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Didn't Heyman have a really big hand in the D2D show? Wasn't his plan to have Lashley celebrate for 20 minutes after winning?

 

As for Heyman coming back, Lagana and Prichard may be gone, but the number one Heyman hater, Steph, will never lose power. You never know what Vince will do, but I'd bet against it. Who even knows if Heyman would want to come back?

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Speaking of Heyman it's two years to the day of the disastrous December to Dismember PPV and him leaving the promotion. I'm starting to think that there's an outside chance he'll eventually be brought back into the fold, given that interest in the product is tanking, the Heyman haters are slowly falling one by one (Lagana earlier this year and Bruce Prichard this week) and Heyman seemingly using the UK Sun and the wrestling sheets as a covering letter for his job reapplication.

If Brian Gewirtz is still around (last I checked he was), fat chance of that happening. And who knows what Freddy Prinze Jr. (he became a writer, remember?) thinks.

 

Really, though, the only thing I'd do with Heyman is let him book the house shows. At least then his attempts to get higher star ratings from the smarts will make the WWE some money, while the writers don't feel threatened because the shows don't air on TV and, to them, they don't matter.

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And Boondocks mentioned Steph, so there you go.

 

It would be more entertaining to see Heyman end up in TNA, just to see which scenario is more likely:

 

* Heyman jumping on Russo for still living in 1998.

* Russo being appalled that Heyman suggested a lesbian angle with The Beautiful People.

* Jarrett telling Heyman he will not bring Cyrus on board to do another Network angle.

 

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. ;)

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Didn't Heyman have a really big hand in the D2D show? Wasn't his plan to have Lashley celebrate for 20 minutes after winning?

I recall that having only 2 matches advertised may have been his idea (there were similar PPVs in the original ECW) but they messed with his main event booking a lot. Originally, the Chamber match was supposed to go something like this:

 

- Big Show and CM Punk start. Punk taps out Show in two minutes with the Anaconda Vice, making him, guaranteeing a title change, and letting Show out early so he didn't mess his back up even more.

 

- Holly and Test come in next, double team Punk relentlessly, Punk bleeds, and Punk gets eliminated.

 

- Lashley pins Holly, Test, and RVD to win the belt.

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Guest The 3H's

It happened in the 4 way of for TV title, with Jericho, it was his last match before going to WCW.

 

It happened with Taz also, before he went to WWE, don't know who else other then those two.

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Heyman said that him and Stephanie parted on good terms. He also said that Steph offered the job of being in charge of FCW but turned it down. Meltzer confirmed that.

 

I think there's a lot of respect between Vince and Heyman. Look at all the times Vince brought Heyman back after kicking him off the writing team. He trusted him with Lawler's job as color commentator on Heyman's first day at the job while they were building up Wrestlemania 17. He gave Lesnar to Heyman. He knew Heyman had to write One Night Stand after the writing team argued otherwise. Contrast that with how he treated Russo. He brought him back for two days in 2002 and then banished him away forever. But I also think Heyman and Vince both realize that they don't work well together and have different visions of wrestling. The only way I see Heyman back in WWE is if business completely tanks and Vince is willing to go against his instincts like he did in 96 and 97. But right now the numbers are mostly good and Vince is in a safe zone doing coservative wrestling that's combining stuff he did succesfully in the 80's and in the Attitude era. There's no reason to make things stressful for himself.

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Heyman is also a master of always making sure he has something to fall back on, so while he has nothing but nice things to say about Stephanie now, I have no reason to believe the two could work together in any aspect for any length of time. I'm also fairly sure they parted on good terms specifically because they both knew they wouldn't have to deal with each other anymore.

 

Vince is a smart guy, he knows Heyman is good when it comes to the verbal aspect of the game. Putting him in roles that take advantage of that is hardly a sign of respect. I think it's more Vince wanting to be the boss of guys who used to be his competition, and once that starts to lose its appeal and/or be a headache he no longer has any use for them.

 

One of the excuses given for the original ECW going under was Heyman refusing to give up any control to allow someone to help him run things, that doesn't seem like the kind of personality type that would respond well to having extreme Alpha types like Vince and Steph as bosses. It does seem like all three of them realize that, which would explain why everyone seems to be respectful towards each other now that enough of a cooling off period has gone on since Heyman's dismissal.

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Vince is a smart guy, he knows Heyman is good when it comes to the verbal aspect of the game. Putting him in roles that take advantage of that is hardly a sign of respect. I think it's more Vince wanting to be the boss of guys who used to be his competition, and once that starts to lose its appeal and/or be a headache he no longer has any use for them.

I think there's more to it than that. Heyman was immediately put on the writing team when ECW died. Bischoff was never offered that. Then he was put in charge of Smackdown. Despite them having a blow-up that resulted in Heyman getting knocked out of that role, they ended up bringing him back to the writing team. Somewhere in here was the deal where Heyman was listening to a phone call he wasn't supposed to be hearing. He got booted again. Then Vince brought him back to write the first One Night Stand against Stephanie's wishes. Heyman was the guy they went to when Cornette finally snapped with OVW. Then they brought him back to the writing team yet again for the re-launch fo ECW. After six contentious months Vince and Heyman had yet another big fight which resulted in him being sent home. And after all that, they wanted him to run FCW. Vince clearly has a soft spot for the guy. But Heyman has never worked well with others and Vince is the ultimate alpha male so it's never going to work out.

 

Vince never considered Heyman competition so I doubt it was an ego boost to have Heyman working for him. And I don't think he'd screw with Heyman for six years just for fun.

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Who is Polish Bob, and how have I never heard of this guy before? I dunno what his credentials are, but what he wrote does sounds like it has the ring of truth. Especially his characterization of Vince as a legitimately brilliant genius who just also happens to be a moody drug addict with an immature teenager's sense of humor. That explains so much. Where could more of Bob's rantings be found? Also, I vaguely recall something in that unauthorized ECW history book that Scott E. Williams wrote about Heyman cussing Stephanie to her face, so there's at least two sources for that particular rumor, for what it's worth.

 

Okay now I want to see this Santo/Panther match held in some random British museum.

Oh yeah me too. Anyone got that?
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  • 4 months later...

SLL on selling, realism, and MMA:

 

Also, I really don't understand this whole "they sure don't sell in mma, do they?" discussion point? Of course they don't, because the point of MMA certainly isn't to make your opponent's offence look painful, get him over with the crowd or anything like that. MMA != Pro-Wrestling. I know it's not meant that way, but you really could use the same line of thought to criticize the concept of selling in general.

This guy gets it.

 

So one of my favorite websites to peruse in my spare time is TVTropes.org, wherein they collect and classify all sorts of tropes/cliches/related phenomena throughout fiction. Some of the more interesting stuff I've read on the site came from this entry and others with a similar theme:

 

"Reality is Unrealistic"

 

"It probably says something about certain segments of the population that many people, when exposed to an exaggeration or fabrication about certain real-life occurrences or facts, will perceive the fictional account as being more true than any factual account of the same. In effect, some are foolish enough to perceive the TV/Hollywood version of something real as being more true than the real thing."

 

To wit....

 

"-Actual rain never looks like real rain on film, which is why they use a hose and sprinkler.

 

-Mice don't particularly like cheese. They like peanut butter a lot. They ate cheese because in an average household... what was most smelly and edible?

 

-Generally speaking, gunshots don't make gigantic bangs and ring out across three city blocks. Real gunshots are often mistaken for firecrackers.

 

-On most hand grenades, pulling the pin isn't what makes them go boom; the pin is just a final safety catch for the lever, which when released sets off the time-delayed detonator."

 

And so on and so forth. But there's another side of this story we have to consider:

 

"The Coconut Effect"

 

"An element that is patently unrealistic, but which you have to do anyway because viewers have been so conditioned to expect it that its absence would be even more jarring. Maybe it's Hollywood Science. Maybe it's Hollywood History. If it's reached this stage, it's probably pervasive enough to be on this wiki.

 

The best example of this is the sound of horse-hooves. From the days of radio, banging two coconut halves together was the standard way to generate the sound effect of horse-hooves. Anyone who has ever actually been around a horse knows that horse-hooves rarely sound anything at all like that, and never sound more than just a very little bit like that. All the same, that sound became so ingrained in the public consciousness that, even when it later became possible to insert much more realistic sound effects, for many years, the coconut sound effect was still used, because the audience wouldn't be able to accept horse-hooves making a sound not generated by coconuts. (This was parodied in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail: They didn't actually have horses, just coconuts; where they got a tropical fruit in medieval England is one of the first questions asked. Revived in the Gatorade Quest for G commercial, with Alicia, the Girl who made horse-trotting noises.)

 

While audiences have finally outgrown that particular quirk, there are others which persist, such as the Bang Bang BANG effects of guns — particularly the thwpt sound of a gun with silencer (which sounds nothing like an actual silenced pistol), the ping sound made by a specular reflection, the click of a remote control, the loud thump of lights turning on or off, or noisy explosions in space. There's also all fistfight noises — the completely madeup sound of a person getting punched in the face in a movie, as well as the exaggerated smack of a boxing glove, both of which are considerably quieter, more muffled and less dramatic in real life. Also note that, in a more medieval setting, whenever a sword is unsheathed, there is always a sound of scraping metal, even if the sheath is made of leather. In sword duels, there's always a loud, echoey clash of metal, when in reality, swords just make a small 'tink' sound.

 

This is constantly done in "Wildest Police Chases"/"Wildest Security Camera Video"-type programs; generally speaking, the gun blasts, squealing tires, and crunchy crashes are all dubbed in after-the-fact, especially in the case of security camera footage, which rarely features an audio track."

 

Professional wrestling isn't real, and Pro Wrestling NOAH, in many ways, in especially unrealistic. I mean, Forrest Griffin is able to gut his way through some serious shit, but if he got dropped on his head as many times as Mitsuharu Misawa has been in real fights - provided his opponents could get him into position for said headdrops in the first place, an unrealistic feat itself - he'd be dead. Fuck, Misawa only gets "fake" headdropped (and I use that term very loosely here), and he's a fucking wreck. So a NOAH juniors match is one of the last things you want to defend because it's "realistic" to begin with.

 

But even putting that specific aspect of the argument aside, it's important to remember that "reality" and "realism" aren't the same thing. Reality is that which is actually real. Realism is what we accept as a reasonable facsimile of reality is things that aren't actually real. In professional wrestling - as with all forms of fiction - realism is generally preferred to reality, even when reality is unrealistic. Fiction often calls for a certain shorthand way of communicating certain things in an understandable and dramatically satisfying way that might have many different effects of varying degrees of visibility, complexity, and dramatic viability in real life.

 

"Space Does Not Work That Way"

 

"Largely thanks to Speculative Fiction, space is probably one of the most consistently inaccurately portrayed things in modern media, to the extent that complete falsehoods are widely accepted fact. This is a very specific kind of Did Not Do The Research, which may have been partially justified in earlier media as the Research back then wasn't up to much. Modern portrayals of space, however, still haven't changed much from the rock-filled, noisy place which will make an unprotected human instantly explode into clouds of ice.

 

Some of these are due to a lack of research or just uninterest. But most of the modern portrayals of this like are due to the Rule Of Cool (things with sound are cooler than things without sound – although not as scary, as a famous tagline pointed out), artistic license, or simply the belief that audiences wouldn't accept it any other way."

 

"Instant Death Bullet"

 

"In real life, being fatally shot almost always leaves the victim the option of 1-2 minutes of essentially normal activity before they finally fall unconscious. In fact, it is not uncommon for the victim to fail to realize they have been shot. Police trainers report that many officers are hurt or killed when their target fails to instantly fall down when shot, "like they do on television," but instead retaliates. On the other hand, sometimes people who have been shot (or even just believe they have) fall over as if dead even if the bullet does no serious damage. Among the reported causes is hydrostatic shock, neural damage caused by kinetic energy transferred in pressure waves, which can disorient or incapacitate even from impacts on bodily extremities.

 

....

 

Consider the Showdown At High Noon, or any other pistol duel. Screen renderings of these "quick draw" gun battles would be rendered relatively silly if a common outcome was that one combatant was fatally shot, and then took careful aim and fired back, fatally wounding the opponent. There's a reason there were never many experienced gunfighters; the Instant Death Bullet makes for a better story, though."

 

"Realistic Diction is Unrealistic"

 

"Speech in fiction is fictional: too good to be true.

 

People in fiction do not speak like we do. In Real Life, we encounter:

 

* Repetition.

* Stu-stut-stuttering, slurrring.

* Mutual incomprehension.

o Huh?

+ Huh?

* Um, er, like, disfluencies, y'know?

* Losing the thread and trailing off mid-

* Bad grammar use with the sentence.

* Mummelinthizanhavintoorepeadem

o Jesus! MUMbling things and having to rePEAT them!

* Speakers talk "Yes, th"NO THEY DON'T"ey do." ing over one another.

* Repetition.

* Repetition.

* People calling you "dude" every third word. (Properly this is the idiolect, i.e. the unique vocabulary with which someone writes and speaks.)

* Personal speech tics in general, right?

* And of course, Repetition.

 

In fiction, characters inevitably come out with well-formed sentences. They may have a poetic flavor filled with Shakespeare-like similes and luminous golden metaphors that most people in real life aren't clever enough to come up with on the spot. They never stumble over their words or say the wrong thing except for deliberate comedic effect or to show that the character is trying to suddenly come up with an explanation. Even "realistic" dialogue is often relatively free of errors and padding. It's almost as if they prepared and rehearsed their conversations the night before, with each and every word intricately reviewed and assessed by a team of professional writers."

 

"Technicolor Science"

 

"When the subject of a TV show includes the use of deadly toxins, radioactive materials, or biological or chemical agents, you can almost be sure Special Effects artists will make them look a lot more interesting than they are in real life. This is because the vast majority of chemical compounds are colorless, odorless, tasteless and could easily be substituted with a glass of water. They just don't look exciting or menacing, so they tend to get totally unrealistic spruce-ups."

 

In professional wrestling, the fact of the matter is that "Realistic Combat is Unrealistic". Yes, people in MMA can get their legs torn to shreds and tough it out, but that's real combat. In professional wrestling "realism", when KENTA's leg gets torn to shreds, he's expected to act like it actually hurts, because selling is the established shorthand a wrestler uses to tell us he's in pain. If he doesn't use it, it tells us he's not in pain, and we have no reason to care about what's been happening to him thus far in the match. We also have no reason to care about Nakajima. He totally went to town on KENTA's leg, and it accomplished jack squat, so why take him seriously? Because he has the belt? The belt, storyline-wise is supposed to be on the best wrestler. If the guy with the completely ineffective offense has the belt, what does it say for the belt? What does it say for all the people competing for it? And what does it say about KENTA that he's content being the big fish in a small pond? So by not using that handy selling shorthand, KENTA is effectively saying that he's not in pain from the work on his leg, Nakajima's offense is ineffective, the GHC Jr. Title can't possibly be that big of a deal because it's around the waist of the guy with the ineffective offense, that every other guy in the division must be even less effective that Nakajima, and that KENTA is vastly superior to all of them, but not ambitious and/or talented enough to go for a bigger prize. And yeah, I realize that's overthinking it, and one match where KENTA doesn't sell properly isn't going to kill NOAH's entire junior division, but that is the longhand version of what KENTA's shorthand is saying. It's might be reality, but in pro wrestling, it's unrealistic reality.

 

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Yeah that's pretty good.

 

In every form of fiction, there are established "rules for the universe" that you lay as the groundwork. Whether they exist in reality or not really doesn't mean fuck all, but when you operate within the confines of a fantasy universe, it's good to at least stick to the rules of your own universe.

 

I think probably *every* generation of wrestlers and wrestling's smart fans have argued this, but it does seem to me that somewhere wrestling pitched it's own reality rules out the window and got lazy "well it's all fake anyway, fuck this let's do it the lazy way". Sammartino-era fans probably thought the same thing about the Hogan era, Thesz era fans about whoever, etc.

 

Wrestling has this weird quality of re-inventing it's own rules of the universe every few years which is probably why so many fans are drawn to one era specifically (usually but not always the one they grew up with). Part of that is the gradual movement from wrestling being portrayed as once upon a time as a shoot into raw entertainement (which off the top of my head is unique to pro wrestling) but there seems more to it than just that.

 

I'm sure there are other examples but the "re-inventing your own universe" thing seems to apply more in wrestling than other things which come to mind for me.

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Well, when we're talking about wrestling, we're talking about an entire genre of fiction that stretches out over a very long period of time and across the globe, but still seems to all belong to the same fictional universe, more or less. Not sure there's any other genre of fiction that you can say that for. So I think with wrestling, one of the rules of the universe you have to accept is that the rules themselves are fluid, and that they're prone to changing due to time, location, and promotion. Like, selling exists in all forms of wrestling, but the way it's presented is fluid, and the specific expectations for what qualifies as "good" selling differ from time to time and place to place. Or piledrivers hurt like a mother, but they hurt Mexicans more than they hurt the Japanese. I'm hard-pressed to think of a good, logical in-universe explanation for that sort of thing, but it's something you kind of have to accept if you're not just going to restrict yourself to one sub-genre of wrestling.

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Or piledrivers hurt like a mother, but they hurt Mexicans more than they hurt the Japanese. I'm hard-pressed to think of a good, logical in-universe explanation for that sort of thing, but it's something you kind of have to accept if you're not just going to restrict yourself to one sub-genre of wrestling.

Well, I will float out the theory that this has something to do with the hardness of head scale that all wrestling fans of course know. ;-)

 

(Unnoficial rankings from the World Wrestling Council)

1- Samoans

2- Giants

3- Fat people

4- Black guys

5- Non-fat heavyweights

6- Non-heavyweights

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Or piledrivers hurt like a mother, but they hurt Mexicans more than they hurt the Japanese. I'm hard-pressed to think of a good, logical in-universe explanation for that sort of thing, but it's something you kind of have to accept if you're not just going to restrict yourself to one sub-genre of wrestling.

Well, I will float out the theory that this has something to do with the hardness of head scale that all wrestling fans of course know. ;-)

 

(Unnoficial rankings from the World Wrestling Council)

1- Samoans

2- Giants

3- Fat people

4- Black guys

5- Non-fat heavyweights

6- Non-heavyweights

 

Ooooh, good point. But...where does Road Warrior Hawk fit into that? And why they seem to hurt Americans more than the Japanese, particularly in certain parts of the south and current WWE. Hmmm....

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Ooooh, good point. But...where does Road Warrior Hawk fit into that?

Hmm that's a good point. The Road Warriors were not big on pain unless it was dishing it out. Nor was Warrior. IZU has a hard head and sometimes brought the facepaint. And Kamala would be in several categories then. For a minute it makes you think about adding a "guys with facepaint" category, but then there's the whole Stalker Ichikawa thing and that flies out the window.

 

I can't address the cultural differences between Japan and the US. As an outsider, there are things I will NEVER UNDERSTAND.

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Well, when we're talking about wrestling, we're talking about an entire genre of fiction that stretches out over a very long period of time and across the globe, but still seems to all belong to the same fictional universe, more or less. Not sure there's any other genre of fiction that you can say that for. So I think with wrestling, one of the rules of the universe you have to accept is that the rules themselves are fluid, and that they're prone to changing due to time, location, and promotion. Like, selling exists in all forms of wrestling, but the way it's presented is fluid, and the specific expectations for what qualifies as "good" selling differ from time to time and place to place. Or piledrivers hurt like a mother, but they hurt Mexicans more than they hurt the Japanese. I'm hard-pressed to think of a good, logical in-universe explanation for that sort of thing, but it's something you kind of have to accept if you're not just going to restrict yourself to one sub-genre of wrestling.

Okay, so this may be one of the most inciteful things about rasslin that I have ever read on the interweb (and it makes sense it would be here at PWO). SLL -- I"m using it as a sig on another forum!

 

Seriously, though, it reminds me of the movie ROLE MODELS, which I was just watching. If you haven't seen it, get to a DVD store right away. :lol: In the film, there's a major plot about a kid who's really into live action medieval roleplaying. This world has its own rules and language and all-around culture. Outisders find it not a little ridiculous, but the participants take it very seriously. And I think that as wrestling fans, we have to be willing to accept the same thing. My brother, who watches a lot of MMA, will often ask questions about why wrestlers do this or that when I am watching it. I explain the context or the meaning of a particular move or promo because when I am watching, I accept that a piledriver really hurts and a superplex really hurts. . .

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I will never forget loudly proclaiming to my friends (7-8 years ago) that "the Rock Bottom just isn't a finisher; I watch Japanese wrestling!". Yet I still react to any number of finishers with little real impact from any type of wrestling as long as the finisher is done properly. It's all context and application; a backdrop driver is just a highspot unless it's sold like death no matter how much "I watch Japanese wrestling".

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I will never forget loudly proclaiming to my friends (7-8 years ago) that "the Rock Bottom just isn't a finisher; I watch Japanese wrestling!". Yet I still react to any number of finishers with little real impact from any type of wrestling as long as the finisher is done properly. It's all context and application; a backdrop driver is just a highspot unless it's sold like death no matter how much "I watch Japanese wrestling".

I remember Yohe, Hoback and me giving a standing ovation to the cross armbreaker being whipped out in the Bret-Shawn Iron Man match. People around us on the floor wondered what we were doing. Yohe explained that he was the deadliest finisher in the world. People thought we were crazy.

 

Granted... we were having "fun" with the spot, especially when it was drawing crickets from the crowd. :)

 

But it does go to the Rock Bottom and the People's Elbow:

 

They were over like shit.

 

People sold their asses off for them, and they fans bought into them.

 

That's pretty damn important in the end. :)

 

I probably could spend some time on why I like the People's Elbow and didn't much care for Angle's Ankle Lock. But I'm willing to cop that the Ankle Lock was over, people sold their ass off for it, and fans bought it.

 

Doesn't mean we can't still look at it in a critical fashion.

 

 

John

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