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As someone who's probably never seen a prime Bruno match what 2-3 would you recommend?

 

From the recent Bruno Collection on the Network:

 

3/7/77 - Bruno vs Ken Patera

8/1/77 - Bruno vs Billy Graham (Any match with Graham is pretty good)

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I read a lot of guys on the internet and in the dirtsheets (as well as wrestlers' autobiographies) where they called Bruno an average or mediocre worker. I disagree and I think he is fucking awesome. I could watch him wrestle for hours. It is very tricky appearing like a superman in the ring without fatiguing the audience or ultimately sucking out all the heat from your matches. Bruno mastered that trick his entire career, including his late 1980s matches.

 

Meltzer wrote that as far as selling tickets in the same territory for the longest time, he is the greatest draw in history, and I am not surprised. No one has ever personified the ace role the way Bruno did. You could tell that he absolutely owned the WWWF. I would love a podcast episode dedicated solely to him.

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How fucking hard is it to write BAYLEY as A HAPPY PERSON?

 

That's the whole problem right there. The issue with WWE. They got 20 or so "writers", and apparently, none of them are worth shit. As much as some matches can be great these days, the booking, sorry, "writing" is dumb, uninteresting and overall, pretty awful (going back to the "art" argument, if we judge WWE by its stories, acting, dialogues, it's barely above your classic 90's porn in term of quality). Has been the case since WWE became what it is in the very early 00's. No one should "write" Bayley. They should just let her be, and work around that. Easy as fuck.

 

"Creative writing" is the worst thing that ever happened to pro-wrestling. (again, we can credit, at least in partly, Vince Russo, who was the first non pro-wrestling guy "writing" pro-wrestling TV)

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that is the thing I don't get. I really don't mean to imply that I would be better at it or to be overly critical of other people's work, but the flatness of WWE's writing on the whole constantly baffles me. Sure, they set up all kinds of hurdles for themselves (3 hours of raw... etc...), but with so many writers and soooooo many resources, there just doesn't seem to be an excuse for this. I assume it is more a problem with micromanagement of writers and of the product more than anything because I just can't believe that there aren't talented writers that are passionate about and understand wrestling that can put together something better than what we USUALLY get.

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What is baffling is with the average quality level of TV series these days, they are so behind the times on about every level imaginable.

 

That's why Lucha Underground, with its B-movie/comics/pulp aesthetics and a guy like Dario Cueto looks a zillion times more relevant and cool, whatever you may think of the actual quality of the matches (of course no-one seems to be watching it either, but that's another issue)

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I read a lot of guys on the internet and in the dirtsheets (as well as wrestlers' autobiographies) where they called Bruno an average or mediocre worker. I disagree and I think he is fucking awesome. I could watch him wrestle for hours. It is very tricky appearing like a superman in the ring without fatiguing the audience or ultimately sucking out all the heat from your matches. Bruno mastered that trick his entire career, including his late 1980s matches.

 

Meltzer wrote that as far as selling tickets in the same territory for the longest time, he is the greatest draw in history, and I am not surprised. No one has ever personified the ace role the way Bruno did. You could tell that he absolutely owned the WWWF. I would love a podcast episode dedicated solely to him.

This podcast is 3 hours of Bruno talk, all about the recent Network collection. Beat that Y2J! http://placetobenation.com/mount-olympus-summer-2017-sammartino-the-legend-lives/

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What is baffling is with the average quality level of TV series these days, they are so behind the times on about every level imaginable.

 

That's why Lucha Underground, with its B-movie/comics/pulp aesthetics and a guy like Dario Cueto looks a zillion times more relevant and cool, whatever you may think of the actual quality of the matches (of course no-one seems to be watching it either, but that's another issue)

I agree on this. I am way behind on Lucha Underground, but I love it. I bought the first two seasons on iTunes right before they came up on Netflix. It is such a different thing to me. There are lots of pieces of that I don't love or that are really inconsistent, but the sum far exceeds the parts. They are so outside the box and - as you point out - culturally wired in and current that I can't help but love it.

 

 

 

I also saw Dario Cueto (or the dude who plays him, more accurately) on a commercial for one of those companies that comes and cleans up after disasters (I think that is what it was for).

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  • 2 weeks later...

Watching the MSG shows it hit me, is there anyone in wrestling who deteriated as fast as Billy Graham? In 1978 he's still Superstar looking like the guy Hulk would crib 90% of his gimmick from, but five years later in 1983 he's Kung Fu Billy looking like he's in the end stage of a terminal disease.

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Also I've noticed that several of the Old School shows that have gone up have the "presented in the best condition possible" disclaimer. I wonder if that means they are going through the archives seeing what shape the oldest stuff is since I've always heard the WWWF collection doesn't go much past 1975 or so in any kind of usable shape.

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A few have bonus footage that was for the live crowd after TV ended, might have been that.

 

The extra bits have been on there for a few years but I didnt notice that one before. I think there is another one that got added like Austin destroying Vince's Wheelchair and Shamrock & Shane getting Stunners.

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