Dumbest foreign object ever

[Laz]

I think his rage is more blatant breaking of kayfabe in a "serious" show and old-timer never-were's refusing to admit the audience doesn't buy their shit anymore. Even something relatively harmless can aggravate you if exposed enough to it.

[Mad Dog]

I do think there is bit of a double standard on this. I will never forget being roundly scolded by Pete for "daring" to compare Baron Mikel Scicluna to Jerry Lawler. But it still seems to me that his argument rests on a circular logic: hidden forgein object play is fine when Lawler does it because Lawler is awesome, but it sucks when Scicluna does it, because Scicluna sucks.

 

The best and most amazing hidden foreign object play I've ever seen is in the three Abby and Sheik vs. Funks matches, because they ratchet up the cheating and villainy to about an 11, to the point where it is drawing serious heat from a sit-on-their-hands-70s-Japanese crowd who are out of their chairs and throwing trash at the ring. It remains the most incredible example of simple rulebreaking generating heat that I've ever seen, and is a masterclass in psychology.

 

I'd love to hear Jingus's take on the foreign object play in those matches and how it compares to what he's talking about.

That seems like perfectly fine logic. If someone sucks they probably suck at doing that spot where someone is good it's probably good. That's like shitting on Iron Mike Sharpe for having a shitty dropkick but praising Ricky Morton for having an awesome one.

[Loss]

I sometimes watch old 80s tags and think there's no way they would work in a modern setting. It doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the good ones, but it is something I notice. The biggest reason is that there isn't enough investment in the personalities anymore (for the most part -- there are exceptions, obviously) where the fans care not just who wins and who loses, but also cares about the momentum shifts throughout the match. When the fan investment is there, it's great. When the fan investment isn't there, it looks clownish. Still, I like it when wrestlers can dust off moves and sequences that have been unused for years and make them feel fresh again. That's exactly what Cesaro has done with the giant swing. And I'm as outspoken as anyone about not liking matches where guys don't do anything. I've even cracked on how Lawler works as a heel for that very reason -- I think he plays hide-the-foreign-object too much, and there's little I hate more than wrestlers cutting promos on the house mic during a match.

 

But you take that foundation of working for heat and add modern stuff on top of it and you've got a winner. That's how the Midnight Express worked at the time, and the philosophy behind the MX would very much still work today with some tweaks to accommodate modern times.

 

I don't know how to work this into my point, but this reminds me of Joe scaring the fan who was doing the CM Punk straight-edge symbol during one of their hour draws, then Punk bagging on him too. To me, that was the biggest black mark on the match, because if you're going to add that in a match, you gotta do it right. That did more to get over the fan as a coward than it did to get over Punk, Joe or the match, and it was obvious time killing. Something like Cornette trying to fight the referee over a bad call before tripping and falling backwards through the ropes is something very different.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

I do think there is bit of a double standard on this. I will never forget being roundly scolded by Pete for "daring" to compare Baron Mikel Scicluna to Jerry Lawler. But it still seems to me that his argument rests on a circular logic: hidden forgein object play is fine when Lawler does it because Lawler is awesome, but it sucks when Scicluna does it, because Scicluna sucks.

 

The best and most amazing hidden foreign object play I've ever seen is in the three Abby and Sheik vs. Funks matches, because they ratchet up the cheating and villainy to about an 11, to the point where it is drawing serious heat from a sit-on-their-hands-70s-Japanese crowd who are out of their chairs and throwing trash at the ring. It remains the most incredible example of simple rulebreaking generating heat that I've ever seen, and is a masterclass in psychology.

 

I'd love to hear Jingus's take on the foreign object play in those matches and how it compares to what he's talking about.

That seems like perfectly fine logic. If someone sucks they probably suck at doing that spot where someone is good it's probably good. That's like shitting on Iron Mike Sharpe for having a shitty dropkick but praising Ricky Morton for having an awesome one.

 

I don't know about that, Scicluna's foreign object play wasn't terrible, he was perfectly fine at doing that stuff and made an entire career out of it. Certainly, I don't think -- personally that is -- that he is self-evidentally any worse than Lawler at doing it, which was my point. And Pete's point never seemed to me to be "well Lawler does that stuff better, the way Baron does it sucks" -- and even if he claims that was his point now, it was not explicit then. I'm just saying what is praised as good psychology in one context, is shit on in another, even when the stuff being done is similar. Seems to me that Lawler is praised because of the other stuff he can do, and Baron is shit on because that's ALL he does. The distinction between that and what you are saying is nuanced but significant.

[Mad Dog]

Let me ask you though. Take Backlund doing the exact same thing as Ted Dibiase. Would you be more inclined to say it sucked when Backlund did it because you don't have the buy in with him?

[JerryvonKramer]

Let me ask you though. Take Backlund doing the exact same thing as Ted Dibiase. Would you be more inclined to say it sucked when Backlund did it because you don't have the buy in with him?

I can't really envision what that looks like. If Backlund worked exactly like Ted did, he'd be bumping his ass off, feeding his opponent and executing scoop powerslams and suplexes with real smoothness. He'd basically just be a different worker.

 

What we're talking about is one spot or one trope really -- it's closer to Ray Stevens, Harley Race and Ric Flair all being slammed off the top.

 

So I could answer a question like "what if Backlund always did the 360 over the neck bump Ted always did?"

 

They question becomes more about the spot itself and whether it's a good one. I like that bump, so if Backlund did it -- great, I mean, he'd actually be selling and showing vulnerability for once, so it would be an improvement.

 

And I think this discussion was about one trope: hidden foreign object play. My only point was that on that front, there seems to be a double standard, depending on who is doing it. If it's Lawler it's a master psychologist at work, if it's the Baron it's a poor worker relying on schtick to cover him his limitations. Understand where I'm coming from?

[Mad Dog]

Yes. I just don't see the double standard there. With the Baron, it's a shitty worker wrestling probably an equally shitty worker trying to kill time in some meaningless opening bout of a WWWF arena show. With Lawler you're talking about a main event or semi main event match between better workers.

 

I would imagine in these situations that Lawler would add a layer of charisma and flavor to the spot that the Baron would not be.

[dawho5]

I personally find Lawler and Dundee's comedy face stuff and the heel "hide the chain" routine to be more than a little over the top. It doesn't completely ruin the match for me, just tends to leave me more in the "kind of liked it" range on the match rather than a lot of Memphis that I love to death. I'm at the point where I realize I have to take the good with the bad on everything, including wrestling. No wrestling style will ever be 100% up my alley. So maybe after I watch a match once and get slightly put off by how it is worked I just skip that the next time through and go to the ones I know I like more. Or in the case of the modern product, I find older wrestling to watch.

 

Glad to see we're back to a bit more civil discourse though.

 

I'm completely on board with any weapon where the person has to use it in a manner that is clearly designed to not hurt the other person badly being awful. Any kind of vehicle (or Vince's blowing himself up) seems to be ridiculous overkill.

 

Other stuff I hate:

 

Crappy, oviously fake garbage cans, etc. in WWE "hardcore" matches

 

Tables in general because of how convoluted things get once they come into play. if you're doing more than bouncing a guy's head off of or slamming a guy onto an announce table while standing on the floor, it took too much time to set up.

 

The garbage can over the head and hit it with something spot. This is an irrational hatred of mine that I refuse to let go of.

 

Anything that hurts the person doing the spot with the foreign object as much as or more than the person taking the hit. Unless it is some kind of massive blood feud or the guy doing it is a psychopath character.

 

Would you count the "off the Titantron" stuff as a foreign object? I respect the risks being taken and have no doubts that the people who do this are well within their limits, but it's just too much for me.

 

Despite the "hide the foreign object" nature of the chain in a lot of matches it is actually one of the more plausible foreign objects. Valentine and Piper in the dog collar match made it into a pretty stellar prop. I also like brass knucks, because they are specifically designed for that purpose. The tag rope is also a nice foreign object. Nothing more heelish than using an object designed to keep order to break the rules.

[Jingus]

The best and most amazing hidden foreign object play I've ever seen is in the three Abby and Sheik vs. Funks matches, because they ratchet up the cheating and villainy to about an 11, to the point where it is drawing serious heat from a sit-on-their-hands-70s-Japanese crowd who are out of their chairs and throwing trash at the ring. It remains the most incredible example of simple rulebreaking generating heat that I've ever seen, and is a masterclass in psychology.

 

I'd love to hear Jingus's take on the foreign object play in those matches and how it compares to what he's talking about.

Several different things come into play here. Firstly, I'd assume that these are probably the only matches on the card where guys are using hidden foreign objects; Baba would probably make damn sure nobody else was doing it, so the main event's heat remained unique. Secondly, both those guys had established this as their gimmick in the past; Sheik with the spike, Abby with the fork. It wasn't just Random Johnny Jobber hiding a chain (or worse, the dreaded Invisible Weapon) in a meaningless midcard match. Thirdly, the victims of the spot were the Funks, a couple of guys who were already 100% over with the crowd as beloved and respected heroes. The audience cares more about them being beaten up than Random Young Boy #37. Fourthly, the execution of the spots was handled in a very serious manner: the babyfaces sold their asses off, bled all over the place, probably convulsed like a seizure victim in Terry's case, and the heels were exquisite in their timing of when to merely tease the weapons and when to actually use them. You don't get anything near that level of artistry when it's one lazy southern undercarder whacking another of the same with a chain-wrapped fist, and then stopping the action dead in its tracks for minutes on end so that he can play hide-the-chain with the referee (who is generally made to look even more blind, deaf, and stupid in these spots than usual).

[El-P]

Aw, for fuck's sake... fine, here:

 

 

Southern bullshit sucks. By which, I very specifically mean, the sort of extended stalling and bad acting and agonizingly unfunny "comedy" that too many lousy, lazy workers rely on to fill time instead of wrestling. For example: whenever a heel kills five minutes of a match playing hide-and-seek with a weapon. "But I thought that was hilarious when Jerry Lawler did it in this one match with Bret Hart!" Yeah, because 1.Lawler's the best at it; 2.you're easily amused (lots of people don't like these spots, period), and most importantly 3.it was just that ONE time. Imagine working shows where nearly every match is full of stuff like that, basically providing extended excuses for every guy on the card guy to avoid contact and not have to WRESTLE for most of the match. That's one of my biggest problems with this stuff, workers lean on it to avoid having to actually put any significant physical effort into their performances. (And on the shows I worked, you'd constantly get lazy never-was veterans preaching about how this stuff was "what the people really wanted to see", while "working" in front of crowds so miniscule that Jerry Jarrett would've cancelled the show if the house was ever THIS bad.)

 

I still remember the first time I ever saw the ask-the-audience spot: watching a rental tape of Starrcade 1986, in the year 1999. Tommy Young turned around and actually asked the crowd "Did (heel) pull (face)'s hair?" and yes, of course I popped. I'd never seen it before; and everything looks cool when it's new to you and feels innovative. Years later, after having DONE that spot AS a referee on countless occasions: no, it sucks. It slows the match down and encourages the wrestlers to stall. It also encourages that terrible "we're part of the show!" feeling among fans, albeit in a blue-balling manner; when you ask them Did This Guy Cheat and then you don't do anything ABOUT the cheating, then the fans get angry at the official rather than getting angry at the heel. Please trust me, in the modern age, this is the consistent outcome of ask-the-crowd spots almost every single time. I've seen it happen FAR too often, and it's generally nothing more than a waste of time and a distraction from the action.

 

And the "comedy" spots, oh the "comedy" spots! I honestly couldn't tell you how often I saw the same ones repeated over and over again, in the same towns, sometime on the same goddamn night. And, so many of them rely on having the heel act like they are literally a retarded person. The one where the babyface challenges the heel to play a game of drop-down leapfrog, which ends with the heel flinging themselves out of the ring in a really contrived manner? Awful. The one where they start a criss-cross spot, the babyface stops running, but the heel inexplicably keeps going for the length of a marathon? Ridiculous. They're spots which seem like they're intended to make a toddler laugh, they make the bad guys look like harmless buffoons who couldn't possibly pose any threat to the heroes, and once again it's a poor substitute for spending the same amount of time with guys punching each other in the face.

 

And no, the Memphis territory's longevity isn't due to its tolerance for goofy bullshit in the ring. They had a bunch of other variables in their favor,:from super-low expenses (especially payroll), to working relationships/talent exchanges with many other companies, to the fact that most of their core stars remained loyal and were never poached by the big national companies, to the simple luck of having a good television deal and never getting their show cancelled out from under them like had happened to so many other promotions. And even then, all that wasn't enough. They went out of business like everyone else, they just took a little longer; and remember it was a little longer, less than a decade overall, by 1997 they were dead and buried. None of the other indy promotions that ran Memphis since then count as a "territory", they certainly never ran the loop in Nashville, Louisville, and the other traditional old CWA/USWA towns.

 

Good stuff (although I don't necessarily agree with everything here, but gotta show some support). And I'm a Memphis fan (I probably enjoy Memphis TV from the 80's more than any other territory that I've seen a bunch of, although maybe the fact Lance Russel is the God of announcing plays a big part), but yeah, people just go overboard defending *anything* from Memphis as if it's the Gospel. I loved how Shane Douglas described the southern bullshit as a "bad Supremes video", complete with every gestures to underline what you're trying to get across, in a very redondant and too-obvious way.