BomberPat

15 hours ago, Thunderplex said:

So many people on Twitter are playing up to the sheer absurdity of the angle, it's brilliant. Perhaps the only way I could get behind this is if WWE go all-in on it and start revealing everybody to be somebody's secret son or long lost brother. It could even bring back an angle me and a mate of mine proposed years ago; "Paul Bearer, Everybody's Dad".

But, seriously, though, Pete Dunne as William Regal's illegitimate son is the only way to go.

15 hours ago, wordsfromlee said:

There's got to be some kind of twist to the Angle/Jordan thing to happen in a couple of weeks or so. In this so-called 'Reality Era', they can't really expect the viewers to actually believe that they are father and son. There's bound to be more to this to be revealed soon.

I'm assuming that somebody - either Corey Graves or Triple H/Stephanie - have fabricated the whole thing, and are exploiting both Angle and Jason Jordan for nefarious ends, maybe trying to ruin Kurt or make him appear unfit for the job so they can make a grab for power. There needs to be a get-out to it, in any case.

I got properly fucked around by Easyjet yesterday.

I was in London for Pro Wrestling: EVE, flying back to Jersey Sunday evening. Really foggy and zero visibility at Jersey airport, so had to turn around and fly back to Gatwick, by which point there were no new flights. We were put up in a hotel, and told that we'd have a flight in the morning, probably around 8am, and that we'd be sent a text or an email, or the hotel would inform us, when the flight time was confirmed. Never received a text or an email, and the replacement flight was cancelled. Woman at the customer service desk the next day, when I asked her why we were told there would be a flight, and why we were told we would get a text, when neither happened, just said, "I never told you that". I know you bloody didn't, but someone working for Easyjet did, so you could maybe try and take some bloody responsibility as a company, no?

There were no Easyjet flights from Gatwick to Jersey until 7pm the following day, and her best suggestion as to what I should do was to get a flight from Southampton, which was due to leave in three hours' time. She didn't seem to grasp any of the reasons that wasn't exactly ideal. I eventually ended up having to book a £300+ BA flight, as it was the only flight from Gatwick that day, and now I'm skint and trying to claim my money back from Easyjet for the flight, for breakfast at Gatwick, for a taxi from the airport, and for Wifi at the hotel because I was awaiting an email that never came. If I'd thought about it, I'd have kept my ticket for the £3 shuttle bus from the hotel to the airport and claimed for that just to make a point.

Not really keen on that reveal. What does it achieve? Where's the pay-off?

It feels like a "Hornswoggle as Vince's illegitimate son" reveal, where they had something else in mind, had to change direction at the last minute, but had already backed themselves into a corner by announcing the reveal.

1 hour ago, JNLister said:

When people argue Jodie Whittaker was picked through tokenism, are they suggesting she unfairly got the role over superior actor Kris Marshall?

Now now, we all know that only straight white men ever achieve anything fairly, and women and minorities are handing everything undeservedly because Political Correctness.

The whole point of science fiction is to look at familiar concepts from a new angle, if you can't handle a female lead in a sci-fi story, you never really grasped the point of sci-fi anyway. If you can't handle a female Doctor Who, you've not really being paying attention to what Doctor Who is all about.

I think they accept that ROH aren't competition - nor are TNA, but ROH have no real pretence about trying to be competition. If TNA are WCW, then ROH are ECW - the company that WWE are happy to blithely tolerate, knowing that they're not at risk of actively losing fans to them, and that their continued existence could actually benefit WWE more than running them out of business would, and knowing that throwing a bone to the hardcore fans by acknowledging them from time to time.

NJPW are in much the same boat, though I wouldn't be surprised to see that change if their US expansion gets much more ambitious than it already is.

Interesting point about Jarrett - I wouldn't have thought that's the case; I doubt Vince was particularly involved with the documentary, and Dixie's there because she played a substantial role in Kurt's story, but, at the same time, never put it past Vince McMahon to be a mad bastard making business decisions based on petty grudges.

I'm in the same boat as you, that if I'm interested in something, I'll check it out. But RAW for most people in the US isn't something they have to go out of their way to watch in the same way we do in the UK - it's 7 or 8pm habit viewing. There are plenty of people who'll stick the wrestling on the telly, never knowing there's anything else going on in wrestling outside of that show. That's the vast majority of the audience.

A few years back, there was a study/survey amongst WWE viewers that found that less than 3% of WWE viewers could name a single other wrestling promotion.

I mean rightly ignored simply from a business perspective - it does WWE no favours to mention them, so why do it? If you mention them you run the risk of either confusing/alienating your audience, or making them think "TNA, eh? What's that?" and going off and watching it. At the very least, by acknowledging them WWE are lending them credibility.

The old adage in advertising was that Subway will tell you why they're better than McDonalds, McDonalds don't need to tell you why they're better than Subway.

5 minutes ago, PunkStep said:

They showed an online article during the documentary where it says 'Kurt Angle signs with TNA' and Dixie referenced 'when he came to us'. I don't think they ever said TNA, but they clearly showed the name- which is their biggest acknowledgement yet of them.

They've been acknowledged by name on Legends with JBL, when he interviewed Sting, as well. And possibly some other places, but always minor Network shows. This is probably the highest profile usage of it.

There's a huge difference between a Network show and RAW, though. Several wrestlers - Kevin Nash, Rob Van Dam and Christian all come to mind - have said that, while wrestling on TV every week for TNA, people would ask them, "why don't you wrestle any more?". The vast majority of the audience don't know what TNA is, and even fewer will know who Dixie Carter is, and fewer still will care. Throw in that she's a dreadful performer, and it would all but force them to acknowledge a promotion they have been rightly ignoring for over a decade, and where would they benefit?

I've seen people say "well, you never thought we'd see Eric Bischoff in WWE" - but the two are miles apart. Bischoff had the built-in story of having "almost run Vince McMahon out of business", he came in with name value and notoriety, from a promotion that was already dead (and that they owned the rights to) so they didn't have to worry about acknowledging his past and, crucially, he was a top-notch on-screen talent. He couldn't be further removed from Dixie Carter.

Whatever it is will lead to the rumoured Triple H/Angle match, surely, so it's far more likely to be MCMAHON DRAMA than sticking a nobody like Dixie on TV for the benefit of a single digit percentage of the audience.

2 minutes ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

The idea of an 'Austin moment' was mentioned above - Stone Cold regularly used to do all that stuff Pat mentions there and became even more of a babyface for it!* Times have changed.

 

 

*not with me, but generally speaking 

I've got a mixture of feelings on this. It's obvious that WWE, with every new star, are trying to make a new Hogan, a new Austin, or a new Rock - The Rock was the archetype for a lot of Reigns' early promos, and for plenty of other attempted top babyface pushes before him; they wanted their top face to be a laughing, joking catchphrase machine. But no one else is The Rock.

So every now and then they try and make somebody more Steve Austin. But they forget that Steve Austin didn't become a star by being the next Hulk Hogan, or the next Bret Hart, he was just the best Steve Austin he could be. And they strip this stuff of all context, so they try and make a new Steve Austin, but it's the highlight package Steve Austin - so instead of a character who developed over time, and was defined by his history, and how he interacted with other characters, we get an angry prop comic who hates his boss, and sometimes commits vehicular assault.

The problem for me with Austin, and the Attitude era in general, is that it was a blip. It was a very brief period in time when the WWF managed to hone in on the zeitgeist, and present itself as something counter-cultural and edgy. But it was still a blip, no matter its success, it was short-term. But so many people watching now owe their fandom to that "era" that they consider it the norm, and it absolutely wasn't, it was the exception to the rule.

18 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I can understand people being miffed at Roman's post match attack and seeing him as a sore loser but to me it was came across more as "this feud is bigger than the matches" type of thing. Both guys hate eachother, Braun has hospitalised Roman several times, tried to kill him and left him battered and bloody over and over. Roman wants his revenge. Why, after being thrown into the back of an ambulance, would he just sit there and say "Dang, I lost the match. Oh well." and just sit in there. He wants to fucking kill Braun. Him attacking him almost immediately after made sense to me.

It's a broader issue of how WWE book babyfaces for me. The key difference between a face and a heel, to me, should always be that the face's way of resolving an issue is to beat the heel in the ring, while the heel will do whatever is necessary to further their own interests. While there are select instances in which a face attacking a heel outside of the match are acceptable, I don't think beating up the heel after losing to them cleanly is one of those instances. Nor should a babyface ever take disproportionate revenge over a heel. 

But WWE have been doing that for years - the most egregious for me was the Punk/Heyman feud. CM Punk won a match that meant he got his hands on Paul Heyman, and we could understand that, despite Heyman being utterly defenceless, it was morally justifiable to let CM Punk beat him up and get a measure of revenge. But then a couple of weeks later, Punk beats him up again just because. At which point he's just beating up a middle-aged non-wrestler for fun, so why is he the hero?

Similarly, if we move away from the concept that a babyface's resolution should always be an in-ring victory, and say that Roman Reigns was justified in attempting to kill Braun Strowman outside of the match, it doesn't just raise the question of why Roman Reigns is the babyface, it raises the question of why we bother having matches at all if the babyface is prepared to physically attack his rival outside of the confines of a match and, crucially, to receive absolutely no punishment for doing so. If you're able to commit vehicular assault on the bloke you don't like, and there be precisely no ramifications for you, why would you spend all your time dicking around in wrestling matches with him?

14 minutes ago, boytoy said:

The attack afterwards isn't really out of keeping with Reigns' character, he has pretty much been a full blown heel for at least 6 months.

He hasn't, though. He still very much wrestles as a babyface, his matches are structured around him working face, and the announcers still sell him as a babyface.

1 minute ago, Carbomb said:

That too! But I was more referring to the degree, i.e. BomberPat's post about "Where could it go from there?"

For the record, I thought it was bloody stupid then too, particularly given that (as we'll most likely see with Strowman too), the angle didn't write The Rock out for more than a couple of weeks. We see people out for half a year with a rib injury, but someone getting crushed inside an ambulance, with untold internal damage, are back wrestling at the next pay-per-view.

You're right that it didn't hurt Rock/Hogan, but I'd say it did absolutely nothing to build to Rock/Hogan either. That match stood alone, and didn't need the build - taken as a product of its build, the match they had makes absolutely no sense if you approach it as a match between The Rock and the man who ploughed a truck into the side of his ambulance and tried to kill him.

42 minutes ago, PowerButchi said:

Bobby Eaton has the second best punch ever so I let it go. Puncher #1 is (or should be) obvious. 

Oh, absolutely. And I'm probably overstating how obvious it is anyway.

Puncher #1 is Lawler or Funk, surely?

Few things annoy me in wrestling more than shitty punches. If you can't throw a decent punch, just don't bother. There's plenty of other things you could be doing instead, and nothing's more likely to make a Dad watching with his kid say, "it's all fake, look at that, he hardly touched him" than a shitty worked punch.

Dixie is responsible for one of the worst live promos I've ever seen, wouldn't sell a single ticket, and would offer nothing to the product beyond a surprise moment that would appeal to the minority neckbeard audience and mean sweet fuck all to the vast majority, as well as likely forcing them to acknowledge TNA on TV to a far greater extent than they ever have. On top of that, I doubt she'd work cheap, so you'd piss off a lot of people that they'd bring in somehow who has absolutely no right to be there and nothing to offer the show making big money, over people working their arse off in developmental. I doubt we'll see her on TV at all.

Echo the love for Samoa Joe, though. I was never really a fan of him until he came to NXT, always felt he was missing something. But on the main roster he's been absolutely nailing it. The way he carries himself, and the way he speaks, he just seems so much more "real" and genuinely menacing than anyone else bar Lesnar. You just wouldn't fuck with him at all.

I loved Brock vs. Joe. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of a physical slugfest early on, but mostly it was great. Someone else said it earlier, but Lesnar's matches really feel like a heavyweight MMA fight, the psychology of them is just completely different to anything else in WWE, and they feel like a sprint more than a marathon. It's always just two blokes fighting like their life depends on it to win, rather than going for flashy moves, and that's great.

Lesnar gets a lot of stick for being formulaic and samey, but his matches are more varied, and have more nuanced storytelling, than anyone else in WWE right now. They're also a lot more unpredictable - for as much as people complain about "Suplex City", who else has given us as many "holy fuck, what?!" moments as Lesnar? From beating the Undertaker to squashing John Cena to losing to Goldberg in under a minute, you go into every Brock Lesnar match genuinely thinking absolutely anything could happen, and not in a Russo swerve-y way, but in a "fights sometimes don't go as you thought they would" legit way.

And it was a star-making performance for Samoa Joe - if you listen to the announcers all the way through, they're barely talking about Brock. The entire story of the match was Samoa Joe.

I didn't like the Strowman/Reigns stuff. I'm a firm believer that a babyface settles his scores in the ring, and it's the heel who takes liberties outside of the ring. I don't know why we should be expected to root for a guy who loses a match and is such a sore loser that he actually tries to permanently injure, if not kill, his opponent moments later. I get that they're trying to give Reigns an "Austin moment", but there was a lot more to Steve Austin than attempted vehicular manslaughter.

When they finally got the ambulance door open, I was hoping Braun would just be stood there bellowing, get out and just beast Jamie Noble across the car park and go off looking for Reigns again. That they had Strowman walk out, refuse help, and get to his feet - a routine long associated with the fiery "never-say-die" babyface - made the whole thing even more baffling as now not only am I questioning why we're expected to cheer Roman Reigns, but why would anyone boo Braun Strowman after that?

Beyond that, what's the pay-off? What can possibly live up to expectations and be a rational blow-off for a feud where attempted murder is the set-up?

Bobby Eaton used to be great for the slapping sound effect - he'd slap his own arm on the last punch, it would get a perfect sound, and he'd be so quick and smooth with it that you'd never catch him doing it. Problem was, it left a big red handprint on his pasty skin.

Sabu's the king of it, though, you can pretty much never catch him doing it, but always get the sound and the timing right. He's the anti-Gargano.

Yeah, I love Gordon Cole, big fan of how much he's in this series. I don't think the last episode was the strongest, but definitely one of the most "Twin Peaks", and the first time it's started to feel like all the different stories are starting to come together and reconvene somewhere. It took three or four episodes for me to really buy into it, and there's still a few aspects I'm unsure of, but there's enough brilliance in it that it's become "event viewing", which very few TV shows manage for me, and I still think it's probably the best thing on telly again.

5 minutes ago, JNLister said:

Overheard some teenagers yesterday discussing Pride and tolerance in general and stuff. One of them made a slightly off-color comment and his mates immediately chastised him and pointed out how attitudes are changing and society isn't the same as way back in the distant past when people were less open and accepting.

Which was a great sentiment. It's just I felt very old because what they actually said was: "Hey, you can't say that. It's not, like, 2005."

Times move quick. That would make me feel positively decrepit, though.

I was, bored, looking through an old thread on a message board a while back, from around '05/'06, and in amongst it was some casual transphobia that I'd be genuinely shocked by if I saw today, yet went largely unchallenged.

I work in education, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how with it a lot of teenagers are these days in terms of calling out stuff like that. It's good to see, and good to see things moving forward.

A colleague once complained that he thinks some kids are just claiming to be "gender-fluid" or "gender-neutral" because it's a cool new thing, and he's probably right in a lot of cases - you can say you're "gender-neutral" and that makes you quirky and interesting without actually having to live your life any differently, and when I was a teenager you'd have people claiming to be bisexual for the same reasons - but my view is that teenagers are always going to try and latch on to something that gives them a sense of identity, or that goes some way to giving an easy answer as to why they don't always feel like they fit in with the world, and if they feel confident and comfortable enough with gender equality issues to claim to be "gender-neutral" just to make them sound more interesting, then let them do it, fair play. I shudder to think what would have happened to a kid when I was that age if they so much spoke about the concept of identifying with a different gender.

Absolutely - All Things Must Pass wins it for George by a country mile, for me. I don't think any of the others have ever released anything as good; there are gems in all of their work, but Harrison pips it for me.

Pent up behind Lennon & McCartney is a great description of it - for me, Lennon's solo work, and a lot of McCartney's early stuff, feels like they're trying to find their feet and figure out who they are outside of the Beatles, while All Things Must Pass is the sound of George Harrison knowing exactly who he was and what he wanted to do, but only now having the chance to show it. It's a far more musically mature album than anything McCartney would manage until Band On The Run, and only Plastic Ono Band touches it from Lennon's back catalogue. And as far as a marquee "iconic" song to take away from a solo career, give me "My Sweet Lord" over "Imagine" any day.

What I find interesting is the directions they go in - McCartney always seemed to be stuck with a reputation of being the "safe" boring one while Lennon was the true creative force, and not entirely without reason, but McCartney released "Temporary Secretary", which is a delightfully bonkers little track, and some genuinely innovative stuff on Band On The Run, while remaining firmly within a pop sensibility, while Lennon's musical experimentations were, by and large, comprised of him disappearing up his own arse. And sodding "Imagine". And "Rock N Roll"! I love a good rock and roll covers album, but you forego any reasonable claim to the role of "the experimental one" the moment you release one.

Not to be too harsh on Lennon, I will concede that he released some bloody brilliant stuff. Even while firmly up his own arse.

10 minutes ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

Anyone else miss WWE customising their sets and stuff for shows?
WWE could have really gone full retro with the set here - had the commentators dress in appropriate attire, hell even have Honky Tonk Man in a backstage skit of some sort.

 

Absolutely. The annoying part is that it wouldn't take much; a few props around the stage, and then all you need is to vary the graphics on the HD stage screen, there'd be no need to construct a new physical set for every show. One of the things that's turned me off the WWE product for the past few years is that it all feels the same, and it feels like nothing's changed for ten years, and all they really need to fix is that is a lick of paint - the in-ring product is decent enough, they just need to alter the presentation.

Imagine a PPV with this name in the mid-90s. You'd have every '50s greaser cliché imaginable plastered all over it. This show should have had a pink Cadillac, Corey Graves in a leopard print trim leather jacket, and Honky Tonk Man interrupting an Elias Samson song.

On ‎08‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 1:54 PM, WyattSheepMask said:

Well, what a nice fella

Top marks.

George was the best Beatle, agreed. Best solo career of the lot of them, and all.

Quote

 

He is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account.

 

This is a tremendously rubbish sentence.

Watched Okja last night. I enjoyed it, though felt it was tonally a bit all over the place, and far too heavy-handed - though it was offbeat and odd enough that it never felt like it was just moralising, which it could easily have done.

4 minutes ago, Wrasslin said:

Side note: Was Taz the one who introduced it to wrestling as a whole in ECW? I seem to remember hearing that at some point. The point being people couldn't speak in the Tazmission.

I believe so, yeah. I'm not aware of it having existed anywhere in wrestling before that - it's not outside the realms of possibility, but I've never seen it any earlier.

I don't know if it was so much being unable to speak in the Tazmission - though it may have been put over like that at some point, I'm sure I can recall the odd verbal submission to it in ECW - but Taz was presented as a legit MMA guy, to capitalise on the success of UFC, and the KATA-HA-JIME (thanks, Joey Styles) as an MMA submission, so anything that added to that image was a plus.

Shamrock was every lad at school's favourite. The kid who insisted he had insider knowledge of the WWF promised Ken Shamrock coming back on pretty much every RAW of 2000.

He had real intensity, seemed legit, and was seriously over. As for why he wasn't a bigger deal, I'd imagine it's a mix of nagging injuries, and the same things that hindered so many in the Attitude era - so many turns, and swerves, and short-term booking problems that it was often impossible for anyone to gain momentum, and simply not being The Rock or Steve Austin. With those two floating around the top of the card, it was always going to be difficult for anybody else to be much more than The Guy Who Works With The Top Guy. There was potentially always the question mark over how long he was going to stick with the WWF rather than going back to MMA, too.

Did Shamrock actually work with Austin much at all? All I've been able to find with a cursory Google search is an angle-heavy TV match in '98. It might be that, at that point in his career, Austin wasn't in the best of shape, and wasn't going to work a programme with a suplex-heavy, hard-hitting opponent. And in 1998, if you're not wrestling Steve Austin, you're not in the main event.

The significance of him introducing tapping out to the WWF can't be overstated, though - as @L_E_T_H_A_L said, it adds a whole new visual element, where a submission that can be teased, and that the audience can see, rather than the inevitable couple of seconds of "did he/didn't he" waiting for the referee to call a verbal submission which, as the audience aren't immediately engaged, is always going to be an anti-climax.

I find it interesting that the next attempt to emulate MMA in submissions by WWE achieved almost the opposite, though, as they've taken away the visual element of the "drop the arm three times" routine and instead just go straight to the referee calling for the bell. More realistic, but taking away that visual element.

Fun fact - the promotion I work for has a ring with a yellow canvas and red ringposts specifically to mimic that first Hasbro ring.

Not so much a cool find as a (daft) cheap plug. Apologies if there are rules about the sharing of videos etc. by our good selves, but this is a video put together by the promotion I work for, CIWW. One of the bosses has requested that I share it online a bit more than we have been doing.

It's stupid. Very stupid. And bloody long. But a good laugh.

I bought Kick Off Revival because I thought it was hilarious that game got a physical release on PS4, with pretty much no attempt to modernise it whatsoever. Only tried single player mode once, and couldn't figure out what the hell I was doing. Was fun, though. Imagine it would be a great laugh multiplayer with someone equally clueless.