Effects of the GOAT Project on Your Goals

[dawho5]

Recently I've been thinking about how this starting has affected the way I look at watching wrestling. It has me thinking a lot about all the things I want to do, wrestling wise and the sheer amount of time involved in it.

 

First and foremost, there was the original plan of revisiting All Japan in some way after a short break. As it turns out, that is going to be a truly in-depth look at things. Which is both good and bad in terms of the GOAT. I'm seeing that my first run through, as complete as I would have liked it to be, was merely a surface look at the promotion in the 90s. And I do love a lot of it and think it deserves my time. That means a lot of time I ought to be spending on weak spots will be spent on my bigger goal. And I think this time through will be harder because of a lot of the awareness I picked up my first time through. I recently watched the making of video for the second Hugh Laurie blues album (great blues presented in a very interesting way), where the second attempt at something was described. What was said was that the second time through is harder because you are more aware of the thing you are doing and the pitfalls it may contain, compared to the chaos of trying to put everything together the first time. And I can see that pretty clearly, with not as much on the side of chaotic my first time through, but more of a gradual understanding of how all the pieces fit into the whole, both in the matches and the overarcing story of the rivalries as I went. It makes the next time through a little more daunting knowing that all of those things are there and still on a deeper level than I experienced the first time.

 

Secondly, I really wanted to get into the 80s territories stuff after that, but this project has opened my eyes to how great 70s WoS can be. It makes me think that to truly "get" what's going on in the 80s I need to see the 70s work and how it translaytes into the 80s. It also makes me know for sure that good mat-based wrestling with brawling peppered in is a style I like. Which means that 70s American wrestling ought to work for me. Then you start to look at the 50s/60s stuff from the Chicago film archives and that has to be watched before the 70s wrestling to see how that moves into the next decade.

 

The 90s is a decade I truly want to tackle in chronological order, with the earlier decades informing me as to how things got to where they were. I think that's one thing I got from watching 90s AJPW was the need to watch chronologically to see why and how things changed as they progressed.

 

Next, I really wanted to get into 80s/90s NJPW and lucha, with a maybe on joshi. All of those things are a long way in the future now. Especially since 70s/80s WoS is going to come before that.

 

I know I'm in the right place to be doing all of these things, but the time commitment is friggin' huge. I'll very likely still be working on all of this well into my 60s and 70s when I have more time to do things like that. I guess it's good in that I can spread the cost involved in acquiring all of that wrestling over years. It's something I hadn't really thought about in terms of scope, especially considering that I might want to keep up with current wrestling at some point. This is really an exciting time to be a wrestling fan due to the sheer amount of available footage, but that's a double edged sword in the volume it encompasses as well.

 

 

[fxnj]

I actually thought you were pretty comprehensive in your AJ watching when you got to the second half of the decade and basically started reviewing everything on Ditch's site. Do you mean you're planning on going through full TV blocks/comms?

[dawho5]

Eh, the meaty stuff is the early 90s. I missed a lot of the establishing stuff in 90 and 91, and I don't feel like I have a great handle on how things went up until 95 as a whole. The comprehensive viewing and better understanding of the later 90s just makes me need to do that for late 80s through 95 for sure. I feel like I got a lot out of the late 90s for what the general consensus on that period is and if that's the case I need to mine further into the much better thought of early 90s.