BomberPat

On ‎25‎/‎06‎/‎2017 at 10:03 AM, Your Fight Site said:

Binge-watched this last night. Enjoyable watch.

One topic I'm surprised they didn't really cover was kayfabe, which would have still been quite prevelant back then. There could have been some scenes of the girls having to "protect the bizness" rather than cut a promo in a Russian accent on a patio store forecourt.

I don't think "protect the bizness" is really in line with GLOW, though - "proper" wrestlers hated the show at the time because they felt it exposed the business, and given that no one involved really had a wrestling background, the whole "protect the business" mentality wouldn't have been drummed into them as hard as it would have been elsewhere in that time period.

I've got two episodes to go, and I've enjoyed it so far. It's not The Wire, but it's good enjoyable watch, and mostly pretty believable. Awesome Kong is genuinely brilliant in it, probably the highlight of the whole thing for me, though aside from Alex Riley there's not really been a bad performance yet. Speaking of Alex Riley, he's partly responsible for possibly my only real criticism of the show so far; spoilers for whatever episode it was that he appears in;

With the caveat that I'm a huge Roddy Piper mark, I absolutely loved it.

It's not quite what you'd expect - none of the content that Piper wrote actually made it into the finished book, they just wrote their own story, using his notes as a starting point - but it's a fascinating study of the contrast between kayfabe and reality.

They question a lot of the long-standing Roddy Piper stories - the story of him getting beaten up by Larry Hennig in under a minute in his first match, they point out can't have been his first match, and that he might have been wrestling for years at that point, and suggest that the age he insisted he started wrestling probably wasn't true, either.

But it's not just picking holes in old wrestler's bullshit, they do a good job of really analysing why Piper was the person he was, and how much his own self-mythologizing was a bit of a security blanket for him, as it meant he could invent his own persona instead of having to face up to some of the more unpleasant bits of his past.

A lot of it is about the question we have of a lot of old wrestlers - where does Roderick Toombs stop and Roddy Piper begin? They explain that, towards the end of his life, he'd dropped "Rowdy" from his name, and was actually planning to start going back by his real name, but he realised that he'd been Roddy Piper so long that he didn't know who Roddy Toombs was any more.

So, yeah, I thought it was bloody brilliant, eye-opening in places, and not just lacking in the sort of self-aggrandising storytelling of most wrestler autobiographies, but actually actively challenging that norm.

Are you thinking of Hayabusa? He's the only FMW regular I know of getting paralysed from a bad bump - he passed away last year, sadly.

FMW was the beginning of me realising there was a huge, wide world of wrestling out there, and stuff like that photo of Mr Pogo was a huge part of its appeal. Never underestimate the appeal of amazing photos in magazines, and scans on Geocities websites, in getting a wrestler over without the kid looking at it ever even seeing them wrestle.

In Kevin Owens' defence, he put in a lot of effort to get in good shape prior to signing with WWE - he used to look far worse than he does now.

Kassius Ohno, I don't mind him being overweight. I've seen him have a couple of matches where being a big guy added to the story. But, for the most part, he doesn't wrestle to his size, which doesn't make him look like an intimidating big man, it makes him look like he's out of shape and hasn't come to terms with it.

If he just owned it and wrestled like a fat lad, I wouldn't mind so much. And get rid of horrible basketball jersey gear that has no relation to his gimmick, and makes him look even worse.

My bigger problems with Ohno aren't just his weight, it's his overall look and presentation, and how he's booked in NXT. He went from a title contender to a sub for No Way Jose, to a Loser Leaves Town match with absolutely no build-up at all in the space of three weeks, and now we're expected to look at him as some kind of locker room leader in his programme with Itami. He's not been used well enough, or consistently enough, for that role to make sense - it's symptomatic of one of NXT's biggest problems; the expectation that the audience will care about Kassius Ohno just because it's Kassius Ohno, so they don't bother booking him to do anything interesting.

Most of all, though, I hate his gimmick. He calls himself a Knock-Out Artist. But if you're wrestling a 10-20 minute match, and half of your moves in that match are strikes, and it takes you that 10-20 minutes before you're able to land a "knock-out" blow, you're a shitty Knock-Out artist. Aleister Black, meanwhile, has a more fleshed out gimmick, and is knocking people out early, and "out of nowhere", basically doing Ohno's gimmick better, and it's just as an aside to the bulk of his schtick.

In fairness, Kassius Ohno has previously been fired from WWE for getting out of shape, and lying about the amount of time he was spending in the Performance Centre's weight room. So he is a bit of a lazy fat lad.

The pacing of American Gods was bonkers, wasn't it? Got to a crucial point in the story, then spent two episodes slowing down to a snail's pace, and ended right as the story proper was actually getting started!

The last episode of Twin Peaks was class, though. Really starting to feel more like Twin Peaks, and feeling like it's going somewhere, even if very gradually.

Locked myself in a room on my own today, ostensibly so I can get on with typing up a load of minutes uninterrupted, but also in part because I'm a sweaty hungover mess. It's not as warm as it has been the past few days, but so fucking stuffy at the moment, I'm struggling.

But one of my colleagues just popped in to give me an ice lolly, so it's not all bad.

IIRC, Al Snow franchises the "Al Snow Wrestling Academy" name to a few different schools.

I doubt he'll end up at the Performance Center - stranger things have happened, admittedly, considering Scotty Too Hotty is there, but I just can't see where he'd fit with the current crop of trainers and, as someone mentioned earlier, he seems to be far more in the Bill DeMott vein than most of the trainers they have these days.

Any combination of Sabre, Ibushi, Omega and Suzuki sounds lovely.

He'll be there as Ibushi - they've already announced him vs. Zack as one of the matches in G1, which could be lovely. Wonder if he'll carry on doing Tiger Mask W at the same time - is the Tiger Mask series still airing? If there's no need for the tie-in any more, it would make sense.

"Crusierweight".

I was having a chat about this the other day with the guy who does all our design work - it's staggering how many people, not just in wrestling but all over the place, don't see the worth in good marketing. Wrestling seems to attract some of the worst of it, though.

That one above isn't particularly eye-catching, and far too much text, but it's far from the worst I've seen. It at least gets one thing right - the first things you see are the word "WRESTLING", followed by the place and the date. I've seen posters for gigs that don't tell you the location, plenty where that sort of information is buried in small print, and I've got a couple of wrestling posters at home that don't feature the word wrestling at all, or if they do, it's only in something like a web address.

In wrestling, and in promoting gigs/DJs etc., which was my previous foray into the big wide world of promoting, you see so many people who put too much stock in their brand. There's a place for that, but when the biggest words on your poster are the clever name you came up with for your event, at the expense of what your event actually is, you're doing it wrong.

I'm a firm believer that "WRESTLING" should always be the biggest word on a wrestling poster. Fuck your brand, fuck your promotion's name, fuck the witty title you came up with for the show, the average punter in the street doesn't know or care about any of that, they're just going to see THE WRESTLING.

I'm clearly preaching to the choir here, but a good poster is exactly the same as a good wrestling promo: it helps to be creative, but if the key points people take away from it aren't What's Happening, When, and Where, it's a wasted effort.

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Honestly, whenever I hear the words "Ah, don't worry about that, i've got Photoshop mate, i'll sort it" sends shivers down my fucking spine.

Ha! This was about to my very next point. That, or any variation of "I've got a mate who does Media" or whatever, it's a huge alarm bell for me. Because to too many people, "that'll do" is good enough, or else they're clueless enough to think that whatever they've cobbled together actually is good enough.

One of our wrestlers did a photoshoot a while back, because their mate was "a really good photographer". They were shit. All shot outdoors, only using natural light - and doing that badly - nothing that remotely fit the character, poorly framed, and with the most obvious "I just learned how to use Photoshop" effects, like one that's all in black and white apart from the eyes in colour or some bullshit.

I don't think they'll go the route of Ellsworth thinking he's won it, but I can see him acting like he won it, a la Christian carrying Edge's King of the Ring trophy around.

It's pretty cool that Chavo was involved in training, considering it was Mando Guerrero who trained the GLOW girls in the first place. From what I understand, Kong is in the series itself - I'd suspect Mundo probably is too, more likely that than him being in as a trainer, I'd have thought.

If TNA "allowed him" to do any of that, he'd be a generic little sod in the X-Division, if under contract at all. As it stands, he's a featured part of their programming, one of the most entertaining parts of the show, and not in danger of breaking his neck every five minutes. I know which I'd prefer.

I called them writing out Nakamura for much of the match the moment he was announced; they did the same thing with Sin Cara when he was the shiny new international star. Have him in the match, but protect him by having him not involved with most of it, in the hope that he comes out of it looking like he could have won rather than like he half-arsed it.

Apparently they're looking to stack Summerslam and make it as big a card as possible, but that does run the risk of watering down Wrestlemania - Cena/Reigns is absolutely the biggest match available to them right now, in terms of people they have on the full-time roster, to do that anywhere but Wrestlemania seems mad; the only way it works to me is if they do it again at Survivor Series, with the rubber match at Wrestlemania, but that raises the question of whether that story would be better than doing it as a First Time Ever at 'Mania. Would either one be the bigger draw?

I'm not as down on Lesnar/Strowman at Summerslam - that could be massive, but if they're going with Reigns/Lesnar at 'Mania, now's absolutely the right time to do it. My worry is that Strowman comes out of it looking like anything other than an absolute monster. He doesn't necessarily need to win, but he does need to look like he could have won. He should be the most protected man on the roster at this point.

Uproxx were even speculating that Kurt Angle/Triple H might happen at Summerslam - surely that's a Mania match?

On ‎14‎/‎06‎/‎2017 at 8:26 PM, Astro Hollywood said:

I used to think that was irritating, but then I saw noted arse Martin Freeman being an arse about it to some TV host ("what are your three favourite Ramones albums?") and suddenly didn't have a problem with it.

I was chatting about this with a female friend last week - if another bloke sees me at a gig in a band T-shirt they like, chances are the only response it'll get, if any, is "alright, nice shirt mate". Whereas if she were wearing one, you can pretty much guarantee that a bloke will stop her and quiz her on what she knows about that band, as if she has to prove that she's a "proper" fan and not just, you know, a girl.

She wears Black Sabbath shirts a lot, and this happens to her all the time, and it's bloody irritating. She's a massive Sabbath fan, but that shouldn't matter. She could have only heard Paranoid, and really liked it, and that would be enough to her to justify buying and wearing the shirt. She could have never even heard of Black Sabbath, and it would still be none of the bloke's business what she chooses to wear.

Likewise, it used to annoy me, but I don't give a shit now. Band shirts are just about the brand anyway, people just wearing the brand is the logical conclusion of that anyway. And, yeah, people can wear whatever they like, it's their business, and has no bearing on my life whatsoever. People being arses about it are more irritating than people who choose to wear a T-shirt because it looks cool.

Got round to watching Okada/Omega 2 finally, what a bloody match. Echoing everyone else's comments that it didn't feel like it went an hour - and that's with me going into it knowing that it would go that long.

It maybe leaned a little too heavily on the signature spots - I'd hate to go back and count the Rainmakers, dropkicks and V-Triggers in the second half of the match - but otherwise was absolutely superb, and probably better than their first. It's hard to say, though, as so much of it deliberately referenced, or was informed by, the first match, so it wouldn't have been as strong had the initial match not happened - in many ways, the perfect rematch. You don't rehash the original, nor do you do something entirely different, you present two wrestlers who have learned something from the last time.

I still preferred Okada/Shibata, and between that and people debating whether the first or second Omega match was better, how mad is it that we can watch that match, a definite Match of the Year candidate, and be left debating not just if it was the best match of the year, but if it was Okada's best match of the year? And it's only June!

I was worried the "Cody might throw in the towel" routine would break up the pace of the match, but it really didn't. A good lesson in being able to tell two or three stories at once, without one being at the expense of another. Surely we're moving towards Cody at least attempting to replace Kenny as leader?

My current favourite Thick of It line;

"I loved your novel....way of writing a shit story".

"Deathmatch" pretty much applies to any gimmick match in NJPW.

Riot posted a photo of her with stitches on whatever social media account I saw that on, but otherwise seems to be doing alright, and Mandrews has Tweeted that he was fine after a check-up at the hospital, so thankfully nothing more serious than that.

I predicted it elsewhere, but I think you'll get your wish and that they won't fight again for a long time. I think that when it does happen, Omega will be babyface. I'm not sure exactly what the trajectory will be, but I think he'll end up usurped and out of Bullet Club before long for failing to win the big one, or for trying to win it fair and square rather than relying on their help, and will be kept occupied feuding with his former stablemates, possibly with Kota Ibushi by his side, before winning the belt clean at the following year's WrestleKingdom. All just a hunch apropos of pretty much nothing, I should add.

I like that there's a fun kind of meta-narrative underpinning this, too. When Bullet Club formed, it was all about importing US-style heel tactics to NJPW, and disrespecting the traditions of Japanese wrestling. For a long time now, they've just become a reasonably generic heel stable instead, and constantly on the verge of self-parody, and Naito has been doing the disrespectful of tradition schtick far more, and far better, than Omega et al. But the build to the first Okada/Omega match kind of harkened back to the US vs. Japan angle that underpinned the first incarnation of Bullet Club - Omega felt that, if NJPW was going to expand internationally, they needed a marketable, English speaking champion, and Okada stood up for NJPW, for tradition, and for himself.

In a lot of ways, it's almost a throwback to the old Rikidozan/Inoki/Baba model of booking; the strong, proud Japanese champion fighting off dastardly foreigners. So many people assumed that Omega would win the belt to bolster the American expansion, but actually, it makes so much more sense for Okada to come in as a champion and beat someone like Cody, who's known to even the most casual of the US audience, because then it's not just Okada going over, it's NJPW as a whole going over.

On ‎11‎/‎06‎/‎2017 at 11:04 AM, SuperBacon said:

Just started The Thick Of It. Like what I've seen so far but bit uncomfortable watching Chris Langham. 

Yeah, I've not been back to watch the first series since it was first on, just never been able to get particularly enthused about watching him! He's done away with by the second series/the election special one, though.

Got caught up on the last three episodes of American Gods over the weekend;

I do find it funny that they sell Kassius Ohno as the "knock-out artist", when they have Aleister Black doing the same schtick far more convincingly, and it's just as an aside to a broader gimmick. As a rule, I'd say that if you're a "knock-out artist", you shouldn't have to wait until 20 minutes into a wrestling match full of strikes to be able to knock them out. Black does it far more convincingly "out of nowhere". I love the idea of Black getting a super-quick win over Roode, but don't see it, sadly.

Ohno went from a title feud his first night back to playing second fiddle to Tye Dillinger and No Way Jose - at least the Hideo Itami feud should give him some decent matches, but he became just another face in the crowd real quick, didn't he?

No, they don't beat Vince Russo up because they're adult human beings and that's not how we solve our problems in real life.