Pro Wrestling Tricks

[GOTNW]

When I first saw Marufuji Superkicks, Chris Hero elbows etc. I thought they were the greatest thing ever. I mean how could they not be they made this great sound! It had to rule right? Eventually I started noticing they'd slap their thigh when in many cases there would be no reason to do so and the magic was quickly gone. In the case of someone like Hero it even annoyed me he would do that when his elbows would look perfectly good without the sound effect. This me brings me to my point-pro wrestling is about creating an illusion of competition. A thigh slap gets a pop, but it also looks really stupid when a Chris Hero punch missed its mark by a foot and makes a sound like a shotgun hit his opponent. And also everything sounding like a slap isn't realistic anyway. And what it's made me think about is that in modern wrestling I feel like there's an overliance on stuff that will *work* and get a pop without concern for how it's going to look in the long run. I'm not saying "it used to be better", it's something that was almost certainly always present. I do think it's worth asking where do people see the line between good formula and shallow props, when did one become the other for them etc.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Maybe it's bad camera work and bad sleight of hand . Chris Adams' superkick always had the sound coming from the thigh slap but you never saw it.

[EricR]

I used to be impressed by how football players were able to maintain traction and turn on a dime on soft grass, but then I looked closer and discovered they wore cleats!!

[khawk20]

Billy Robinson's neckbreaker. The timing of it so it didn't break his opponents neck always amazed me, and in my eye it had to be almost all Billy making that move safe as his opponent really had to give himself up for it.

 

Even when you figured out that it was mostly about the release point of the chin by Billy on the way down, that move always looked devastating. That made it a great pro wrestling "trick" to me.

[khawk20]

...and blading. Before you knew what you were looking for. For me there was a time when I did not know about the blade (that changed in the early-mid 80's..The Stossel piece might have actually been what clued me in...memory is fleeting on knowing about it before that bit).

 

Once you look for it, it is mostly obvious when it is put in use...but before that, when a guy would come up bloody, it grabbed your attention immediately.

 

And AFTER you knew about it, and you missed it happening, it was still an "oh wow, I missed that!" moment.

[GOTNW]

I used to be impressed by how football players were able to maintain traction and turn on a dime on soft grass, but then I looked closer and discovered they wore cleats!!

Always weird when it hits you stuff like that isn't common knowledge somewhere else.

 

I'm fine with blading if I feel like wrestlers have put in enough violence into the match to earn it but watching the ref and the wrestler try to cover up the blading for two minutes after the wrestler hit the ringpost/steel steps/whatever can be pretty eye-rolling. Though in something like the Dandy-Santo hair match it added to the match to me because it was like "what's taking them so long" and Dandy just started bleeding everywhere and it looked so great. But even then they did an ok job of covering it up even if it did take a while.

[Jimmy Redman]

I used to be impressed by how football players were able to maintain traction and turn on a dime on soft grass, but then I looked closer and discovered they wore cleats!!

 

Similarly, I was always impressed with how smoothly footy players or footballers could slide along the ground when they dived or made tackles or whatever, but then I went to some football match and saw them watering the ground with sprinklers before the game.