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24 Hours of Mid South Go Under the Microscope at 9pmEST


Guest si oem

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Guest si oem

From 1984 to 1987 UWF (Watts, not Hamada) produced some awesome episodes, matches and angles. So we're taking a break from our usual geographical randomness and time-traveling in the gwe marathon and bringing laser-like focus (cough, cough) to some of the most entertaining tv ever made.

 

We'll be reviewing, chatting, re-capping, live-blogging and flogging for the next 24 hours and posting it all here, so please, put on your sailor suit and come by to add your thoughts, writing and general palaver.

 

taima.tv/r/gwemarathon.

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I thought that was excellent and deserves to "stand alone" in its own thread.

 

I've always wanted to see more writing on wrestling along these lines. I think you might be able to write 1000s of words just on the depiction of middle eastern heels alone. And pretty much every point you make about Watts's ideology being completely infused into every aspect of his promotion is spot on. I particularly liked the passage on Ross being a sort of loser / bullied nerd / outsider wishing he could be one of the boys. It's a really good article.

 

Personally, practically everything you said is why I love watching Watts. The fact that the babyface values are completely perverse, the fact that he deplores "sissies" etc., to me is absolutely awesome as a time capsule of a particular mindset at a particular time.

 

I have a near-total divorce between my personal politics / views on any number of social issues and what I like in my wrestling. I don't want my wrestling to be acceptable to a feminist in 2015, I want it to be hard-boiled to the point of ludicrousness and absurdity, I want the crowd to be genuine redneck, or blue-collar, all shades of rough and all types of wrong. It's one of the reasons I love the old-school so much, and care less for 00s indies environments or modern WWE. The old couple who sit grim-faced in the front row of Watts shows who you know genuinely want the heels dead.

 

So I agree with practically every single point made in the article, but in my (perverse, twisted, distanced, totally aestheticised, selfish) view that's precisely what makes it awesome. The sorts of characters you get in those crowds, the sorts of attitudes the product represent are just so much more fascinating to me than smarks chanting "this is awesome". World of Sport from the 70s is fascinating. Some RoH show from 2005 just isn't, can't compete. I guess this artcile brought home once again how much of my love of wrestling is bound up with time and place. The context is important. I mean for me, it's basically impossible for a show in WWE in 2015 to be as interesting as a show from any of the territories from the 1970s or 1980s. Point-blank impossible. And it's bound up with that. I think this is something that not all fans share -- I'm in it for the things around wrestling as much as for the wrestling itself, whereas I think a lot of fans on this site especially are just in it for the wrestling regardless of where and when it took place

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Yay everyone, Jingus is here to contribute nothing to the topic but pour scorn and snark over the people discussing it, smugly self-satisfied in his ivory tower of elitism, which he gained access to because he was "in DA BZNSS"! Rejoice!

I loved, loved, loved the article. My mindset is diametrically opposite to Parv's; I hate the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic (ad idem.) elements in professional wrestling, and it shocks me that wrestling manages to get away with it even in 2015, purely because of its status as low-brow entertainment. I am radically left-wing and a feminist, so you can argue that wrestling is not for me; to some extent, I have learned to embrace the disgusting elements in wrestling, but that does not mean I like to see such elements being celebrated.

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This was one of the more fascinating articles I've read on wrestling in a long time. The Pope seeking out Kim Davis and supporting her has pretty much been proven false, but might not have at the time you wrote this.

 

I personally find nothing wrong with sourcing and treating a wrestling article like a legitimate academic enterprise. I do think it's something to be cautious about at times. Unlike JVK I am NOT easily able to separate my politics from my fun hobbies. Wrestling to me has usually been run by total scum bags who epitomize the very worst in this country. They exploit every fear of the outsider (not male, straight and white) again and again and usually argue "Well we aren't worse than X (X being the worst show on TV at that time)" or "that's what our audience wants and expects". It makes me respect someone like Norman Lear all the more, for making entertainment ABOUT something rather than what they do.

 

So I admire Bill Watts' booking approach but I think he's a terrible terrible human being. He's someone so obsessed with this frontier cowboy Western myth that he actually took pride in creating working environments that ruined families. He's a man filled with hate and anger and violence who tried to create a whole generation to think the same way he did.

 

I truly believe one of the reasons wrestling is dying out and has been shunned by the modern media as a joke is because its political and social views are the total opposite of mainstream entertainment and indeed where much of this country is going. I'd like wrestling to get out of the hands of the McMahons types, but that's not going to happen. And maybe fundamentally that is why wrestling is dying. Because the US that embraced wrestling has been dying for 50 years, slowly, sometimes two steps forward and one step back, but nonetheless the times they are changing. And right now, wrestling is not changing with them.

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Yay everyone, Jingus is here to contribute nothing to the topic but pour scorn and snark over the people discussing it, smugly self-satisfied in his ivory tower of elitism, which he gained access to because he was "in DA BZNSS"! Rejoice!

Yay everyone, some dude (wait, who the hell are you?) is here to insult me for no goddamn reason whatsoever! For your information: I've talked with Si in the chat about "serious" academic analysis of all kinds of wacky pop culture, my post here was an extension of those conversations. And my post didn't mention a single thing about my time "in DA BZNSS", I was referencing the fact that I'd just spent the last few years as an English major and have written countless citations just like the ones Si did here. It's an in-joke that you're on the outside of, so take your assumptions and shove off.

 

 

JvK, as for "ibid": it's just always looked weird to me, this random word that's never used in any context outside of footnotes. It's pretty typical of academia to use a random contraction of a Latin word in the same place that any regular person would just write "same" or "ditto" or whatever. And it's not even a contraction that makes sense; the entire word is "ibidem", what's the point of only lopping off the last two letters? That hardly makes things much shorter...

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Yay everyone, Jingus is here to contribute nothing to the topic but pour scorn and snark over the people discussing it, smugly self-satisfied in his ivory tower of elitism, which he gained access to because he was "in DA BZNSS"! Rejoice!

Yay everyone, some dude (wait, who the hell are you?) is here to insult me for no goddamn reason whatsoever! For your information: I've talked with Si in the chat about "serious" academic analysis of all kinds of wacky pop culture, my post here was an extension of those conversations. And my post didn't mention a single thing about my time "in DA BZNSS", I was referencing the fact that I'd just spent the last few years as an English major and have written countless citations just like the ones Si did here. It's an in-joke that you're on the outside of, so take your assumptions and shove off.

 

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

 

 

My mindset is diametrically opposite to Parv's; I hate the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic (ad idem.) elements in professional wrestling, and it shocks me that wrestling manages to get away with it even in 2015, purely because of its status as low-brow entertainment. I am radically left-wing and a feminist

As a relatively new poster on these boards can I just say that I'm delighted that I'm not the only person of those political persuasions on here. Not that this board is in any way a cesspit of right wing politics, its clearly not, but I thought maybe I was to the far left of many on here so its cool to know I'm not the only one. :)

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I'm as far left and liberal as anyone here, man. But at the same time I can look at stuff in wrestling that was and is amazingly fucking stupid and racist and laugh at it, have fun with it, and not get all worked up about it. I can watch old Tom and Jerry cartoons and enjoy them despite Mammy Two Shoes. Being a lefty doesn't mean you have to constantly be offended.

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I'm about as far left as it gets too. When I can't dissociate my personal politics from what I'm watching, I find joy in viewing it as an over-the-top parody of right-wing America. Soooo much wrestling works in that sense, even if that's not at all the intent of the creators.

 

Edit: And yeah, I love Bill Watts as a wrestling figure. Absolutely love him. When he talks about anything that isn't wrestling philosophy, he frightens me. This is a guy who stockpiled food in the 1980s to prepare for war with the Russians and kept a gun on his office desk when wrestlers came into talk to him. He pushed his wrestlers to start fights in bars and fuck women in broom closets. He's awful. But he sure could produce a wrestling show.

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I take your point Johnny but I find that's not quite what bothers me as much. I love old Charlie Chan movies, and heck they are racist today. But the thing is, they were not such at the time as much. Wrestling in the 80's was much MORE a product of its time, so even Bill and Mid South, I can live with that.

WWE today is basically Donald Trump's America as a TV show. It's now one of the most sexist, homophobic racist shows on TV far more than anything else I can think of and THAT really turns me off it today.

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I'm about as far left as it gets too. When I can't dissociate my personal politics from what I'm watching, I find joy in viewing it as an over-the-top parody of right-wing America. Soooo much wrestling works in that sense, even if that's not at all the intent of the creators.

 

Edit: And yeah, I love Bill Watts as a wrestling figure. Absolutely love him. When he talks about anything that isn't wrestling philosophy, he frightens me. This is a guy who stockpiled food in the 1980s to prepare for war with the Russians and kept a gun on his office desk when wrestlers came into talk to him. He pushed his wrestlers to start fights in bars and fuck women in broom closets. He's awful. But he sure could produce a wrestling show.

 

 

Great take on Watts Wrestling and why it's enjoyable on multiple levels. I wonder how I would feel about it in real time...

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