Guest Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 15 minutes ago, PunkStep said: It bloody didn't!! Terrible name. Yet one that's in the record books as a former WWE Divas Champion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members wandshogun09 Posted October 5, 2017 Paid Members Share Posted October 5, 2017 3 hours ago, tiger_rick said: His bouts with Liger at Superbrawl 2 and Badd at Fall Brawl 95 are two really good matches. Good shouts. The Liger match was an eye opener for me as a kid. I'd never seen anything like it at the time. He had a really good match with Lex Luger at Halloween Havoc in 1989. Love that match. Think it was on the Pillman DVD that WWE put out. Had a cracker with Flair in 1990/91ish on TV as well. And his matches tagging with Austin as the Hollywood Blondes vs Steamboat & Douglas, Flair & Anderson and Scorpio & Bagwell were also quality. Real shame he wasn't alive and healthy during the Attitude era. To think of the things they could've done with him as a worker and a character in that period if he was still physically good to go. He'd have been a natural rival or ally to Austin given their history. But I think he could've done some great stuff with The Rock, DX, Vince McMahon, Foley etc as well. Even post-wrestling, you'd think he'd have been a fantastic shoot interview/podcast guest. Was it ever said how the angle with Goldust and Marlena at the time of his death was going to conclude? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted October 5, 2017 Paid Members Share Posted October 5, 2017 1 minute ago, wandshogun09 said: Was it ever said how the angle with Goldust and Marlena at the time of his death was going to conclude? Marlena was going to reveal she was with Pillman all along, and turn on Goldust, as far as I know. Don't know if there was anything more to it than that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Really Big Shoe Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 Brian Pillman was way ahead of his time and his "Loose Cannon" gimmick was so well thought out that even his co-workers thought that the "Loose Cannon" was a shoot. I think had he left WCW earlier and went to ECW and fully developed as a character him turning up in the WWF would have been huge. His injury had it not have happened means he could have had some classic matches. I think you could have had Brian try and take over the Hart Foundation so Bret goes back to being a babyface then you have Hitman v Loose Cannon. With Austin you could create an unholy alliance among the two with a reformation of the Hollywood Blondes and then when they split you have Austin v Pillman. HBK vs Brian working his Flyin Brian style would have been a great match. Plus he came in at the beginning of the Attitude Era so (injury free) Brian Pillman surely should have been in the mix. We will never sadly know how far his career could have gone. To think he'd have stagnated in the mid card against Val, Goldust et al doesn't seem right. You could have had him run down Austin instead of Rikishi, win the title instead of Mankind, fill the role Hunter took when HBK retired and have him lead DX. Maybe he could have crossed over into the mainstream. Him playing the Loose Cannon would have been perfect for a movie too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dudley Eastbank Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 I had a WCW TopTrumps-like game in the early 90s. I remembered playing it with my mum once and she thought that the card she was holding was for a wrestler called 'Flying Brain'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 6 minutes ago, Dudley Eastbank said: I had a WCW TopTrumps-like game in the early 90s. I remembered playing it with my mum once and she thought that the card she was holding was for a wrestler called 'Flying Brain'. This? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dudley Eastbank Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 15 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said: This? That's the one! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liam O'Rourke Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 I could talk forever and a day about Pillman, especially after the last two years of planning and research, but it's interesting how much my feelings at the time echo ones expressed in here. Like Rick, his death didn't hit me in a massively impactful way at the time because it didn't feel real to me, and the WWF were so fucking desperate to make it a non-issue that they almost made it one. As expressed elsewhere, I fucking hated Pillman when I was a kid. So cocky and obnoxious, I just wanted to punch him in the face. Austin too, when they were a team. And what a team. As brilliant as he was on screen, he's just an absolutely fascinating guy. There is very much a strong knowledge of the general story of Pillman, but the WWE's DVD barely scratched the surface of how amazing his life and career really was, and he'll probably never get the credit for being a key part of the wrestling butterfly effect of the major companies tying reality into storyline. That comes with good and bad, of course, but still. So much to say on him, so many awesome stories I've found out and can't wait for people to read. For me, and even now I can't put my finger on the exact quality about him, perhaps an inate charisma, that drew me to him as a kid. Almost like you can tell there is more to him than most, but he's a captivating character, and the Loose Cannon scam is one of the greatest pieces of business of all time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The King Of Swing Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 6 hours ago, BomberPat said: Marlena was going to reveal she was with Pillman all along, and turn on Goldust, as far as I know. Don't know if there was anything more to it than that. Yeah that's almost certainly how it was going to go. In the end they turned her during Dustin's shitty feud with Val Venis. As for Pillman I absolutely love his Rogue Horseman run in WCW. Unlike most though I've never been that fond of his ECW stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members bAzTNM#1 Posted October 6, 2017 Paid Members Share Posted October 6, 2017 Would have probably been Austin vs Pillman feuding going into the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, if he stayed alive and healthy, rather than Austin - Rock. Probably would have got a "Wrestlemania 13" style switch sometime in there too. Feud would have ran for years, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Astro Hollywood Posted October 6, 2017 Moderators Share Posted October 6, 2017 I loved the Loose Cannon gimmick so much, I literally wrote (a chapter of) the book about it. And it's been out for 3 years now, so it was odd to woke up this morning to this: I figure that's from forum discussion everywhere about how great he was. People talk about how ahead of his time the Loose Cannon character was, with him dying just before the Attitude Era, but in an odd way, it was a pre-curser to this weird 'troll villain' role people like Milo and Hopkins assume on social media and on TV. Obviously his was far better than these basic wretches, but there are shades of it in those tools who can only elevate themselves to earning money by sticking to this brand of offense, 24/7, until they can no longer switch it off, even if they tried. No exaggeration, for me, he's one of history's most fascinating characters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted October 6, 2017 Paid Members Share Posted October 6, 2017 Yeah, I'd agree with that. He's fascinating for all the reasons pro-wrestling is - figuring out where you draw the line between fiction and reality, between performer and performance. I think, with social media, the Network, Total Divas, and everything else giving us unprecedented levels of access to wrestlers' lives, and the WWE product giving more nods to insider gossip, we'll see the industry go further and further in that direction - and Pillman was doing it 20 years ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted October 6, 2017 Author Paid Members Share Posted October 6, 2017 12 hours ago, BomberPat said: Yeah, I'd agree with that. He's fascinating for all the reasons pro-wrestling is - figuring out where you draw the line between fiction and reality, between performer and performance. I think, with social media, the Network, Total Divas, and everything else giving us unprecedented levels of access to wrestlers' lives, and the WWE product giving more nods to insider gossip, we'll see the industry go further and further in that direction - and Pillman was doing it 20 years ago. I still think that's the way it has to go to see any upturn in business. You can't continue with the bipolar stuff they do now. There'll never be a "still real to me" era again but that doesn't mean you have to shit all over kayfabe. For people to really buy into characters again, I think they have to be 24/7. What you see on TV is what you see on Twitter, on daytime telly, on podcasts, etc. Obviously that means creating realistic characters who are extensions of the person but that's the logical step. I've often read the term "reality era" to describe WWE but there's nothing real about it. What's real about a guy being a caricature foreign heel on TV but a funny dude with a hot wife on Twitter. Or a woman being a monster heel in one segment and cheering breast cancer survivors in another. Or your evil authority being celebrated anti bullying campaigners. It wouldn't suit everyone, so someone playing a character like Bray Wyatt wouldn't have Twitter or be on the tonight show or whatever. People need to believe again in some form for things to boom again. Wrestling isn't simply a TV Show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted October 9, 2017 Paid Members Share Posted October 9, 2017 Absolutely - but it isn't necessarily about being "in gimmick" 24/7 to the extent that no one ever breaks character publicly (though I agree, the likes of Bray Wyatt shouldn't be on Twitter - I remember thinking he was fucked the first time they made him wear his own merchandise to the ring, as if this spooky cult leader just popped over to the merch table), so much as using all that access to blur the lines as to what is and isn't real. Something more akin to the Daniel Bryan storyline, where even though he was main eventing every PPV, and a featured part of every TV show, people still thought he was legitimately being held down, and as late as Elimination Chamber in February people were still complaining that he hadn't been booked to win the main event, when by that point it was obvious he was about to headline Wrestlemania. That storyline worked because it played on real life issues, and people believed it to be real, but it still all made perfect sense within the context of the show. Contrast that to the "worked shoot" stuff between Cena and Reigns, and the "shoot" comments are completely at odds with how Reigns has been portrayed as a character. We're told he's a corporately constructed top star, yet we spent a year watching him feud with Triple H because he refused to be the corporate guy. Cena brushes off his win over the Undertaker as "you beat an old man with a bad hip", when the announcers spent months putting it over as a huge victory. There's no consistency - so as soon as the "shoot" comments stop, I'm back to not believing in the character whatsoever, as even on their own TV show they're hammering him home that he's not the real thing. I don't think the solution is necessarily "it's still real to me!", so much as the Johnny Valentine quote I always use - "I might not be able to convince you that pro-wrestling is real, but I can sure as hell convince you that I am". People believe that Brock Lesnar is a legitimate bad-ass - it helps that he is, but they believe it in the context of the show, to the extent that a win over him or even just a competitive match with him makes his opponent look like the real deal - people believed that Daniel Bryan was a held down underdog even when he was main eventing pay-per-views, people believed that CM Punk was an anti-authority punk rock rebel, and so on. With all the tools available to them, it should be easier to make someone - it doesn't have to be everyone - feel real enough to stand out from the pack, they just need to show some commitment and consistency in how they present people, and their product. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted October 9, 2017 Author Paid Members Share Posted October 9, 2017 I think you've named three examples of what I mean. Daniel Bryan was pretty much himself. A nerdy, awkward dude who's a phenomonal athlete and is really likeable. He was a possessive boyfriend and an angry goat for a while but neither was a particular stretch from him. Lesnar is as real as it gets these days. It helps that he's sheltered from the bullshit three out of every four weeks. Punk, as much as he was a hyprocrite, portrayed the same person on and off screen so it caught on and was never a stretch. It should be easy to keep that up for everyone. Don't stretch the truth and don't acknowledge the "fake" aspects. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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