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There's a vintage episode of Thunder currently playing on SPIKE TV.
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Jan 5, 2010 03:33
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The reason Goldberg/Hogan didn't even pop a real rating was because it had a 3 day build and no real storyline, they announced it on the prior week's Thunder. It was originally a dark non-title match.
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Feb 6, 2010 09:15
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Cornette's booking in OVW was also widely hailed by pretty much everyone that's ever seen it for being the best product around at the time, even though his storylines were continually in flux based on who WWE called up at a given time. If you think Cornette can't book you should really seek some of that stuff out, that era of OVW also produced a lot of top star talent.
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Feb 27, 2010 06:15
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Dr. Video Games 0055 posted:Yeah, by that point WCW had completely rinsed their hands of Russo and were attempting to push some new stars (including a young AJ Styles) and focus on exciting in-ring matches again (at least, that's the impression I got). Not quite. Basically Bischoff retook booking control and was pulling the stars off television for a planned reboot after he finalized his purchase of the company. It wasn't so much that they were pushing, say, Air Raid as that they just needed meaningless bodies to fill the midcard while Scott Steiner put every top guy out of action.
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Mar 28, 2011 04:35
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LividLiquid posted:I know that sounds retarded but it really worked to elevate guys as it created an environment where the cream would actually rise to the top instead of being booked into the ground. Except they booked every single one of them into the ground once they rose to the top.
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Mar 28, 2011 08:21
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AJ was Air Styles, teaming with Air Paris as Air Raid in the cruiserweight tag team division Bischoff formed to fill time. He was there for the last couple months, mostly on the secondary shows.
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Mar 28, 2011 09:32
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LividLiquid posted:You cut off the second part of my quote where that's what I said. Well no, you said they didn't pull the trigger on those guys. It was far far far far beyond not just pulling the trigger on guys, they were actively and intentionally burying anyone who got over past their push level, from Chris Jericho to Adam Bomb/Wrath.
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Mar 29, 2011 01:24
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Benoit has quietly been added back into things like title histories and event results over the last couple years. You're never going to see WWE put out a Best of Chris Benoit tape, but as time passes the name will become less toxic and he'll probably be just a downplayed part of history instead of never existing.
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Mar 30, 2011 01:31
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Sue Denim posted:Companies essentially never build to and peak for television so when a big match is given away for free it's almost always with a subpar story and just generally not as important as it should be. Also commercial breaks and time are usually major issues.
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Apr 1, 2011 22:33
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Sue Denim posted:I'm referring to the Miz/Morrison match, because obviously WWE can afford to give away matches like these every so often. Given their PPV numbers they really can't.
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Apr 2, 2011 23:25
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To me it's more that they WWE has badly overexposed their guys and matchups between them such that it's hard to give much of a poo poo about anything. There's a grand total of two fresh programs on the Mania card, one of which is a feud between two announcers. Everyone else has wrestled a billion times on other PPVs and/or free television, and these particular matches aren't ones I want to see over and over again. The stories outside of Rock vs. Cena (which isn't even a real match) and Cole vs. Lawler aren't peaking at the right time. I'll watch the show and I expect it to be good, but most of it doesn't have a real WrestleMania feel. This is a similar problem to that which plagued WCW in about mid-1998. The top of the card stagnated badly during the prior few years and they'd run through every interesting program with those designated top guys, so they started doing a mixture of stupid poo poo and rehashes. That was beginning of the end.
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Apr 2, 2011 23:47
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The overexposure of stars is more that they've refused to rotate guys up and down the card, and compounded that by putting all of the few guys who are designated as permanent, cemented in concrete top-top stars on television every week. You can book John Cena in the same top position for many years and be successful, or you can have John Cena wrestling in important matches on television every week. But you can't have both, because after a certain period there's no more mystique left to John Cena and nowhere new to go with the character. That point was years and years ago and yet still nothing has changed. It amazes me given the reactions that stars get coming back from their absences that they haven't figured this part out yet. Well, Triple H obviously has for himself given that he held off his return for so long. Giving away so many matches on television when almost all of them are booked with terrible finishes is just dumb. If it was one or two a year like you're claiming it is, fine, lots of successful promotions throw the fans an occasional bone. But you're getting a PPV-quality matchup every drat week on one show or the other. It's not drawing viewers because almost nothing they do draws viewers. Changing that isn't going to drive everyone away; nobody watches RAW to see Cena wrestle Alberto Del Rio in a bad match that mostly consists of a commercial and has a non-finish. And now that match, which in theory could be a good and fresh money program, has already happened and wasn't any good. That's not even the worst example in just the Mania build of burning matches for no rhyme or reason, Edge and Miz in those champion vs. champion matches was. This isn't all rocket science, they're just stuck in a counterproductive booking mentality that's only worried about the next rating and the next PPV number with no sense of the bigger picture. Apparently people believe this now because it's former writers saying it, but there's hardly ever a long-term plan because any long-term plan that exists gets changed by Vince every week on the way to the show. It is frighteningly similar to WCW at the beginning of that company's fall, before Russo came in and things got really manic. Now, WWE has revenue streams that WCW didn't, and heretofore has not run into its Brad Siegel, so it isn't like the company is going to die anytime soon. But it's not really prospering in the grand scheme of things either, and if there ever comes a day when they fall out of NBC Universal favor (which considering the trials and tribulations there isn't a total impossibility), they're going to have some real problems. Moreover, it's producing RAW shows that have alternated between horrible and underachieving recently, ones that even some of the most ardent WWE fans around here haven't been defending. You'd think at some point the light bulb would go off to try some new stuff.
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Apr 3, 2011 10:01
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bobkatt013 posted:Ya but the car crash made it so they no longer wanted him They still wanted him, but WCW refused to guarantee contracts for injury.
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Aug 5, 2011 00:33
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I was more of a Crockett/WCW fan than a WWF fan for a very long time. It was the wrestling promotion while WWF was the gimmick promotion that mostly had bad matches. The WCW promotion was a business failure for most of its life, but it was only a consistent failure as a product towards the end.
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Oct 23, 2011 04:51
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VinNYC82 posted:I assume you mean "lost his mask". Bischoff wasn't running things at the time? I didn't really start watching RAW/Nitro until like '98. I guess I really don't know of a time when he wasn't "the guy". Who was running things at the time? This was in 1997 and Bischoff was most definitely in charge. Rey was booked to lose his mask and refused to do the job, so the finish was changed minutes before the match. Kevin Nash booked himself to win Rey's mask a few years later, still under the Bischoff regime although in the period where Bischoff was checking out. That time Rey went along with it under the promise of a big main event push, which never came.
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Oct 23, 2011 06:42
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The guy to beat Goldberg hadn't been built up yet. There would have been a time and a guy eventually, but it wasn't on the horizon when Kevin Nash decided to make it Kevin Nash.
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Oct 25, 2011 02:12
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The other piece of the Goldberg backlash is that they started heavily working his number record and piping in fake chants, both of which were completely unnecessary except that WCW wanted to control absolutely everything even when organic was far superior. Sound familiar?
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Oct 25, 2011 02:34
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Whatever blowup between Vince and Savage happened between about 1998 and 2001, IIRC. That doesn't mean that the incident that caused the blowup happened then. Something very serious and personal did happen, because Vince will do business with anyone that will make him a buck, even people that hosed him over, and Savage wasn't even a consideration. Whether that was something with Stephanie or something entirely different, well, we'll probably find out eventually, I guess.
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Jun 20, 2012 20:59
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Thauros posted:If the Macho and Stephanie rumor was true, I find it difficult to believe they'd let their #2 face do his elbow drop in an obvious tribute. On the other hand, Punk has a lot of latitude and the announcers never acknowledge that it's a Savage tribute, to the point of ignoring loud chants for Savage the first few times he did it.
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Jun 20, 2012 21:04
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Thauros posted:That's a good point, but it still seems to me like Punk's elbow would go over as well as a throat slash followed by a diving headbutt if he had sex with a fourteen year old Stephanie. On the other hand, the crossface and diving headbutt have both reappeared, which honestly I never thought I'd see again in a WWE ring after the Benoit tragedy.
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Jun 20, 2012 21:46
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LividLiquid posted:Let's break this down. Vince McMahon is absolutely motivated by his broken childhood. It informs nearly every decision he makes. Savage and Elizabeth split again in 1998, I believe. McMahon had an abusive step-father who hit his mother whom he's confessed to wishing he'd murdered. Savage is long-rumored to have been abusive to Liz. Isn't it far more likely that McMahon had no interest in further lining the pockets of somebody who now reminded him of his step-father than there being some well-kept secret that Savage raped his daughter? Savage and Elizabeth split in 1992 and never reconciled personally, although they did wrestling angles together through about 2000.
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Jun 20, 2012 21:47
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Ultimate Warrior tried to hold Vince up for money and was fired, got brought back, then got fired again over drugs and money, then got brought back again, then got fired again for no showing over money, and they've been intermittently trying to bring him back ever since. The only known guy of note Vince has actively refused to do business with other than Savage is Jeff Jarrett, and there was no money in Jeff Jarrett.
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Jun 21, 2012 00:29
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Savage left in 1994 because WWF was phasing him out into an announcer and Hogan got him a gigantic money deal to main event. The original WCW idea was to run a year-plus long Megapowers II type angle, but Hogan's star started fading and they never got to the breakup. It was, by all accounts, a fairly cordial departure for Savage from WWF.
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Jun 21, 2012 14:41
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We'll get an answer eventually because nothing stays secret in wrestling.
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Jun 22, 2012 14:21
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The American Dream posted:WCW World Tag Team Champions The Steiner Brothers (Rick and Scott) fought The Miracle Violence Connection (Terry Gordy and Steve Williams) to a time-limit draw (30:00) The Steiners were one of the bigger acts in the promotion and Williams and Gordy were brought in with a ridiculously huge push because of Bill Watts, who had given both huge pushes years earlier as singles in the UWF, unifying the WCW and NWA tag titles quickly upon arrival. This was also considered an interpromotional dream feud because Williams and Gordy has been the top tag team in All Japan for a few years, while the Steiners were the top tag team in both WCW and New Japan. When the Watts regime quickly washed out, all four left the promotion, but at the time that was pretty much the lead feud in the company. All three matches were very good.
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Jul 6, 2012 16:08
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LordPants posted:I can't seem to understand Dave's sentence structure. I think he's implying that All Japan is the bigger promotion, and if he gets a job there he'll get a job in the US, but even if he doesn't get a job jobbing to Misawa he'll get a job in the WWF because the WWF badly needs heels. Dave was saying that if Austin got a regular touring gig with All Japan that he was also going to work for ECW (Heyman was sharing a lot of guys with the big groups in Japan and Mexico around this time), and that Heyman was going to build ECW around Austin. At the same time, WWF was going to offer Austin enough money for Austin to go to WWF, which because WWF was demanding exclusivity by this point would have precluded Austin from continuing to work for ECW. Dave is implying though not outright saying that Austin preferred working for All Japan over working for Vince, which sounds insane in 2012, but in 1995 All Japan was a healthier promotion with an easier schedule. And Austin didn't really fit into the bad cartoon New Generation style that WWF was pushing at the time. So basically the choice was working AJPW and ECW or working WWF. He chose the latter, obviously.
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Dec 28, 2012 18:49
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bobkatt013 posted:Didn't Flair say that he was grooming him to take his place but then Hogan come in and destroyed everything, or is that Flair just talking bullshit? No, that's absolutely true, Austin was rather clearly being groomed to move into main events in early 1994. Austin was one of those guys like Rock and Orton that was pegged as a future world champion from his first few weeks in the business, he was not a diamond in the rough type like Foley in the least.
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Dec 29, 2012 09:22
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Austin got over because he was the total package of in-ring, charisma, and interviews with an everyman raging against the machine character at the perfect time to be such. I don't think his trunks being black or navy blue or trunks instead of long tights or whatnot mattered at all, the point was that he was a brilliant performer playing a realistic character at a time when the fans desperately wanted more of those instead of WWF New Generation cartoons.
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Dec 29, 2012 22:15
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1.) Stunning Steve Austin never wore generic black gear like Stone Cold Steve Austin did. Austin wore flashy vests and used patterned trunks in WCW. He also wasn't bald and didn't always have facial hair. 2.) Goldberg was much more of a ripoff of Ken Shamrock (and Shamrock actually wore gear much more similar to Goldberg than Austin did) and Taz than Steve Austin. 3.) The "Goldberg is an Austin ripoff" was a lame newsboard meme in 1998 so people who were around at that time are more apt to just totally handwave it.
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Dec 29, 2012 22:37
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Jorts would be an obvious ripoff because John Cena is pretty much the only dude that wears jorts. Lots of dudes wear solid color tights. As has been noted repeatedly, Goldberg's look was pretty obviously styled after Ken Shamrock and not Austin.
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Dec 30, 2012 00:23
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At the time Goldberg debuted WCW's top active face Lex Luger also wore plain black trunks. Goldberg is physically similar to Luger and they shared pushed football backgrounds. Ergo...
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Dec 30, 2012 00:54
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If you think Stunning Steve Austin was a generic looking CAW in generic solid black tights you should probably check out, well, anything Stunning Steve Austin did in WCW. That's just not factually accurate.
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Dec 30, 2012 01:40
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Zack_Gochuck posted:Where does Bischoff's alleged quote come in, then? I'm baffled. The booker of WCW in 1994 during Austin's big push with the US title after the Blondes were broken up was Ric Flair. Flair put the title on himself as one of his earliest acts, and one of his other major projects was preparing Austin to become the next top guy in the company. Austin was planned to feud with Flair in mid-late 1994 to begin a lengthy reign on top. When Hogan came in, Flair pretty quickly lost his booking power to Kevin Sullivan (with Hogan pulling the strings). Flair's plans were all discarded; Flair turned heel and dropped the title, and Austin was thrown into an even steven feud with another guy being discarded from the main event mix in Ricky Steamboat before being squashed by Jim Duggan. Hogan and Sullivan then brought in all of their friends en masse, which left no room for Austin (who had no great political allies even on his good days) to even have midcard level programs after losing to Duggan, so Austin was more or less used as a name job guy for a few months despite still being paid high level guaranteed money. Then he hurt his knee. The real reason he was fired was because he was turned into a well paid jobber and they had a chance to get out of his contract. I'm sure the Hogan crew didn't see money in him, but it wasn't for a real reason, it was because they didn't see money in anyone who didn't fit into the Vince McMahon 1980s WWF mold. oldfan fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Dec 30, 2012 |
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Dec 30, 2012 02:16
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I posted:Has Hogan ever starred in a movie which didn't suck massively? The aforementioned Rocky III is probably both Hogan's best performance and the best movie Hogan's ever been in, and that's not really saying all that much; it's only the fifth best of the six Rocky movies.
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Jan 21, 2013 08:52
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Dave didn't really develop an online presence until Observer Live, which was 1999. Well, not Dave himself at least, most of the post-RSPW names like Mike Samuda and Al Isaacs were just calling Dave's hotline and regurgitating it. eYada basically paid Dave and Bryan enough to do the hotline stuff for free and that's how the Observer online experience started. I don't even think Dave had e-mail until then, up until basically the merger he was using his father's Juno account. oldfan fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 20:41
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Not only does Dave still have a fax but he also has an old-fashioned answering machine on his landline.
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Jan 31, 2013 18:17
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EugeneJ posted:I thought this legitimized Dave in 1990: Right year, wrong thing. Getting hired by Frank Deford as a featured writer in The National was what legitimized Dave outside of insider wrestling circles. The National was a spectacular failure as a business, but it pushed Dave as one of America's best sportswriters and the Observer as a publication on par with the top newspapers.
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Jan 31, 2013 18:41
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If you guys think the Observer is bad now in terms of that stuff, you should have seen it before he had Scott Williams/Bryan/Vince doing editing work.
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Jan 31, 2013 20:07
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coconono posted:Scott Keith likes to interject his personal feelings about a wrestler as fact. Also he's a scummy jerk with dumb opinions. Also likes to interject made-up "facts" as actual facts.
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Jan 31, 2013 21:55
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Tying in the two topics, if you ever wants to hear Dave sarcastically rip on someone, either get a question about Scott Keith into the Observer Radio mailbag or ask it on the air during a call-in show.
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Feb 1, 2013 00:35
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