BomberPat

18 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I think this is a bad wayv to look at things. What is the definition of a 'need' when it comes to an artistic endeavour? The better question for the creator is do they have something to say. Do they have some new idea they want to communicate to the audience, or something old they want to communicate in a new way. 

I agree with this, even though in many ways it contradicts my earlier criticism of Tim Burton approaching every film assuming the audience just want to see Tim Burton's take on the story.

I don't get as hung up on adaptations and remakes as some people (though prequels and origin stories I find entirely unnecessary and counter-productive in 99% of cases), as remakes are almost as old as Hollywood and some of the best films ever made are remakes, but I remember at the time there was a lot of talk that Burton hadn't even seen the Gene Wilder film, so was coming in completely blind. At the time, I thought that was a positive and that it meant he would be bringing a fresh take to the table, now I find it a bit daft (if it's even true) to go into a creative endeavour without familiarising yourself with an extremely well-liked previous take on the same story.

In terms of need, the impetus for the Tim Burton version from what I remember was that Roald Dahl didn't like the Gene Wilder version, so there was years of work with the Dahl estate going into trying to make a new film that was a more faithful adaptation. But I don't think it manages that at all, particularly given the aforementioned crowbarred in "his dad was a dentist" closing act.

2 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

Yeah I suppose people would go for the weekend just to believe they were in the company of fellow intellectuals for a weekend and where they can spew bollocks without getting any criticism

I'm not sure how many would even want that, but maybe they won't realise until they get it. It's like why every attempt at a right-wing social media platform never really goes anywhere - for so many of these people, the appeal of having a platform is being able to shout at lefties and liberals, jump into people's mentions with a strawman and a "well, actually", and generally be confrontational bell-ends. The last thing that all but the most gullible of marks in that space want is to be surrounded by people who agree with them. 

That said, Allegedly Dave, Sovereign Pete and Tom Numbers are all incredible cat names.

later than it should have been, but the Tim Burton Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is when I got utterly fed up with him as a director, and largely with Depp as an actor too. It felt like the tipping point of Tim Burton deciding that the reason he's making films is people want to see what a wacky dark and creepy Tim Burton adaptation of a story looks like (spoiler: stripes, mugging to camera and a Danny Elfman score), rather than him actually bothering to tell the story.

I think it gets unfairly criticised for things that it shouldn't, because it's treated as a "remake" of the Gene Wilder film, rather than a separate adaptation of the same book, and in many ways is closer to the book, but it's not a better film for it. Depp playing Wonka as Michael Jackson is somewhat justifiable when you consider that the character is an eccentric recluse, so he probably wouldn't be all-singing all-dancing but, again, while it might have a logical reason for it, it doesn't make it enjoyable to watch. And all the stuff with Christopher Lee as Wonka's dad is bollocks.

In terms of the Wilder film being scary, I wonder how much of that is a thing of adults looking back and finding that scene creepy because it feels like a horror set-piece, whereas kids without that experience have no reason to be scared by it? I don't think I ever found it scary as a kid.

I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night, and thought it was perfectly solid. I expected more, given how much praise it got on release, and I expected it to be weirder and harder to follow given so much of the chat around it at the time was how wild and hallucinatory and inventive it was. It's certainly odd, but it's not Holy Mountain, is it? Visually it's very fun, and I can see why it would have been great to see in a big cinema, and there's some good performances in there, but it's solidly around a 3 and a half stars if we're doing that, leaning towards four if I'm being generous. The best part was the universe where it's just rocks and silence - it was a good gag, but one that felt like genuinely taking a risk in a Hollywood setting, rather than just wackiness for its own sake.

Yes, definitely Sam Fatu and not Rikishi in this video:

How was the reaction to The Rock? The Observer writeup seemed surprised that the initial reaction was positive, and that it took him doing hokey "you're all inbreds and your local sports team is bad" cheap heat to really turn the crowd on him.

They may have played their hand too early, if heel Rock is key to the story, as it seems that most audiences might not actually want to boo The Rock and were only doing it to express their frustration at Cody not getting the main event - now he has his match back with zero effort, what do we hate The Rock for again?

7 hours ago, Statto said:

(As I imagine did family friendly promoters around the country who are already dreaming of putting "Winner of BBC's Gladiators" on posters). 

The flipside of that is I found myself saying, "he'll be putting up his asking price, then"

2 hours ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

There must be hundreds of flyers up and down this country with wrestlers on that no one ever heard of outside that one show. 

I'm just speculating that he would be a local talent, but it rings true with how these shows were run in the Channel Islands, and I wonder if it would be similar in the Isle of Wight. I dug out the programme from the Shane Stevens-run show in Jersey I mentioned earlier, and there's an insert page for the local talent there. 

Almost all of them are described by comparing them to World of Sport era wrestlers, despite it being 2011 and an audience of kids. One of them had a sort of Abyss knock-off gimmick - huge 20-something stone bloke in prison jumpsuit and a mask - and they just printed a photo of him out of gimmick, no mask and a t-shirt!

9 minutes ago, air_raid said:

More likely that poster is a screw up. I bet Chuck Norris didn’t show up either.

Definitely occurred to me that they could have used the wrong photo on the poster, that wouldn't be a surprise at all, and Wrestlingdata placing Rikishi in the UK on 28/4 and Cagematch on 2/5 makes it more likely he was around for a longer tour, whereas just the Cagematch data makes it look like he popped over for one show and was in Memphis less than a week later. Not out of the question, but far less likely at the time. Though obviously the data is hopelessly incomplete either way.

On the other hand, neither site has Sam Fatu working in the UK at all, and his only match in 1999 being at the Heroes of Wrestling PPV, but some newspaper ads from April 1999 list him as "Fatu The Tonga Kid".

Probably not the promoter - depending on which iteration of the "British Wrestling Federation" it is, that could be Orig Williams or Shane Stevens/Palmer, or Martin Newman, though I know nothing about the latter.

Orig never booked James Mason under that name (he was always "Jesse James" for Orig), so I'd hazard a guess it's Stevens promoting, and that, based off of how Stevens advertised his shows in the Channel Islands, Karl 'The Bull' Antony is a local Isle Of Wight wrestler. I can't find anything about him beyond this flyer.

3 minutes ago, LEGIT said:

Yoko teamed with Fatu, who I thought for years was a post Sultan/ pre Rikishi Fatu but subsequently heard that was incorrect, it was some other member of the family. 

Cagematch and Wrestlingdata both have "Fatu" as Rikishi for a BWF show in Walthamstow, teaming with Yoko in 99, but no other UK matches for him that year. Rikishi was working Memphis most of that month, so it's unlikely he would have popped over to the UK for one or two random matches, so I think you're right about it not being him.

I found this flyer from an Isle of Wight show, and it looks like it's Sam Fatu (Tonga Kid/The Samoan Savage):

It's not Wrestlemania without some old lads stealing the spotlight from the current crop; having Rock, Triple H and Austin hanging around Roman and Cody and turning it into Attitude Era nostalgia wouldn't surprise me at all.

I once found a copy of Mick Foley's Tietam Brown in a charity shop, bought it for a quid, and got it home to find it was signed "to Gary".

I am trying to envision a way Hangman might end up costing himself the match just to spite Swerve, that wouldn't seem cheap, but would still be clear enough what the intention is. Maybe being caught in a Joe submission and tapping out just as Swerve is about to break it up.

my first was the FWA Revival King Of Europe show, as a teenager in 2002.

My parents and older brothers hated wrestling, so it was never on the cards to go to a show before that one, but I managed to cajole one of my older cousins into taking me to this one. I'd been living in Jersey for a couple of years, and basically became a die-hard wrestling fan not longer after moving there, so it was a big thing to be flying over to London for a show, and I found it all very daunting.

The show was superb, as I'm sure plenty of you know. I'd been buying every wrestling magazine I could get my hands on by then, so had been reading about the FWA in Powerslam, and so a lot of the card felt like stars even though it was the first time I was seeing them. As much as I went in for Brian Lawler and Eddie Guerrero, I came away far more a fan of the British guys, and absolutely convinced that Jody Fleisch would be the future of the industry.

It was a long time before I'd go to another show, even though my fandom only got more obsessive - living on an island and working minimum wage jobs put paid to that, and I missed out on Jersey having been one of the regular stopping off points for All-Star and other touring promotions; my friends went to shows in the early and mid-90s featuring a knackered Dynamite Kid and The Legend of Doom (an old mate still insists to this day that he saw Hawk wrestle in a Jersey hotel), whereas the only shows I ever saw advertised in the early '00s were a single newspaper ad for a full-blown tribute show, and posters for a show headlined by Robbie Brookside that ended up cancelled. I only found out a few months ago that Shane Stevens was still running some hotel shows in Jersey around this time, but they were only advertised to hotel guests, so I never heard about them - if I'd known, I could have been watching James Mason wrestle four or five times in a weekend.

My next show was TNA at Wembley Arena in 2011; a good mate of mine that I was going to music festivals with around that time had got big into TNA, and had been to a live show the previous year. He got some cheap tickets for this one and asked if I fancied going - another friend had just started uni at Goldsmiths, so I stayed with him, and made a long weekend of it. Despite having some of the most phoned in matches imaginable - Rob Van Dam vs. Matt Hardy, and Jeff Hardy vs. Mr. Anderson come to mind - it was great fun, with a Jeff Jarrett/Johnny Moss match that's still one of my favourite matches I ever saw live, and made a Jeff Jarrett fan of me. 
The big story going into it was that Ric Flair had missed a show earlier in the tour - from what I remember, he'd not been paid his fee up-front, and was spending money he didn't have, maxing out his credit cards at the bar in every town they went to, and having to get management to cover him. They got sick of it in Dublin, and left him behind, so he missed the following night's event, and it all came to a head again in Manchester the day before I was due to see him wrestle. We weren't sure if we were going to see him, and given that AJ Styles and Kurt Angle had already pulled off, he was one of the big draws for us. Jeremy Borash didn't mention Flair at all during the pre-show hype, and he feared the worst, but he showed up after intermission and had a mad brawl with Doug Williams.

The following year, it was the return of live wrestling to Jersey at long last! Rumblemania at Fort Regent, a good 500-600 turn-out, and I managed to talk my way in as a ringside photographer as they had booked some of the "stars" of Channel Island Wrestling, then just a ramshackle training school. The show was run by Shane Stevens, serial con-man and convicted fraudster, and those are the nicer things you could say about him, though I didn't know any of that at the time. I mentioned James Mason earlier in connection to the shows Shane Stevens had previously run in Jersey - James told me that Shane was the dodgiest person he had ever met in wrestling, and just imagine the ground that must cover. 
As far as this show goes - VIP ticket-holders got front row tickets, a post-show meet-and-greet, and would be sent a DVD of the show when it was produced; that DVD never surfaced, and because of our involvement on the show, Channel Island Wrestling were still fielding complaints about it at least two years later. He also promised that he was coming back with a bigger show the following year, that would feature an ex-WWE superstar - some kids behind me got excited that it must be Shawn Michaels for some reason - and that show never came to be.
I found out years later that the four CIW talents who got booked on this show, Shane did the expected shitty promoter to naïve young talent thing of not paying them, and just using them to fill spots on the card, and bring in plenty of family and friends buying tickets, and that didn't surprise me at all. What was more of a dick move that I wasn't aware of was that he refused to let them change in the same dressing room as "his" wrestlers, making them get changed in the corridor instead. 

Bob "Blondie" Barrett was advertised for the show, and they used his Rebel Pro ring (I'm racking my brain trying to remember what the actual promotion name they used was, because it wasn't that), but he wasn't there. I don't know if he just never got on the boat, or was there working backstage, but I never saw him. I've been looking up the show and some old photos to try and get a sense of who was on the card - a short-haired and unrecognisable Joseph Conners, Mad Dog Maxx, Danny Steel, Paul Malen, Tom Mason, Flex Buffington, Matt Mentzer, Bam Bam Barton, and others I don't recognise at all. Not exactly a superstar line-up, and what strikes me now is that it's odd that it's almost entirely a Northern and Midlands contingent for a show at the southernmost point of the British Isles.

It was, through a long and convoluted set of circumstances, that the Fort Regent show led to Channel Islands Wrestling (later Channel Islands World Wrestling) getting a regular gig at a local hotel, and running consistently there from 2013 until last year, so after that, I was refereeing and firmly getting started in the business, and every subsequent show I attended was with at least one eye toward that. My next show was RevPro's When Thunder Strikes at York Hall in 2013, for the headline match of Prince Devitt vs. Jushin Thunder Liger. 

From there, I started attending the occasional RevPro show when they had a big NJPW name in, and in 2015 I went along to the first CHIKARA UK tour, co-promoted with Fight Club Pro, and I started going to more of their shows, and later to Pro Wrestling EVE, and picking up other indie shows as and when I could. Before long, all of my disposable income was going on wrestling shows, and I was travelling back and forth between Jersey and London, Birmingham or Manchester for live shows, some years as much as once a month, and since moving to London three years ago, often more than that, so I'm not going to detail every single one of them over the last almost ten years! 

45 minutes ago, air_raid said:

This feels about right. Hogan era of 89 was wildly different to when he ascended in 84. Likewise, by 94 there are very few of the class of 89 left apart from Bret and Shawn who had undergone tremendous growth/change. 1999 might as well be 15 years different in comparison, 2004 feels different again. It's only thereafter where you find more and more of the same guys are still there at five year intervals, and to complete the circular discussion back to the benefit of having AEW and another viable "place to work" - 04-09 being the first full five year markers between which, there was no serious competition.

The old adage used to be the Seven Year Rule - after seven years, you can rehash a storyline or angle, or give an old gimmick to a new wrestler, because the audience will have refreshed itself enough; enough people will have stopped watching, and enough new fans will have started watching, that the ideas will come across as fresh and new again, and the fans who have stuck around either won't make enough noise about it being a rehash for it to matter, or are lifers by now so they're not going anywhere and you don't need to worry about them. 

It usually holds up, but I agree that the inverse should be true as well, that in those seven years the show itself should have refreshed too - whether that's the roster as a whole, or their gimmicks and position on the card; one of the things I always find amusing watching New Generation era WWF is that the midcard is largely awful, but so many of them are people who, with a fresh lick of paint, became much bigger stars in the Attitude Era just a couple of years later.

The absence of a major competitor or external pressures, and WWE being content to rest on their laurels with the top stars of yesteryear, meant that not only was never that roster turnover, there was barely any impetus for people to change gimmicks and reinvent themselves - Dolph Ziggler didn't become a tedious time-filler just because he'd been there for so long, but because he'd been doing the exact same schtick the entire time. Ricochet has been in WWE for six years now, and is the exact same character he was when he walked through the door in NXT, and I'd struggle to name you anything of note he's done - in that amount of time, Charles Wright had been Papa Shango, Kama, Kama Mustafa, and the Godfather, and was about to become The Goodfather.

1 hour ago, LaGoosh said:

Revolution is his final match and presumably final appearance. 

Not necessarily final appearance - Tony Khan has said that he hopes Sting will remain part of AEW in some capacity, presumably doing the odd special appearance and so on.

Samoa Joe just brings a credibility to every promo he does, even when he's being wordy and long-winded, he feels like a professional fighter who knows the title means he's the best, not like a guy doing wrestling promos. I love every time he mentions the "championship committee". 

Hangman becoming petty and obsessed enough that he's more focused on Swerve losing than on himself winning is going to be his downfall, and I love it.

I just love the idea that they named all the lines to make it less confusing for tourists and visitors, and then presumed that all of those tourists have an intrinsic knowledge of which areas of London were historical hotspots for the weaving industry.

I understand the logic of splitting the Overground up into groups; I've got used to the little stretch of it I routinely use, but it can be a bit confusing/daunting trying to make sense of it otherwise. 

I'm just not a fan of the names they've chosen, I'd rather something more blandly functional that gave me some indication of where the train was going.

1 hour ago, RedRooster said:

I'm sure Takeshita vs. Ospreay will be great, but I'm not crazy about good matches for the sake of good matches. I need to feel invested in the outcome, so I hope they make the effort to do that. Perhaps Ospreay decides to go solo or something. I do think they need to reassess how the Don Callis family works. It's not about the wrestlers within, it's mostly about Callis. And he's a bit shit, really. 

I assume the end result is Ospreay going babyface against Callis, maybe taking Kyle Fletcher with him. Aussie Open were booked on the Jericho Cruise, so that's Mark Davis due back soon too; as much as you'd think the conventional wisdom is to throw Ospreay in right at the main event level, there's not a clear fit for him in the Joe/Hangman/Swerve situation which is likely to go on past Revolution, so there's worse things they can do with him than Trios matches with Aussie Open until everything is moved around enough to get to him challenging for the World Title at All In.

it's bizarre how Cody hasn't really changed that much, but everything that made him seem like an out-of-place weird robot who spoke via an AI trained on wrestling promos in AEW somehow makes him seem like one of the most organic babyfaces WWE have seen in years.

must have mentioned this before, but I have a wrestler mate who, on hearing WCW commentators call Brian Pillman "Flyin' Brian", was convinced that this wrestler's name was Brian Bryan. 

WWE just aren't very good at putting people over in defeat (and, arguably, not always in victory either). When people talk about wins and losses mattering, that doesn't just mean about title shots and pushes, it's about some indication of momentum, and of the wrestlers involved caring about it. One of the reasons Eddie Kingston is great is because you get the sense that every loss eats away at him, and every victory feels hard-earned, while Cena's schtick for years was to lose to somebody then cut a "nice speech" promo about how it didn't really matter unless they beat him again. 

Ten years ago, when people kicked off that Daniel Bryan didn't win the Royal Rumble, the problem wasn't just that he wasn't in the Royal Rumble, it's that he'd lost earlier that night and there was no indication of any direction or forward momentum for him at all, which left people open to blindly speculating that he would be in the Rumble, and let them down when he wasn't. When John Cena was doing his US Title open challenges, he was doing all he could to have competitive matches and give star-making performances to guys like Cesaro and Kevin Owens, but the problem with star-making performances is that they only actually make stars if there's any follow-up. The only person who used to be able to pull it off was Brock Lesnar, because if he had a competitive match rather than a squash, the opponent usually came out of it with more credibility for simply being able to hang with him. 

The last few weeks aside, WWE booking seems to have been more coherent lately than in years past, and Triple H seems to have a slightly different creative vision to Vince McMahon, so maybe he will be able to do as a booker what he couldn't as a wrestler, and have people look good in defeat, which I agree would be a fantastic use of John Cena if they can pull it off, but also, maybe for Cena the bloom is off the rose and he's too well known as someone prepared to do business at this stage that a win won't mean much at all.

8 minutes ago, Vamp said:

There's got to be a luchador in his 90s on the Mexican independent scene. 

Wikipedia reckons Tinieblas wrestled in 2019, when he would have been 80, but I'm certain that's incorrect and that it was Tinieblas Jr. in that match at a sprightly 53.

Mil Mascaras has been teasing a comeback at 81, though it's yet to happen. 

While I wouldn't be surprised if there's some obscure local act I don't know about, the oldest I can confirm is El Satanico, who wrestled last Tuesday at the age of 74, and is essentially a regular for CMLL and still taking independent bookings. He's worked more matches this year so far than Roman Reigns worked between Summerslam 2023 and today, despite having debuted in 1973, and having wrestled the original Blue Demon and El Santo - which means there's at least one person wrestling regularly today who wrestled somebody that debuted in the 1930s. 

As for Great Kojika, he's the oldest active wrestler currently, and may also have the record for longest career - aside from Popoff Le Gitan; he's at least 80 years old, claims to have debuted in 1956, and wrestled Charles Crowley in France last year, which maybe gives him the record for wrestling in the most consecutive decades at eight, which, if true, would be the record. The problem is that, like Mae Young, who also claims eight decades (or nine, if you believe that she debuted in 1939, which there isn't really any evidence for - 1941 seems more likely), it's not clear if they worked every intervening decade - Mae most likely didn't work at all in the '80s, and maybe not the '70s either (though there's record of her wrestling in 1969, so the '70s isn't unthinkable), and it's not clear how often Popoff was working, given how little data there is on the parts of the French scene he was working in. A Guardian article claimed his retirement match was in 2009, and I know he worked 2019 and 2023, so that's the three most recent decades covered, but whether he genuinely worked the '90s, '80s, '70s, '60s and '50s I'm not sure.

Back to Kojika - aside from being 81, he also either has or only recently recovered from colon cancer. I would guess that he's the only wrestler still active who came through the JWA dojo.  

When I worked jobs that didn't require me to wear one, I used to wear suits quite a lot just on nights out and the like, and I was told that how I was dressed and the little bits of know-how about fashion I expressed in the interview were what got me the Moss Bros job, but since working there and having to do it all the time, I never wear suits outside of weddings and funerals these days. Aside from the job, part of that is that I used to love tweeds and a waistcoat, and the double whammy of Gareth Southgate and Peaky Blinders made me not want to look like every other prick on a stag do.

I've done a weird amount of jobs that have entailed me being on my own for long stretches, and very few that have allowed for stuff like quizzes and mucking about with co-workers, though on another quiet day at the call centre I introduced people to Tape Measure Pontoon after it got a mention on a Radcliffe and Maconie call-in. You get a tape measure, extend it to full length, then snap it back and try and stop it as close to 21 as possible. 

18 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Growing up bombarded with messages like this from a variety of sources across the cultural landscape, to view the erosion and outright violation of someone's sexual agency as nothing more than a bit of fun at worst and a comedic mishap at best, it's not surprising that insufficient comprehension of what consent entails, both by men who breach it or women who defend said behaviour, has been so endemic.

I think what's worse than it being played for laughs is the extent to which various romance films, TV shows and the like have depicted persistence and ignoring boundaries as somehow romantic, that the way to a woman's heart is just to keep pursuing her until she eventually says yes. That, as much as sexist jokes and objectification and titillation, has contributed to those aspects of the culture.

To bring it back to Vince, and to comments by people like Kevin Nash - I don't know who first said the line that everything is secretly about sex, except sex, which is secretly about power, but lately I tend to see a lot of cultural failings rooted in our inability to reckon with issues of power and systems. Especially in America, where a combination of the fact that talking about power dynamics that can sound a bit too much like scary Marxism, and their culture - especially on the right-wing - being profoundly individualistic, they don't like the idea that anyone but themselves can have bear any responsibility for their actions, or that any external factors can impact on someone's decision-making. When it comes to broader politics, it means pattern recognition that should be identifying systemic corruption and inequality instead misfires and creates conspiracy theories, and when it comes to consent, they can't frame it as anything but yes/no, so anyone who entered into a relationship of any kind with Vince McMahon was de facto consenting, because there's no appreciation of the enormous power imbalance that relationship entails, or the pressures that somebody like Vince McMahon can place on somebody.

It also raises the other two ugly aspects of Nash's response - one being that by consenting to a relationship, even if we overlook the duress she was placed under to do so, she consented to everything that Vince subsequently did to her, which is the logic of marital rape. The other is financial - the idea that Vince's victims are either only after his money, or that Vince's actions are excusable because they got or are going to get his money. It seems to start at the assumption that the victims are acting dishonestly, and work backwards from there.