tiger_rick

8 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

I think it's a problem across all of wrestling right now. Almost all the best promos are the older stars. It's why when someone like MJF comes along he stands out more because he's genuinely good.

I just don't know if they're working enough on them across the business. Maybe they need to do more pre-recorded stuff rather than in-show interviews because you can paper over cracks more easily there. The standard is pretty bad in WWE and AEW, and NXT doesn't suggest the next generation are going to improve that.

Would completely agree. I specified modern wrestlers because I think old wrestlers used to live the gimmick to such an extent that it rarely seemed like "acting" at all. They had all their mannerisms and reactions down.

I'm surprised given their obsession with hiring TV writers because they're in the entertainment business, pal, that they've not strayed into having proper directors. People who'd look at the awkwardness of their high-school drama club acting in backstage promos and over-selling in the ring and work to improve it. 

It does seem to get a pass because it's just wrestling though. I saw a video a year or two ago of times that Sami Zayn caused the Bloodline to corpse in the ring. It was funny stuff and Sami was great in it but it strikes me as odd that the obsessed weirdos who consume everything will give it loads about telling stories and ring work, but accept a wrestler being completely unable to stay in character during a major storyline. It's a strange dichotomy.

9 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Anyone still watch this? I caught an episode out of curiosity and it was pretty good. Standout was this cracking little match.

CW: Natalya.

Sol Ruca and Blair Davenport had a good one as well. I wouldn't stick it on every week, like, but I'm going to add it to my Bleacher Report results list.

How do you feel about the promo work, Dev? As someone who watches and judges a lot of movies, how do you feel when you watch "acting" in wrestling promos. It looks absolutely horrible to me even with the caveat that I don't expect much from modern wrestlers in the acting department anyway. 

1 hour ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

I get why, if TK felt he had to have someone say something, it was Edge who did the opening promo. He's one of THE most WWE guys in the world, and he's saying all that good stuff?

Is that not the point? You've got Punk out there suggesting they are not in the same league so you respond with a guy who is the antithesis of WWE who'd know? I think it's tragically small-time but you know they're going to rebut it, they've been as bad as TNA for this stuff.

8 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Anyone still watch this?

If @JLM doesn't then, no!

6 hours ago, The Dart said:

Absolutely pissed it down in Philadelphia today all day long.  Apparently it’ll be fine by the weekend, but would be amusing if it rained like it did today.

10 hours ago, IANdrewDiceClay said:

Anyone remember that WrestleMania party about 10 years ago where they all got kicked out before the show got going? What happened with that again? Who organised it?

Was that a Tommyboi production? He was in to doing PPV nights in clubs for a bit after the mobile phone scam failed to take off.

The NDA stuff is tragic. NDAs in wrestling should only be brought up in reference to Vince having the women he and his mates used, and paid off with company money, sign. Not a bunch of children having a real fight over their playfighting. The only likeable one amongst them was the dog.

Needs a spin-off #EATCLEAN: USA like they do with Pop Factor.

12 hours ago, kidzero said:

The last ten minutes of raw was cinematic 

Fuck sake, I thought wrestling was back.

Can't find a pic but I had a version of the hot dog stuffed crust a month or so ago. Sounds epic but I found it really disappointing. Even dipped in sauce, it was still dry as fuck. 

Salivating seeing the posts on the last few pages. We went to a Mexican in Wisconsin last year that had almost incredible everything but this Taco bowl is one of the best things I've ever eaten. Made even better because my annoying brother was gonna have it but because he couldn't possibly have the same thing as someone else, he switched to some veggie dish and ended up utterly miserable eating a load of damp green stuff while everyone else was creaming their pants over how good the food was.

Reminded that when we arrived in Madison, me and my daughter walked a few miles to find this Mexican we got recommended. We googled and checked it was open Mondays. We arrived and the opening hours on the door said it was open Mondays. There were people inside. Still closed though.

On 3/4/2024 at 11:12 AM, air_raid said:

October - Jim Cornette rips into the Hulk Hogan vs Roddy Piper match at Halloween Havoc, noting things like Hogan's bald spot and Piper's hip replacement. Fans will retcon the "title" of the match to "Age In The Cage" (coming so soon after "Hell In A Cell") though Corny himself didn't actually say it. Ages - 44 (Hogan) vs 43 (Piper).

Nearly posted about this and then had the sense to re-check the OP to see if I'd missed it and I had. Was watching a video of the Sting transformation in WCW and there was a clip of Piper coming out. I thought he looked pretty decent given it was early 1997, coming off Starrcade 96 with Hogan and a few months before the "Age in the Cage" match. Went looking to check and as above, Piper was 43 and Hogan was 44. The match is rightly shit on and the ages were a massive factor back then. Mad to compare it to the likes of Edge and Christian having matches that people seem to like when they're both 50. It's not just TV age either as those two guys have 20+ years on national TV, albeit with forced retirements for a big chunk of that. they also have an awful lot of miles on the clock. There's clearly a massive shift in lifestyle now. Particularly an absolutely massive difference in the intake of coke, booze and gas.

It's a good shout. Savage's whole middle of 1990 felt like a come down coming off his title run and then his feud with Hogan going pretty much a year from the official break-up on Main Event right up to the SNME match with Buster Douglas reffing. It was probably inevitable given the other top babyface in Warrior was working Hogan at Mania so it was always going to be a step down to face a Dusty, Jake, Duggan or Boss Man type. The actual Mania match involving Sapphire does then take it all down another level, even if I do like the SummerSlam 90 aspect to heat him back up for Warrior. 

From main eventing and drawing the biggest Mania buyrate in history to a crappy mixed tag involving one of the worst non-workers ever is some fall.

3 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

My main takeaway from the interview, which I enjoyed a lot, was that CM Punk doesn't understand what a loaded question is.

I think mine was that wrestlers refer to "the internet" like it's 1999. Punk even spoke about TikTok and YouTube and still made his points about this broader appeal someone like The Rock brings. The Rock's broad appeal isn't from wrestling, even at the height of it's popularity. It's from mainstream TV and movies. He's pop culture. What's pop culture now? The Internet. Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. It's such a stupid contradiction given wrestling loves to champion their massive interactions on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, Tout, etc, rightly, and they'll use those massive numbers in contract negotiations, sponsorship deals, etc. Yet a lot of these muppets still have this "internet bad" mentality like that old HHH gif. Just say you mean Dave Meltzer and Ross Sapp and whoever else writes badly about wrestling these days. It's odd.

2 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Would've been interesting if he was challenged in any way whatsoever, but true to form I think Ariel’s entire response to all this was to describe Punk’s comments on Monday as, “killer line, bro.” The real journalist there, whose entire approach to this interview was, “why are you so brilliant?”

@jbwkz1313 - 11 hours ago - Props to Ariel, what an interview. No softball questions.

@heihvyegs - 9 hours ago - That’s what you get when you have a real journalist, not your friends playing journalist because they made a YouTube channel

Who to believe? 😆

FWIW - I enjoyed the interview. Punk's the best worked in the business. You accept that and it's all easier.

Wouldn't want Socko in my mouth knowing where it's been.

5 minutes ago, Loki said:

The Dynamite Merch Stand last night.  That was the full product line.  Whoever is in charge of their merch division needs to be fired!

This seems insane given that the range of AEW shirts you could get on PWT was absolutely massive at one point. Is that part of the problem though, allowing all these guys to sort their own shit? It's consistently a massive missed opportunity, although from the pics I've seen, they appear to have one shirt for every member of the crowd last night. 

We went to an NXT show in Sheffield a few years ago and our kid was excited to get some shirts. The merch offering was dreadful. And it was still better than that.

1 hour ago, Version1.0 said:

Is it too late to bring back Dan Severn?

That one for "If only they'd come along... in 1926"?

I like Mox a lot. Great worker and promo, obviously, but his is one of the few new wrestling books I've read and he seems like a good guy who worked hard it, is just trying to have the time of his life in what he's doing and is generally winning at it, so I liked him even more. 

They all go back though, except Randy Savage. There's no way he doesn't - eventually. He'd never have gone back to the creative environment before but I'm absolutely sure that in another year or two, it will be unrecognisable from that POV and they'll throw money at him. Punk went back. He was the one I really thought never would. After that, I'd never give less than a 75% chance of anyone going back, except Mel Phillips and George Zahorian.

I thought about Sid with the Yoko comparison, but he was a pretty major star though. Not quite the same as if Flair had main evented 8 but closer to that level than the complete unknowns of Yoko or Lesnar. 

2 minutes ago, Lorne Malvo said:

This period involved him losing the IC title clean to The Miz on Raw 25 too, which was maybe the nadir of them half-arsing Reigns push.

File that in things you'd completely forgotten happened. 

That whole period existed because someone obviously thought the issue with John Cena all those years was that he won all the time. So they made Roman an absolute loser, presumably imagining it would get him sympathy. Just another terrible read of the audience in a good decade-long period of them.

My daughter's gotta take a bus across Lincolnshire for her Uni placement. I couldn't work out the route and the stops from the website but googling it brought up a video over an hour long of a couple of lads getting the bus. Genuinely the dullest thing I've ever watched in my life and I've watched TNA Wrestling.

On 3/22/2024 at 7:04 PM, Devon Malcolm said:

Serbian actress Marija Pikić.

Pik me, Marija.

13 hours ago, Jazzy G said:

Or how about Yokozuna? He wrestled two matches each for the WWF title at Wrestlemanias 9 and 10, then was tagging with Owen against the Smoking Gunns at 11.

Yoko works the other way around too. Hadn't even been hired by Mania 8 and had very little national recognition before main eventing Mania 9. Very little precedent for that in the company's history.

1 hour ago, Shane O' Mac Version 2 said:

Wait, what? How on Earth did WWE jerk him around? He's been earmarked as THE GUY from day dot. He's always been main event/top of the card, usually with some title in tow. Only times he hasn't been the top champ really is when Brock had the belt, and really Roman was still The Guy back then because he was actually the one on TV every week.

All I can think of is Seth cashing in at Mania 31. And that only happened because the fans were rejecting Roman, I wouldn't call that WWE jerking him around.

The booking of him and around him was atrocious for years. Their usual fetish with babyfaces who smile a lot, not striking while the iron was hot and then striking once it was stone cold, making him look like an absolute loser compared to that nerd Seth Rollins and a 67 year old Triple H, not turning him heel after he beat The Undertaker which would have been the hottest thing they'd done in years and then turning him heel in front of zero fans. He was a guy who beat cancer, came back and cut one of the most brilliant, heartfelt promos we'll ever see and they had fans booing him within months.

As absolutely unforgivable as doing your most interesting possible heel-turn in the middle of the Thunderdome era was, they finally got the presentation of him spot-on from that point. Having him just win all the time as a heel, having him be the only World Champion (ahem), having him steamroll everyone isn't engaging week to week TV, but it's absolutely the way to make a star and re-establish your title and your hierarchy which they're benefitting from for the last 18 months or so, muddy-Rock waters aside. (Full disclosure, I've hardly seen any of the heel run but you know that already.)

16 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

the Hamburglar knew about the allegations at the very top of the organisation so anyone that still eats at McDonald's is a cunt.

Fuck sake, gotta tell the kids we're boycotting Maccies.