BomberPat

That's actually likely another aspect of it - WWE have been after a major Hispanic draw for years; it's why they fast-tracked Mistico to the main roster, why they pushed Del Rio so hard, and so on. Velasquez is a huge star in Mexico.

1 hour ago, Michael_3165 said:

He has always historically been cited as saying he prefers to see wrestling as mini movies or stories. He is embarrassed by the business and dies to be seen in the same category as other media tycoons. He can't stand the term wrestler Ffs! 

Again, that's not "he hates wrestling", that's "he's realised how to make money from wrestling on a scale never seen before" and "he knows how to sell wrestling to advertisers and investors". 

He wouldn't still be running a wrestling company in his 70s, working til god knows what time in the morning rewriting scripts, when he could have handed it over or sold it off decades ago and lived off the interest, if he "hated wrestling".

Short answer is that he impressed in his first wrestling match in AAA, and had big money offers from NJPW and AEW as a result, so WWE got on board.

Long answer is that we're seeing in the US something akin to what happened to NJPW, and Japanese wrestling more broadly, in the late '90s and early '00s. An industry that has always had to negotiate where it fits between "sport" and "entertainment" now having to consider if, and how, MMA impacts on that balance, while MMA stars are starting to age out of that sport (which, in the grand scheme of things, is sort of a recent phenomenon). 

1 minute ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

I don't know why people had such a major problem with this. I went to the Empire Strikes Back in concert the other week and he does just as quippy a quip in that. Does "apology accepted" get a pass because it was in the OT? The occasional Vader quip is a much more fun way of showing there's a still a bit of humanity in there than him having a wail over Padme.

It's a hard one to justify - I love Vader arbitrarily promoting people in Empire after he's force-choked someone, but I think he stops short of making naff puns. I think it's the combination of the quip and the hitherto unseen volcano lair that make it a bit too much for me. That said, I do love the shot of Vader in his life-support tank thing out of his armour, but feel it would be a better fit in another film, where it wouldn't have undermined how much better that shot of him in darkness would have been as his first appearance.

Also, as much as I think the evil volcano lair is a bad fit for the Vader character as of the Original Trilogy, him being a mopey angsty prick for the entire prequel trilogy makes me think that a melodramatic Mighty Max evil base on the planet he got burned on is exactly the sort of goth bullshit that version of the character would do.

5 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

For me, the strongest impression I get from the way things are done is that McMahon actually dislikes wrestling, whereas most other promoters love it. 

I would love to find out what wrestling McMahon actually enjoys, compared to what he thinks makes money. Because I'm convinced the two are very different, but everyone assumes that they're the same thing.

There's as much fan wank in Solo as any of the others, though. The aforementioned villain, Lando, the visual nod to the Rancorr pit, Chewbacca ripping off arms, practically everything with Lando ("I hate you"/"I know" in particular), and so on. 

Rogue One largely follows original characters with no bearing on the trilogy (which also means heightened engagement, as at no point am I thinking, "well, these guys are going to survive because they're in the next film"), and fleshes out aspects of the original movies that benefited from being fleshed out - establishing that the Death Star's obvious gaping flaw was there through active sabotage is a plot point that makes what follows more reasonable, whereas earlier prequels only serve to muddle and confuse by drawing connections between characters or plot points that were never necessary. The fan wank is there, for sure, but it's not the majority of the movie, and is often the weakest points.

I also love how Rogue One shows the Rebel Alliance as actually being made up of a variety of splinter groups, with varying approaches to tackling the Empire, and with even the unified "Alliance" still arguing on what the best course of action would be - it makes them feel more believable, and with more of a sense of urgency and humanity, than the whiter than white, stereotypical good guys of the original trilogy.

1 minute ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

thought Vader's rampage through the corridor was possibly the scariest he's ever been. 

100% agreed with this - though I think it should have been the only time we saw Vader in this film. Seeing him in his melodramatic supervillain volcano base, and quipping like an '80s cartoon villain, wasn't necessary. His lightsaber activating in darkness, and then just wrecking everyone is a perfect introduction, and complements the opening of A New Hope perfectly.

1 minute ago, Chris B said:

That said, they do seem to be learning from their mistakes and making changes at times, so hopefully it's a learning curve and they'll improve at it.

This is something that I think plays a big part in why I still enjoy their shows in spite of my criticisms; a mistake feels like a mistake honestly made, a questionable booking decision is something I can have faith in them to address, and so on. Whereas with WWE, a questionable decision leads you into saying, "well, they need to protect X because he's booked to headline Wrestlemania in 6 months time, and the next match won't have a clean finish because there's a Saudi Arabia show coming up" - they've lost the audience's trust, and everyone cynically assumes the worst.

Admittedly, I've not watched Rogue One since it came out in the cinema, but it felt fresh in all the ways Force Awakens didn't, and felt like it actually functioned as a prequel in all the ways the prequel series didn't. It supplemented A New Hope, it didn't over-complicate or take away from it. It filled in plot holes, rather than creating new ones. And, cameos and CGI Tarkin aside, it effectively established that you can tell a Star Wars story, firmly set in the Star Wars Universe, without relying on the same old characters.

Compare that to Solo, and you have a character who at the start of A New Hope is a heartless, self-centred smuggler, and whose narrative arc over that film and the next is to realise a purpose greater than himself - to have him effectively already have undergone that arc in a movie set, presumably, only a couple of years (at most) earlier completely undermines the point of the character, and the journey the audience go on with him in the original trilogy. In terms of storytelling, that's arguably more egregious than any of Episodes 1-3's plot holes. 

And, again, "How did Han Solo get his name?" is not a question anyone was asking. You also see it established that Han can speak Wookiee, something he never does again for the rest of the franchise. It's a film that added nothing, and detracted a lot. 

Prequels are largely pointless endeavours almost all the time, but when a prequel undermines or takes away from the original story - as every Star Wars prequel bar Rogue One has done in some sense - it's even worse.

True, but that's not as much of a give-and-take relationship as that implies. When one company more or less has the monopoly on advertising and marketing their films, that means it's that one company dictating what people want to see.

Audiences can be awful for it - almost everyone I know who complains about "all Hollywood does is sequels and remakes these days" will still flock out for the next Marvel movie, or a Terminator sequel, or the new Star War - but it's hard for audiences to want to see anything else when there's nothing telling them what else is out there, and when Disney are releasing enough movies to fill every screen, and cover every advertising hoarding. 

It's more about a seeming inability to capitalise on, or follow up on, key moments.

While I like that they haven't gone the WWE route of having everyone on every show, and recognising that some people can afford to miss a week, they've created a clear hierarchy with the people who are on every show (this isn't necessarily inherently a bad thing) - but this is where promos and highlight packages should come in. Brock Lesnar isn't on WWE TV every week, but they rarely let you forget that Brock Lesnar exists. In the early '90s, Hogan wasn't on TV every week, but you were always constantly are that you were watching a show in which Hulk Hogan existed, and mattered - other people talked about him, you saw video packages, promos, highlights. 

Nyla Rose turned heel, beat up Riho, beat up Michael Nakazawa, and had to be stopped by Kenny Omega, one of the bosses and top stars, on episode 1, and she hasn't been on TV since. Talent that have been featured on PPV haven't shown up on TV at all. There have been one-off video packages for wrestlers who still haven't debuted weeks or months later. 

Out of sight, out of mind - at a time when they should be establishing who their roster are, how they relate to one another, and what their motivations are, all but a select few we're barely even being given reason to remember exist. 

4 minutes ago, Whistling Skull said:

I'm pretty sure Cody himself is responsible for this. The bucks and Omega's presentation of themselves is vastly different from Cody's. So much so, that I assume that no one is overseeing their character development as a whole. They seem to still be doing what they individually think is cool.

I think you're probably right - early on, they talked a lot about how they would let wrestlers manage their own characters and book their own stories, using that as a selling point, but it just rang alarm bells for me, and that's probably been one of their biggest issues so far. There's a real issue of stylistic inconsistency when you're letting one guy book a serious blood feud while another guy's booking themselves in a more comedic fashion, with little thought to how to bridge the gap. 

And sooner or later you'll run in to guys who don't agree with how someone else wants to book them to their ends, or two conflicting ideas of how things should be. There needs to be someone steering the ship.

It feels to me like they invest a lot of energy in Cody Rhodes' storyline, and leave everyone else to figure out their own. The presentation of one compared to the rest is light years apart.

Yep. And for all they try to argue that they're not kids' films, how many of them fell in love with the franchise as an adult? 

And "it's for kids" isn't a criticism of its quality. It's just an acknowledgement of the target audience. But insecure people don't like to be told that they're not the target audience for anything, and certainly don't want to be told "it's for children".

On 10/22/2019 at 9:45 AM, WyattSheepMask said:

All that shows is that the “NOT MY STAR WARS~!” folk are either full of shit or just a very loud but small pocket of the fan base.

 

100%. They're a tiny minority, and representative of the most toxic element of fandom and "geek culture"; the sense of ownership over a media property.

They talk about how the films will be a disaster because "the fans" have been let down, because they think that being a Star Wars fan is some niche sub-culture. There's nothing special about you for being a fan of one of the highest-grossing, most watched film franchises in history. It's such a blinkered, naive sense of entitlement that has no bearing in reality.

For the record, I didn't like much of The Last Jedi, I felt it tried a little too hard to subvert expectations to the point that it didn't really seem to know what it was trying to say, and had whole sub-plots that amounted to nothing and could easily have been cut without affecting the narrative. There were a few points where I honestly just lost track of what was going on.

Force Awakens was okay, weakest points were the blatant fan-service, but I recognise why that was necessary. Rogue One was fantastic, and the best Star Wars movie since Empire, and Solo was absolute dog-shit. In many ways I'd put it right at the bottom of my rankings, because at least the prequels tried to add something new, Solo was a complete waste of time, utterly out of step with the character's existing character arc, and only served to answer questions no one was asking - people wanted to know how Han and Chewbacca ended up as a team, sure, but no one wanted to know why he was called Han Solo, I think everyone rightly assumed that it's just his fucking name! 

(Though my "galaxy brain" interpretation of that scene is that every single character in Star Wars was given their name by a bored, surly immigration officer, and that's why they're all fucking stupid. "Chet....Porkins, I guess".)

Agreed. I still enjoy watching it as a wrestling show where it feels like what's going on actually matters, and where the crowd are invested in everything, but I find that the people I'm most invested in are those I know from elsewhere, there's not really anyone that AEW have taught me to like.

It really highlighted how essential Chris Jericho is to them in his promo introducing The Inner Circle, as it was the first time anyone except maybe Cody got a "this is this person's name, here's a one line summary of their character" introduction.

What I'm really hoping for, and I think the connection to Rey Mysterio is pointing toward, is that the match starts out with Brock expecting it to be an MMA-style fight, only for Cain to catch him off guard with some lucha stuff, or Brock to rush him for the F5, and Cain counter with a big lucha spinning arm drag, something like that.

To the vast majority of the audience, unaware of Velasquez's couple of matches in AAA, that'll be a great twist that will win him a lot of goodwill from people not yet won over by him.

With reports of him being on a multi-year contract, though, I do wonder what's next, after the obvious Brock feud. In a way, I almost think he'd have been better off signing with AEW (if they could match WWE's offer), because the appeal of being "The Guy Who Beat Brock Lesnar For Real" is a better sell in an upstart promotion competing with WWE than it is in WWE itself.

I always love a heel turn where the wrestler turning visually crosses a line from one side of the ring to another. It's like a more subtle, but generally more impactful, version of the old "remove your t-shirt to reveal a different t-shirt" trope. I'm rarely ever a fan of the Pelé kick, but what a superb use of it. 

Only downside is that it almost definitely means we're getting Undisputed Era in Wargames again, and I'd like to see someone else get a shot in it - it kind of highlights how static the upper card of NXT is in a lot of ways (particularly compared to in the past, where someone would generally have a logical narrative arc up to the main event, and then be called up to the main roster), that TakeOver War Games will be headlined by the Undisputed Era three years in a row, and that the saga of Johnny Gargano and Tomasso Ciampa has been going on even longer. 

Jamie Hayter is basically Bea Priestley but better at everything Bea Priestley thinks she's good at, so hopefully this isn't a one-and-done, or just her there as a proxy for Bea. 

She wrestled Britt Baker in EVE earlier this year, and I seem to remember it being decent, but nothing specific. It was on a stacked card, though, so I'm not surprised it doesn't stand out.

Almost any wrestler looks like a wanker in white. It's never a good look.

6 minutes ago, Love-Wilcox said:

I think the issue with Riho's offence, particularly her strikes, isn't with how she throws them but rather how her opponents are selling them.

100% agreed here. Riho throws strikes well, with full commitment - other people shouldn't be selling them as anything more than a bit of a nuisance, though. Takes two to tango and all that.

I don't know enough about Ice Ribbon's audience back then to know whether it was predominantly adult males or not - I know from conversation with Emi that it's never been her target audience, but couldn't tell you what the actual demographic breakdown of the average Ice Ribbon crowd would be! 2006/7 was a pretty dark time for Joshi wrestling, falling somewhere between the good old days of largely teenage girl audiences and the bad times of idol perverts, so it could go either way.

In terms of age balance on the shows themselves, matches tended to be very short - only a couple of minutes - and basically grappling exhibitions, particularly where the younger wrestlers were concerned. Bigger matches were more likely to involve older talent like Emi herself, Cherry, or Manami Toyota. Or, weirdly, Mr Gannosuke.

"Who wants to watch her wrestle" isn't the same thing as debating the fact that she was wrestling for that long, though.

1 minute ago, Mark_Doctor said:

Pro wrestling is supposed to be entertainment in front of an audience though, unlike kids doing karate or whatever.

Other than the suggestion of audience noncery, that doesn't really seem to be a significant distinction. I'd be far more worried about a child potentially getting hurt in any of those sports than I would be worried about them having to perform in front of an audience. And we don't think it's wrong for young kids to play football or rugby at that age.

I'm not really defending Riho wrestling at that age, because personally I don't think kids should be wrestling that young, though I admit there's logical inconsistency there when you accept that we take it as read that kids will be involved in all sorts of other physical activity at the same age. The majority of Sakura's trainees when Ice Ribbon started (which was where Riho got her start) were young girls, with Emi training them predominantly in terms of exercise and physical fitness, through the means of wrestling classes. You can quibble with whether those kids should have been on shows or not, but the fact remains that they were, and that it does mean Riho has 13 years of experience at her age - which was the point you initially seemed to be contesting.

Yeah - we can quibble about whether wrestlers should be training at that age or not, but you can't really deny that Riho was, and has been working consistently ever since.

I've not seen a lot of her work from that time period, but Emi's training style (and Ice Ribbon's house style under Emi) was very mat-based, and I don't think she has kids training to take big bumps or anything like that. I inherently feel uncomfortable with the idea of young kids being trained to wrestle, but in practice, is it that much different to kids that age doing karate, jiu-jitsu, or boxing, or kids learning rugby from the age of six or seven, or American football from even younger?

Joey Ryan's fine when he doesn't lean too much into that gimmick - I enjoyed him in Lucha Underground as a sleazy undercover cop. 

I don't get annoyed at the dick flip stuff in a Cornette "killing the business" sense, I just don't find it funny, particularly not the two hundredth time around. Hated the Joey Ryan stuff at All-In, for a variety of reasons.

That said, dude has found a way to earn big money on the indies by doing very little work, and taking very few bumps. More power to him.

19 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Interesting they went down the "Nintendo of America" route. Would've thought, to make it a bit more palatable to the general American market, they'd call it "New America Pro-Wrestling" or something.

I don't think they'd want to undermine the NJPW brand by not incorporating it in full in the name; and I don't know what they think their ceiling is in the US market, but I imagine they must have done enough market research to realise that their audience is largely made up of people for whom "Japan" will be more of a draw than a turn-off.

I'm pretty sure I've spent the last five years thinking wrestling news couldn't get any madder, only for the following year to top it. A lot of the past few years has just seen the received wisdom of how wrestling is "supposed" to work turned on its head, which is quite exciting.

I wasn't watching wrestling in 1999, but got back into it around mid-2000.

The thing that would amaze me most from back then, as someone who got into tape trading, into waiting hours for short, grainy clips of FMW matches to download, and followed Japanese and indie deathmatch wrestling vicariously through message boards and magazines, is just the sheer accessibility of wrestling these days. Being able to watch NJPW shows, from the Tokyo Dome, live in the UK would have been unthinkable. That even small and niche promotions can be watched online with relatively little effort is the most drastic change to how we consume wrestling in decades.