylan, Jerry, me, the rest of us think was Quality doesn't have dick to do with it being Good Product for those fans.

 

Jesus... I would swear I referenced Twilight, both as a book series and a movie series. I honestly haven't got a clue why Jerry could even believe that we're saying Pro Wrestling is different from other forms of entertainment where non-highbrow things sell shitloads of tickets.

 

John

[jdw]

For some reason, wrestling is prone to coming "in and out" like makes of trainers, yo-yos and other such things, in a way that legit sports aren't. (by which I mean, football is almost always "in").

I really don't know what you're talking about.

 

Leeds United has played at Elland Road for more than a century. It's been renovated several times over the years. Average attendance is in the right hand column here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Leeds..._A.F.C._seasons

 

Their attendance went in the shitter when they got relegated to start the 60s. Revie came in, turned around the team, got promoted, and took the club to it's highest points. Revie took the England job, the club started to decline... and attendance dropped. Leeds got relegated, and it dropped more. It picked up when they won the Second Division to get promoted, and then stayed improved when they got into the First Division / EPL (with the lack of instant "growth" due to the transition to All Seaters and also the whip saw of 1st Division Title to Relegation Battle in the space of a year. Once they established themselves as a quality EPL side, a regular fixture in the Top 5 (7 out of 9 years), attendance grew rapidly and held. Then they got hit with financial issues, a rapid fall from a Top 5 side to dropping *two* divisions in just 6 years... and attendance went to shit. They've moved up one division, but attendance has never returned to the peak.

 

There's a baseline of fans who are Leeds Fans who will go out and support them even when they're shit.

 

There's a larger base of Leeds fans who just aren't going to pay every game to see them if they're shit.

 

That 16K of extra fans aren't all "fad" fans, and frankly aren't even all fair weather fans or casual fans. You can be a hardcore fan and just not want to pay when it sucks to go to Elland Road and watch your team blow. As a fan, you don't owe it to the club to pay them money when they suck.

 

We see this in all sorts of sports. Ask Kriz about how Braves attendance has changed over the years. How many people came out in the late 80s when the club went to shit. Even hardcore fans don't want to go to the stadium when your team is losing 100+ games.

 

So no... wrestling isn't completely different from "sports" or entertainment. Fans of pretty much everything wander away when the product doesn't keep them interested.

 

John

[jdw]

A curious phenomena with these big debates we have sometimes is that I get PMs of support from silent observers. This is the fourth time it's happened now over the past year. I guess not everyone is comfortable posting in such back and forth ding dongs. I can understand that.

It's cool you wave that around. Is this where I'm suppose to head over to my PM box and over to FB to count up the various "Jerry's being a idiot (again)" comments? Seriously? I'm having Usenet flashbacks...

 

"I got a lot of e-mail from people

thinking Meltzer was totally off base on..."

-Mr. Schemer

 

No one does that anymore, and when they do it's just really poor form.

 

John

[BrickHithouse]

I can't speak for him / her (lol, yeah right "her")

Hey I don't mean to derail the current conversation, but this is the "little questions thread" after all.

 

Why are there practically ZERO hardcore female fans of wrestling? Hardcore wrestling junkies span the globe and this little community here is one hell of a cross section. Aside from liking wrestling, the only other thing we all have in common is we're males.

 

You can find hardcore female fans of all other sports and virtually all other areas of entertainment. Not wrestling. Why?

 

Sorry if this has been debated to death years ago or something.

[jdw]

There were a number of women on RSPW back in the mid-90s. Overwhelmingly male posters, but a few women.

 

But yeah... not many.

 

John

[JerryvonKramer]

jdw, you might have saved yourself a lot of breath there if you'd actually read what I wrote. The point about quality was brought up by the silent observer, not by me. Take a look closely at what I said.

 

Now, I suspect jdw and the other people on that side of this argument will come back and say that they weren't talking about "quality" so much as "what the people want to see".

 

But this argument is circular. "What the people want to see" is fickle. Fashion is fickle. Audiences are subject to change without warning. And as a wrestling promoter there's one thing you can't control: the name on the marquee is wrestling, and wrestling might be the thing that people don't want to see.

Let me repeat that again:

 

Now, I suspect jdw and the other people on that side of this argument will come back and say that they weren't talking about "quality" so much as "what the people want to see".

 

But this argument is circular. "What the people want to see" is fickle. Fashion is fickle. Audiences are subject to change without warning. And as a wrestling promoter there's one thing you can't control: the name on the marquee is wrestling, and wrestling might be the thing that people don't want to see.

 

Once more, in case anyone is in any doubt:

 

Now, I suspect jdw and the other people on that side of this argument will come back and say that they weren't talking about "quality" so much as "what the people want to see".

 

But this argument is circular. "What the people want to see" is fickle. Fashion is fickle. Audiences are subject to change without warning. And as a wrestling promoter there's one thing you can't control: the name on the marquee is wrestling, and wrestling might be the thing that people don't want to see.

 

Was I really accusing you of talking about quality when you were talking about the product?

 

Well?

[JerryvonKramer]

Leeds are a strange example for you to pick out by the way, since they are one of the few clubs who can rely on 20,000 fans turning up week in, week out in the Championship (second tier of English football). They have fiercely loyal fans.

 

Anyway. We've come, yet again, to the point impasse.

 

I should be blunt: I think the view that "the product" is to blame "95% of the time" is idiotic. Untenable. Blind to the complexity of the world. Crude. Reductive. I find it amazing that someone who has read Kahneman can still think along those lines.

 

You John have made it clear that you think I am an idiot for thinking that and have said in now unclear terms that you're belief in that point of view is unshakable. You've got to the stage where you're being impatient. Abrasive. Abusive even.

 

That is the definition of a deadlock. An impasse. End of discussion territory. It's been fun. I've drawn my conclusions, you've drawn yours. Everyone else can draw theirs. You can do what you want, but I'm moving on. Interesting debate.

[jdw]

I saw what you wrote in that post, and the earlier one where you directly responded to Dylan's post:

 

Define "quality."

I can't speak for him / her (lol, yeah right "her"), but I think the idea is that if you look at films for example, it's frequently the case that poor films -- which even the people going to see them don't think are very good -- do very well. And, of course, the inverse.

 

The same is true across most forms of entertainment. To the extent where the relationship between "the product" and its popularity almost seems random. To the extent where films that almost no one likes (or admits to liking) make all-time boxoffice lists.

 

I don't know if the "50 Shades of Grey" craze has hit the US or not, but I've literally never heard a single good word said about that book by anyone. Not in life, or on TV. But it's a smash bestseller. A "product" that virtually everyone shits on, a product that is by all accounts putrid. And yet it's a smash.

 

Why is wrestling different from that?

 

You're narrowly focused on people shitting on 50 Shades or Transformers, and worrying about "quality".

 

We're trying to tell you that "quality", and what *we* think is "quality", aren't terribly important on whether it's Good Product.

 

Vince tried to push Warrior like Hogan. Tried really hard, for quite a few years to get him to that point.

 

The WWF Fans didn't buy Warrior like they did Hogan.

 

Warrior just wasn't as good of a Product to WWF Fans as Warrior was.

 

This is fairly similar to the JYD and Reed comment posted earlier.

 

We could look deeper into why Hogan and JYD connected and why Warrior and Reed didn't to that level, but it doesn't change the fact that two of those guys were monsterous draws for their respective promotions, and the other two weren't at that level.

 

Here's where you get lost:

 

There actually are a lot of people who think Transformers and 50 Shades are good and worth paying for. You might not know them, and might not read posts and articles by them, but the numbers don't lie.

 

I fucking hated the Lord of the Rings adaptations. But I'm not so delusional to believe that they weren't good product, because a shitload of people watched them. Those folks clearly liked them because they came back for the next one... and the next one... and the first of the three next ones.

 

John

[jdw]

Leeds are a strange example for you to pick out by the way, since they are one of the few clubs who can rely on 20,000 fans turning up week in, week out in the Championship (second tier of English football). They have fiercely loyal fans.

They do have a loyal fan base.

 

That loyal fan base did this in two years:

 

36,119 --> 28,814 --> 22,294

 

A large chunk of that old loyal fan base in their EPL days views the product in a way that causes them to stay home.

 

That's similar to what happened to Mid South.

 

But do futbol analysts in England pull out of their ass that in 2004-2006 the local economy caused Leed's attendance to drop 20% in one season, and 38% over the course of two seasons?

 

Or to they go:

 

"Well that was fucking obvious. They played poorly, got relegated, and the flood of talent away from the club increased. Teams lose fans leave when that happens."

 

Even ones that you cite as having loyal fanbases.

 

 

I should be blunt: I think the view that "the product" is to blame "95% of the time" is idiotic. Untenable. Blind to the complexity of the world. Crude. Reductive. I find it amazing that someone who has read Kahneman can still think along those lines.

AWA failed. Why?

JCP failed. Why?

WCW failed. Why?

WCCW failed. Why?

TNA as intially planed failed. Why?

TNA under Plan B failed. Why?

TNA under Plans C-F has failed. Why?

 

I'd actually like to see the pro wrestling promotions that failed for reasons other than their product, especially relative to other product available to their wrestling fans. We can go back to the NoCal and SoCal promotions in the 60s - early 80s that failed without even having competition. They failed because the product got increasingly poor / uninteresting to their fans.

 

Did GCW fail for reasons other than the product? Even that one is unlikely. Business was declining when the Brisco's and the other partners sold Ole out. They saw the chance to take Vince's money as better than getting $0.00 later.

 

So yeah... I'd be interested in you offering up some real proof of promotions dying for reasons other than their Product.

 

 

John

[Matt D]

With Reed, wasn't he sort of the last resort? He was a heel (and a great JYD foil) until all the other guys failed, and once he turned face Vince pretty much snatched him up?

 

Or is my timeline off in my head?

[jdw]

Reed didn't get signed by Vince until July 1986, debuting in September. He'd been out of Mid South since January, working KC which is where he hooked up with Slick. He also had an AWA run the prior year in the middle of his face run in Mid South.

 

John

[Matt D]

It's hard to tell from the TV who was successful or not since from watching it you'd believe that almost every guy was getting over, especially Master G and Snowman.

 

When exactly did Reed turn face. Snowman vs Jake was June 86 and I thought it was after that, but it's been a while.

[ohtani's jacket]

Sorrow brings up a great point about Watts trying to find a new JYD....he went through Brickhouse Brown, Master G, Iceman Parsons, The Snowman, Brickhouse Brown again before finally just saying fuck it Butch Reed is the #1 black babyface.

 

If JYD was a fad then why were they trying to replace him for a year.

That gives more weight to JYD being a fad. If other black wrestlers couldn't draw then it shows there was no trend of black wrestlers drawing. I don't understand why fad is being given negative connotations in this thread.

[Johnny Guitar]

For some reason, wrestling is prone to coming "in and out" like makes of trainers, yo-yos and other such things, in a way that legit sports aren't. (by which I mean, football is almost always "in").

I really don't know what you're talking about.

 

Leeds United has played at Elland Road for more than a century. It's been renovated several times over the years. Average attendance is in the right hand column here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Leeds..._A.F.C._seasons

 

Their attendance went in the shitter when they got relegated to start the 60s. Revie came in, turned around the team, got promoted, and took the club to it's highest points. Revie took the England job, the club started to decline... and attendance dropped. Leeds got relegated, and it dropped more. It picked up when they won the Second Division to get promoted, and then stayed improved when they got into the First Division / EPL (with the lack of instant "growth" due to the transition to All Seaters and also the whip saw of 1st Division Title to Relegation Battle in the space of a year. Once they established themselves as a quality EPL side, a regular fixture in the Top 5 (7 out of 9 years), attendance grew rapidly and held. Then they got hit with financial issues, a rapid fall from a Top 5 side to dropping *two* divisions in just 6 years... and attendance went to shit. They've moved up one division, but attendance has never returned to the peak.

 

There's a baseline of fans who are Leeds Fans who will go out and support them even when they're shit.

 

There's a larger base of Leeds fans who just aren't going to pay every game to see them if they're shit.

 

That 16K of extra fans aren't all "fad" fans, and frankly aren't even all fair weather fans or casual fans. You can be a hardcore fan and just not want to pay when it sucks to go to Elland Road and watch your team blow. As a fan, you don't owe it to the club to pay them money when they suck.

We see this in all sorts of sports. Ask Kriz about how Braves attendance has changed over the years. How many people came out in the late 80s when the club went to shit. Even hardcore fans don't want to go to the stadium when your team is losing 100+ games.

 

So no... wrestling isn't completely different from "sports" or entertainment. Fans of pretty much everything wander away when the product doesn't keep them interested.

 

John

 

As someone who lives in Leeds this is so true. Whenever Leeds play at home, all the pubs and bars in the surrounding era are packed. People do care, just not enough too by a ticket.

 

They do care, its just they've been burned in the past and times are tough economically.

[BrickHithouse]

they've been burned in the past

That's been my theory for WCW kicking ass in 1992. Well not really a theory. It was a pretty awesome year quality-wise, but the fanbase had been burned so many times (screwjobs, countless changes in direction, etc) over the 5 previous years, that no one tuned in to give it another chance. WCW never seemed to give anything enough time to gain momentum. I guess this is pretty blantantly obvious though.

[jdw]

Sorrow brings up a great point about Watts trying to find a new JYD....he went through Brickhouse Brown, Master G, Iceman Parsons, The Snowman, Brickhouse Brown again before finally just saying fuck it Butch Reed is the #1 black babyface.

 

If JYD was a fad then why were they trying to replace him for a year.

That gives more weight to JYD being a fad. If other black wrestlers couldn't draw then it shows there was no trend of black wrestlers drawing.

I believe one of the points made earlier is that JYD can't be dismissed as just drawing the Ethnic Fans (i.e. Black Folk) to the cards: JYD draw blacks, but he also drew lots of fans across ethnic lines. Hence the references to Bruno, who also was more than just drawing "Italians" to WWWF shows.

 

Watts is the one who got caught up in it being a Black Thing. He still was hung up on that in the 90s. He really didn't get his own fanbase, and what it was that connected the Dog (or even later Duggan) to the fans.

 

I don't understand why fad is being given negative connotations in this thread.

The Monkees = Fad

The Beatles = moved past Fad into having staying power

 

The only reason JYD stopped drawing in Mid South in 1984 (after drawing there in 1980 and 1981 and 1982 and 1983 and early 1984) is because he jumped to the WWF. He had staying power.

 

John

[jdw]

As someone who lives in Leeds this is so true. Whenever Leeds play at home, all the pubs and bars in the surrounding era are packed. People do care, just not enough too by a ticket.

 

They do care, its just they've been burned in the past and times are tough economically.

That's pretty common with teams that have a strong fan base.

 

Ones with weaker fan bases can have them complete crater. The Braves in the late 80s were in the tank in drawing. That's to be expected:

 

* the team was mediocre-to-poor for pretty much all of the 70s

* Bobby Cox turned things around

* Torre inherited it and got the one division title in the era

* they quickly feel back...

* ... and then got really bad

 

The fanbase that might have gotten excited in 1982 didn't have much to hold onto when it went back to being a bad team.

 

John

[KrisZ]

Plus let's not discount JYD's power in WWF as he firmly slid in Slaughter's spot as the #2 babyface in WWF (when Andre wasn't around) drawing well on his own up until the Orndorff turn.

[Johnny Guitar]

they've been burned in the past

That's been my theory for WCW kicking ass in 1992. Well not really a theory. It was a pretty awesome year quality-wise, but the fanbase had been burned so many times (screwjobs, countless changes in direction, etc) over the 5 previous years, that no one tuned in to give it another chance. WCW never seemed to give anything enough time to gain momentum. I guess this is pretty blantantly obvious though.

 

I think thats a fair point. For both WCW and the WWF. There's lots of great stuff to enjoy in both company's . But the box office didn't reflect the in ring effort that both companies put out. There's obviously reasons why the american business went in the shitter, which is ironoc as it was probably the best in ring year for five years.

 

Which shows that the casual fan really doesn't give a fuck about workrate

[ohtani's jacket]

I believe one of the points made earlier is that JYD can't be dismissed as just drawing the Ethnic Fans (i.e. Black Folk) to the cards: JYD draw blacks, but he also drew lots of fans across ethnic lines. Hence the references to Bruno, who also was more than just drawing "Italians" to WWWF shows.

 

Watts is the one who got caught up in it being a Black Thing. He still was hung up on that in the 90s. He really didn't get his own fanbase, and what it was that connected the Dog (or even later Duggan) to the fans.

I thought Watts tried to capitalise on the prominence of black sporting stars by pushing a black wrestler as a main eventer. Watts saw a trend, created a fad, and kept trying to replicate it with black football players. JYD may have drawn a melting pot of fans, he may have even been a cultural icon for a time, but he was largely forgotten by the time he died.

 

The Monkees = Fad

The Beatles = moved past Fad into having staying power

 

The only reason JYD stopped drawing in Mid South in 1984 (after drawing there in 1980 and 1981 and 1982 and 1983 and early 1984) is because he jumped to the WWF. He had staying power.

 

John

We don't know if JYD would have kept drawing in Mid South, but in any event it didn't happen and it doesn't make JYD any less of a fad. There are plenty of reasons why fads end and plenty of reasons why they could've kept on drawing if things had been different. Wrestling booms are generally fads where wrestling is suddenly more popular than usual. If a ton of people are going to the wrestling because they're into JYD, then JYD leaves and people stop going, that was a fad. It's no different from Chigusa retiring and a whole bunch of schoolgirls not giving a shit about wrestling anymore. If she hadn't been forced to retire, she might have kept on drawing, and she pretty much flirted with returning from the second she left, but that doesn't mean girls were listening to her records in 1990.

[Loss]

WCW had a lot of really high quality wrestling in 1992. But they were still making some pretty big blunders. They didn't exactly make their TV easy to follow, as each show existed in its own universe, and there were too many of them anyway. The syndication wasn't really synched with the TBS show, and they didn't run nearly enough angles. They didn't invest in better television production - so often, the lighting and sound made WCW look bush league and even a little depressing. They ran three pay-per-views and a Clash in less than two months, which was crazy oversaturation at that point. We got a lot of good - and some great - wrestling, but it wasn't a particularly well-booked promotion. They also had no marketing vision. The WCW Magazine article discussing Barry Windham's heel turn late in the year hit the stands *before* the actual turn happened. They even ran a commercial for it earlier in the Clash show too.

 

As well remembered as the Dangerous Alliance is by hardcores now, it wasn't really much from a booking point of view. The matches were largely disposable in the big picture, and never mentioned again. After the initial formation, the Dangerous Alliance never really did an interview as a full group. Even after a show like War Games, they were right back into running a long, canned six-man on the weekend show with no one selling any damage from a MOTD contender with everyone bleeding that was brilliantly booked just a few days earlier, and it's not like they were hyping how incredible War Games was after the fact in an attempt to sell videotapes. Hell, they were releasing two hour videos of three hour shows because Turner brass was convinced that three hour videos would hurt them in the rental market.

 

Ron Simmons was not a good choice to be anchoring the company. Steve Williams and Terry Gordy were not a good choice to be anchoring the tag team division. They changed direction on top quite a few times - Luger was the top heel early on, then Rude, then Vader, then some combo of Barbarian and Cactus Jack. Sting was the top babyface for the first half of the year, and Simmons for the second half of the year. There were too many turns back and forth, especially near the end of the year. Watts seemed on a kick that I understood and enjoyed - he was taking a few steps back to take a few steps forward. He was trying to re-educate the audience on the in-ring, feeling that he could get people to believe in the matches themselves again, which would make it easier to sell just about everything. But it really was a terrible miscalculation.

 

In short, they were only drawing a hardcore audience because they were only catering to a hardcore audience. It doesn't mean they were doing everything wrong, as I think they should have run with some of the good ideas they did luck into a few times. It definitely doesn't mean that the in-ring was a detriment. But they sure weren't doing enough right.

[Matt D]

There were a lot of quick changes in direction too. Watts didn't really let things finish well before switching things about.

 

I wish we had a long run of Arn Anderson challenging Sting, for instance. As a kid, the switch to Watts really turned me off. Flying Brian was my favorite wrestler at the time and I was really into the Dangerous Alliance.