BomberPat

I genuinely can't think of the last time I had that conversation. It always used to embarass me when friends of mine got super defensive and basically turned into a WWE Don't Try This At Home advert if anyone even suggested the idea; "BUT THE HAZARDS ARE REAL".

Generally, people are maybe kind of curious about how it works, or why it's a thing, way more than assuming anyone thinks it's real. I get "how do they decide who wins?" far more often than, "isn't it all fake?".

The maddest thing about the Bang Bang Scissor Gang was that they united together to get revenge on Undisputed Kingdom, and then haven't interacted with or referenced them since. 

99 times out of 100, stories are predictable because the ending is the right one. The ending of almost every movie you've ever seen is "predictable" - good guy saves the day, gets the girl, that kind of thing. The plot twists, shocks and turns should come in the middle of the story, not at the end. 

Admittedly, wrestling being a continuous narrative that goes on forever rather than a closed one like a movie means sometimes it's not clear when the "ending" is or should be. 

Never forget that this is the company that shut down NXT UK and fired all of their Welsh talent right before running a show in Cardiff, though. All things considered, Branson Reed should consider himself lucky to have a job.

2 hours ago, Merzbow said:

Antonio Inoki vs The Great Antonio is a fav shitter to go back to once in a while, the latter being one of the worst workers in existence but with a hugely over inflated ego so thought he could no sell everything thrown at him until the strikes became so real he was kicked in the head repeatedly busting him open and probably knocking him the fuck out.

He's a really interesting fella though.

 

If you'll excuse the cheap plug, I did some research into the Great Antonio while writing my book, and ended up sticking it in my blog:

https://www.patrickwreed.com/blog/the-fights-that-made-antonio-inoki-1-the-great-antonio

https://www.patrickwreed.com/blog/further-research-the-great-antonio-and-mr-wonder

A lot of the biographical information that's readily available about him online is inaccurate. He was in a displaced persons camp at the end of WW2, and most likely survived a concentration camp before that.

The (largely very good) video you posted is a little inaccurate in saying he adopted a wildman persona; when he started out as a wrestler and strongman, he actually had a pretty boy bodybuilder gimmick. 

Over the years, Antonio teamed with Bruno Sammartino and Danny Hodge, and was an outlaw promoter himself, booking a lot of big men and oddities, including a double amputee wrestler in the 1960s.

The Rikidozan match in the 50s is, I assume, the reason Inoki ended up booking him, as Great Antonio was long out of the spotlight by then. The video expresses confusion at Antonio beating five men in handicap matches, but that was his entire act.

The Rikidozan match went to a non-finish, officially a draw, under a similar set of circumstances as the Inoki match, Antonio being uncooperative. He was possibly roughed up afterwards by some of Rikidozan's goons, and definitely kicked off the tour early because he was constantly complaining, was angry about being expected to lose, and generally difficult to deal with. I assume Inoki wanted to kind of one-up Rikidozan by beating him, but who knows.

Sting vs. Triple H is a big one for me - everyone I watched it with live hated it at the time, we were laughing our heads off at most of it, and a friend told me how he watched it with his mate who, after Triple H's Terminator entrance, stood up and applauded saying, "fair play, that's the shittest thing I've ever seen". 

Watching it back now, removed from the context of the time and knowing Sting ends up having a great run with a company who actually appreciates who he is and what he brings to the table, and it's just ridiculous bollocks and a good laugh. Sting cutting a sledgehammer in half with a baseball bat is one of those things that should never have got off the drawing room table, but cracks me up every time.

There's some bits and pieces from latter day WCW too - the gauntlet that Jeff Jarrett wrestles against George Steele, Jimmy Snuka and Tito Santana on one episode of Nitro, and all of the promos around it, is atrocious, but I get a kick out of it every time. 

And then there's Jimmy Hart and Norman Smiley in a Hardcore match, absolute daft gold:

55 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

It's not ideal, but Hangman ranting and raving about Swerve destroying his life, taking his ability to walk while in a cast or wheelchair could end up being absolute gold, and a weirdly logical next step for the character. 

This is what I was thinking - it's a shame that they so recently had Roderick Strong play the wheelchair gimmick for laughs, because I can already envision an increasingly unhinged Hangman in a wheelchair like Pillman in ECW.

His whole motivation right now is stopping Swerve Strickland from getting any more success, and in the longer term his key characteristic is that he's consistently his own worst enemy and battling his anxieties and insecurities, and how he's looking at a situation where a freak accident that's arguably his own fault is not only taking him out of a PPV title match, but giving Swerve Strickland a clear, unobstructed run at the title? That should be exactly the thing to push him over the edge.

Ryback alleged that there were NDAs around John Cena back in 2022. Might be worth looking back at the 75-page "contract" he made Nikki Bella sign before moving in with him, too, and considering that as something serious and suspect, rather than a bit of goofy reality TV business.

17 hours ago, Lorne Malvo said:

I think attendances definitely will rise if they carry on putting on an entertaining show.

Attendance always has a bit of a lag as an indicator of how successful/hot a product is. If they keep up the consistency they're at now, with better shows (though I thought this one was one of the less interesting in recent weeks, it was still perfectly solid) and better TV ratings, less behind-the-scenes chaos either distracting from or negatively affecting the on-screen product, and more reason for people to stop giving WWE the benefit of the doubt instead, I expect things will pick up as the year goes on. They're certainly not in the doom and gloom position that half of Twitter desperately wants them to be in, and they've got back into the groove of just doing what works for them, rather than seemingly second-guessing everything.

12 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

Where the heck did the Angelo Parker/Ruby Soho thing come from? Maybe it's a Collision or Rampage thing?  

It's been going on for months, but it's fairly low-key, so easy to miss. They are a couple in real-life, so I just find the whole thing kind of adorable watching them pretend to be doe-eyed and nervous about their first date on TV, even know I have no idea what the storyline pay-off to it could possibly be.

10 hours ago, Vamp said:

I can't remember what match I was watching but I was watching something from the 70s the other day where someone was taking a foreign object out of their tights, clenching it in their fist and then using it as a weapon, only I'm 99% sure that they didn't even have anything. Crowd still bought it.

Whenever Jerry Lawler had "brass knuckles" or something like that concealed in his tights, unless the point was someone else getting their hands on it, there was usually nothing there 

The best thing like that I've seen recently was the ref searching the heel before the match, finding some brass knuckles and confiscating them while the heel protests. Later in the match, he sneaks up on the ref and pickpockets them to get his weapon back.

if true, I'll be celebrating this one. Abhorrent prick.

1 minute ago, LaGoosh said:

"Don't bury the ref" seems to be a weird sticking point with the higher ups at WWE. Even recently that prick Bruce Pritchard on his podcast in reference to the 3D (one of the most popular and coolest wrestling moves ever) said he never really liked tag team finishes because they broke the rules and "buried the ref". It's absolutely ridiculous. Who gives a fuck about the ref? Really, the rules of any match are just another story telling device and should be bent and used according to whatever story you want to tell. That's what the fans will remember, no one will come out upset the ref doesn't appear to have the required authority.

Keeping the referee's credibility is important, but only because it ensures that heels get more heat when they cheat! It's a fine art as a referee to not have the crowd booing and heckling you for your call, but instead hating the bad guy for getting one past you. If the bad guy never gets anything past you, you're just a means to an end, as far as creative and active input into the match goes.

The rules are a storytelling device, you're absolutely right, and it's the referee's credibility that allows them to be one. But when you value that credibility at the expense of the possible stories you can tell, it all starts to feel like you've got it backwards. It's especially odd that WWE seem to have really pushed this approach at the same time as making their referees more and more anonymous and interchangeable (though they seem to have been dialing that back recently, and actually at least refer to them by name again).

I did commentary for a show a few months back, and the referee screwed up the finish a bit - it was a confidence thing, where something could or could not have been a rope break, and he called it as one, but then went back on his decision and counted the pin. I didn't even consciously process "I need protect the referee's credibility", I just did it, because my job then and there was to make sense of what was happening in front of me, so I said something about referee's discretion, and then when I realised he was going to go through with counting the pin after all, switched on the fly to completely make up a ruling that the referee had judged that the contact with the ropes was only incidental, and not enough to break the count. That sort of thing is what we should mean when we talk about protecting the referee's credibility - the whole show is staged and stage managed, so use everything you have available to you to make it make sense, and try and come out with everyone's credibility intact. Because why wouldn't you? It's your show, and everyone should look good.

30 minutes ago, Chili said:

 Was the bit in where Belafonte gets them all singing Day-O for fucking ages. 

It's in there, but framed as them kind of spontaneously doing it as a tribute to Belafonte after the recording, rather than him making them do it. There's a ton of great recording footage, and some really fun interactions between this mad combination of people. I think I laughed every single time Dan Aykroyd appeared on camera.

I don't know why I laughed so hard at the phrase, "Godzilla remains unmodified".

2 minutes ago, Loki said:

  Heels don't really cheat much any more, outside possibly of group interference.  

I bang this drum a lot, but this is a huge thing for me with modern wrestling in general, and modern WWE in particular. It was apparently a Vince edict years ago that heels shouldn't cheat, because it undermines the credibility of the referee. So if there's ever any cheating at all, it's outside interference, or it's the finish - a foreign object, a pull of the tights, or a foot on the ropes - and even then, that's as likely to come from a babyface because "turnabout is fair play" as it is from a heel actually trying to garner heat. You get none of the great little incidental bits of cheating - positioning yourself between the referee and your opponent to get in a little cheap shot, exploiting the referee in tag matches to get some extra shots in, raking the eyes, choking, that kind of thing. So cheating either doesn't happen at all, or isn't treated as cheating when it does.

I'm all for protecting the referee's credibility, but not at the expense of heat. A great heel works with the referee to make sure the heat is on the heel for cheating, not on the ref for not catching them, and that's a dying art, because in WWE the wrestlers aren't allowed to do it, and elsewhere a lot of the wrestlers and referees just don't have the experience and know-how to do it effectively. I did a referee seminar recently with Scott Armstrong, where he said that when he used to ref Los Guerreros matches on house shows, Eddie and Chavo would always say to him, "I don't care what the finish is, if you catch us cheating, disqualify us", and though they always cheated, he never caught them. Though they confused matters by cheating as babyfaces too!

I think that lack of cheating, or the lack of consequences for cheating, probably makes it way harder to work heel than anything else that's been talked about here. It's all tied to making wins and losses matter; if whether the babyface wins matters, then the heel putting obstacles in their way matters too. If the rules are enforced well and consistently, then cheating and getting away with it will always get you heat - and it's that last point, getting away with it, that I think is crucial; people don't really care about cheating in and of itself, but they hate the idea that somebody is getting away with something that they shouldn't, or that somebody else was punished for (it's why as a referee, cutting off a babyface tag because you "didn't see it", while letting the heels get away with blind tags, will always drive the crowd nuts).

I'm in two minds - one of them looks at how quickly and awkwardly they pivoted back to Cody/Reigns when people rejected Rock/Reigns and thinks that they'll follow that up and have Cody win reasonably clean, with a little assist from The Rock, as I don't believe The Rock stays heel past the RAW after Wrestlemania. On the other hand, though, they want to do Roman Reigns vs. The Rock, and I don't see them doing it anywhere but Wrestlemania - and as much as that match doesn't need the title (and arguably would be worse for having it involved), the WWE approach is often to try and make the match as big as possible, and you do that by throwing title belts on top of it.

So if they want to get to Roman vs. Rock for the belt at Wrestlemania, that's Roman retaining this year, facing The Rock (and likely winning next year), and not losing the belt until Wrestlemania in 2026. By which point Cody had better hope that he's still relevant and there's no shiny new toys that people want to see win the Rumble that year.

I definitely think Roman Reigns turns face once it's all done - maybe I'm wrong and they run Rock/Roman somewhere other than 'Mania, let's say at Summerslam; I expect that's with babyface Rock and heel Roman, and Roman takes some time off afterwards, and returns as a babyface in time for the following Wrestlemania.

On 8/31/2018 at 2:37 PM, BomberPat said:

These days I worry that I'm the shit neighbour. I live in one of six flats above a car showroom, and aside from next door, have basically never seen any of my neighbours in the 18 months I've lived there, aside from maybe once or twice passing someone on the stairs.

Next door are a bloody nuisance, though not in any particularly entertaining way. No idea how many people live there, as people seem to be in and out throughout the day, but the one woman who definitely lives there will go outside for a fag on a walkway that's directly in front of my living room window. While out there, without fail, she'll either be on the phone, or watching a YouTube video on her phone so loud that it's drowning out my TV even with the windows closed. Several times a day. 

This one got far worse during lockdown, to the point that as much as I loved my little old flat, I was absolutely fucking ecstatic to get out of it when I moved.

I never plucked up the courage to complain, either directly to her or to the landlord (because if I had and anything came of it, it would have been pretty obvious it had been me wot did it), even after she knocked on my door at about 12/1am one night to complain of the noise from me and my girlfriend watching TV in the living room - I apologised and we shut up, rather than me saying, "hang on love, you spend all day stood outside my window yelling down your phone while I'm trying to work, and now you're worried about noise?".

All through lockdown I basically couldn't open the window in my living room, and barely ever even opened the blinds, because it just opened directly on to the walkway to her front door, where she spent all day on the phone and chain smoking. She never seemed to go inside the whole day, and constantly had people coming and going - whether they were visitors she wasn't meant to be having, I have no idea, as I still never figured out how many people actually lived there. 

It was driving me absolutely mad - I had to work all day in that one room, and then spend the rest of the night there once I was done, and she was always out on that balcony drowning out whatever I was doing. Even without the sound, I couldn't open the window for all the fag smoke. By the end of my time there, as things were starting to open up again, and you were allowed to meet people outside, she started having barbecues on that walkway, by which point I would have fucking welcomed the fag smoke and phone calls - five or six people crammed on to a walkway not quite wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side, directly up against my living room window, and completely covered overhead, so the smoke from the barbecue just had nowhere to go. That was when I came closest to complaining to the landlord, because I started having visions of them burning the place down while I was out for a walk, but again, given that mine was the only flat you could see this walkway from, it would have been obvious who had complained. 

I watched The Greatest Night In Pop last night, the Netflix documentary about the making of "We Are The World".

It's an easy watch, and good fun. It has the same appeal of watching the video for that song, just amazement at them getting all these huge names in one room, and hearing about the logistics of putting it together, and of how they arranged it to showcase everyone's voices, was fascinating. Lots of Bob Dylan shuffling about awkwardly and mumbling, as you'd expect. 

There's a bit early on of Lionel Ritchie talking about being in a limo with Michael Jackson, and just phoning Stevie Wonder, that reminded me of an old Travelling Wilburys documentary, where George Harrison explains how they came to be a band, and it's just, "well, I was having lunch with Jeff and Roy and we decided we should record something together, and we knew Bob had a nice little studio, so we phoned him, but then I realised I'd left my guitar at Tom Petty's house". Simultaneously the height of rock star glamour and utterly mundane.

of course, I'm being very glib in that last point, and I'd rather the show be that way than the old days where the only way to get queer art made in the mainstream was so long as you never actually showed men kissing, and it had a tragic ending.

It's a series that couldn't possibly have existed when I was at school, and I'm glad it does now. 

Eraserhead is so weirdly confident as an artistic statement for someone's first film, too. I've seen it a few times, but a couple of years ago saw it in the cinema for the first time, and the sound design just blows your head off in that setting. There's a screenshot from Twin Peaks S3 that became a bit of a meme for the subtitle "ominous whooshing", and that's what half of Eraserhead feels like.

There's some great later Orson Welles stuff with similar things - one half of a scene being shot months or years after the other, because it's just cobbled together as and when he could get the money together.

Mulholland Drive I think is fantastic, and I only appreciate it more with age. I first saw it as a teenager doing a Film Studies AS, and really bought into the "keys" to making sense of it, and had that tedious personality trait that half the internet seems to have these days of treating a film like a puzzle to be solved, whereas now I see it far more as an experience that you just need to let take you along for the ride. The opening sequence of the car driving at night, the road barely lit, to an Angelo Badalamenti score, is about as perfect Lynch as Lynch gets. In terms of plot or what it's "about" or what it "means", I just see the whole thing as an analogy for Hollywood, and if there is a key to getting it, it's knowing that Lynch is always stuck on a story of "woman in trouble" and Marilyn Monroe. It's about how Hollywood allows anyone to reinvent themselves as whoever they want to be, but also how it chews you up and spits you out as someone else entirely, until nobody's sure who they really are, and all these starlets and wannabe stars are just interchangeable versions of each other, so you can recast your film halfway through and who would even know? 

Heartstopper - Series 2

My other half had a friend staying over at the weekend - last time he was around they binge-watched series one, so this time I was treated to all of series two. If you don't know, it's a high school LGBTQ+ drama, based on a graphic novel. It's all very sweet and low stakes, and does a good job of navigating awkward teenage queer romance without making it all about battling homophobia and stereotypes, which has been done to death elsewhere - there's plenty of that to it, and one of the things it does well is with the parent characters, some of whom are very supportive, some outwardly homophobic, some just naively oblivious, but there's enough believable variety there to provide a good backdrop.

The only thing is, practically every character in this show is queer. Obviously that's the point - you've got the gay kid dating a bisexual, gay couples, lesbian couples, the trans girl, the kid coming to terms with being asexual, multiple gay teachers, and it starts to get to a point where you wonder why these kids are worried about coming out at school when you're only ever one or two episodes away from the revelation that everyone else is gay too.

19 hours ago, Doog said:

And let's be honest, the reason people hate him isn't because he's now playing a heel on TV.

but surely that's what you're asking for? They're not booing him because of the character he's playing on TV, he's playing that character because they're booing him. 

Jun Akiyama has appeared in AEW before, as a tag partner and then dream match for Eddie Kingston, so I'm sure they will lean into all of that as part of this story. 

9 minutes ago, Doog said:

The art of the conventional heel of the old days is long dead, I mean based on this forum the biggest heel going at the minute is the bloody Rock.

So the biggest heel at the minute is someone working heel in the main event of Wrestlemania, and somehow that's a bad thing?

21 minutes ago, gmoney said:

I should declare an interest here, because this is my mate's channel, but he's done some fun, easter egg filled cartoons to accompany some wrestling stories. Enjoy. 

The placement of the YouTube play icon made me do a serious double take on the title of this one.