|
Hefty Leftist posted:requesting a decline of WWE megapost from let's say, 2014 onwards when the ratings started to crater Please.
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2022 03:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 12:25 |
|
|
Walla posted:The follow up really clenches it. FRIEDMAN IS G-D
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2022 04:13
|
|
|
Trollologist posted:Lol. Like anyone is going to pry the company from Vince's hands. He'll be 150, and plugged into life support on a golden throne booking the company in 2100. Can definitely see Vince funding the creation of actual Space Marines. Also the people complaining about Cena never being a troop are missing that the entire ARE TROOPS deal doesn't and never has cared about any actual troops. Soldiers aren't real people to Americans, cartoon characters are.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2022 05:28
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:Can definitely see Vince funding the creation of actual Space Marines. It's true. The only real americans are those who can sing Hulk Hogan's theme
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2022 06:05
|
|
|
thread seems dormant. Is vince still old?
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:08
|
|
|
Hefty Leftist posted:requesting a decline of WWE megapost from let's say, 2014 onwards when the ratings started to crater To be honest with you, ratings have been deflating on a slow puncture since the day Steve Austin turned heel in 2001, and I can't really write you a summary of twenty years of Raw shows because I'll spend four paragraphs on Kurt Angle wearing a tiny cowboy hat and singing Jimmy Crack Corn, and about two sentences where I yadda yadda yadda over a five-year period that includes world title reigns for Alberto Del Rio, Jack Swagger, and for the briefest of moments, Dolph Ziggler as heavyweight champion of the world. And I'd be right to do so. At this point, if you wanted a narrative history, you'd have to find someone who watches three hours of Raw each week, and there are people who actively wrestled on Raw every week who came out after they were released and said that the only way they followed the show was to watch ten-minute reviews of it on Youtube. But I can give you a trends-and-forces history to work from: After Austin and Rock left, WWE needed a new top babyface, because their entire business model has always traditionally been built around having one megastar that has name recognition outside of pro-wrestling and who casual fans will pay to see. And they moved all of their chips onto John Cena as the top guy. And, at the risk of being controversial on the internet, Vince McMahon did nothing wrong here. John Cena is a world-class babyface. He's funny, he's charismatic, he energises a crowd, his matches are slightly formulaic but always acceptable enough, and he always shows up looking he could run through a wall. In the right context, the fans actually like him a lot. The problem with John Cena was never John Cena. The problem with John Cena was that he marked the WWE abandoning the 'Attitude' era and going back to PG booking-styles from the 1980s, where just like with Hulk Hogan they would stack the deck against Cena each week, Cena would get beaten up for twenty minutes and then suddenly spring up and do all his moves. At one point, Cena and Orton would fight the entire Raw roster. He was Mickey Mouse, and everyone else was on the Mickey Mouse show. And it created an open split within the crowd that would basically last for his whole run. Kids loved Cena. But the hardcore fans who came to the big shows would boo him out of the building. Leading to a couple of iconic moments where Cena was loudly booed against a Russian (not Russian) man who came out in a tank, and where he defended the world title against Rob Van Dam at one of the ECW nostalgia shows and the camera cuts to a large bedsheet reading 'IF CENA WINS, WE RIOT'. As of 2012, RAW was expanded to a three-hour show, which broadly made it unwatchable. This is exactly the same mistake that Nitro made in the late 90s, where Turner asked them to do extra hours, but all they achieved in doing so was to make a bloated, boring, show that was difficult to watch or to follow, and where stuff was added for the sake of producing content rather than it actually being entertaining. By 2021, WWE was running three weekly shows, with three nominally 'world' titles and seven hours of content, plus at least one monthly 'pay-per-view' show. I say 'pay-per-view', but in reality WWE effectively abandoned pay-per-view in favour of a streaming service from 2014 onwards, which they promoted by having everyone on their three-hour show loudly berate you to purchase the streaming service for about twelve months or so. Have you purchased the streaming service yet? Why haven't you purchased the streaming service? Is it because you're too stupid to purchase the streaming service? My wife, she is very insistent on the matter of getting you to purchase the streaming service. And so on, and so forth. Which wasn't a terrible business decision in and of itself (or at very least, that question is still up in the air), but again it put them in a position of now being a content service rather than needing to build their business around PPV buyrates. I can't imagine that otherwise they would have allowed a mixed tag match featuring Baron Corbin and Lacey Evans to main-event a pay-per-view. Also by 2014, the question of who wouid take the reigns from Cena was suddenly very prominent. For a brief flash one summer, Jeff Hardy merchandise was outselling Cena, and he looked like he might have his moment, at which point he was immediately arrested and let go from the company shortly thereafter. CM Punk also outsold Cena during his year as the rebel king leading the anti-Cena fans against Mickey Mouse and his henchmen, but by his very nature could never be seen as the face of the company, and would disappear one day pausing only to burn several bridges on the way out. But where he left off, Daniel Bryan took over. By 2014, he was the most popular babyface in the company, and who had gotten a comedy chant so over that the winning team at the Superbowl did it. He'd also been publicly screwed out of the title several times by the McMahon clan. Which was obviously building to him winning the Royal Rumble and getting the big coronation at Wrestlemania. And when it was time for number thirty, the crowd did his chant as they counted down, and then... Rey Mysterio's music hits. And the crowd boos. And keeps booing. Like, yes, the crowd booed Cena, but they were largely having fun booing Cena. This I think is the first time the crowd genuinely starts to poo poo on the product as a whole, and I'm not sure they ever really got them back. The plan that WWE actually wanted to go with for Wrestlemania 30 was Randy Orton vs a returning Dave Batista, with Batista being a suprise entrant and winner in the Rumble. Except that Batista being on house shows got leaked to the press beforehand, so Batista's big return was just on Smackdown, where he was invited to the ring by his good friend Bryan wouldn't hold the belt for that long before having to relinquish it due to concussion-related injuries that would keep him out until the end of the year (and eventually force a temporary retirement), but he would come back in time to announce his entry into the 2015 Royal Rumble. There was surely no way to gently caress this up a second time. But somehow, they hosed up exponentially more. Daniel Bryan enters fifteen minutes in, and then ten minutes later is very nonchalantly eliminated, in his big return match. The crowd isn't even angry, they're confused. Like, surely there was a gently caress-up and he's going to get in and they're going to pretend he didn't go over the top. But no, he gets up and goes to the back. And what follows is thirty full minutes of wrestling where the crowd start to boo everything and everyone involved. They don't even count down the numbers, there's just booing mixed with general apathy for everything occurring. I'm amazed that they still have the full match up on Youtube (it goes to poo poo from about 28 minutes on, picks up a little, but then dies an absolute death at the end) Instead, this was the year earmarked for the big post-Cena project, Roman Reigns. I'm pretty sure WWE had picked him as the chosen one even before he left developmental. And, as a sum of his parts, he was a choice. He's tall, he played football, he looks like loving Aquaman, and he's related to the Rock in some way that I can't be bothered to look up right now. But... that was it. He didn't energise a room in the same way that Hogan did, or that Cena did. His promos were awkward, scripted affairs that sounded like they were written by a seventy-year-old man (they were). And the fans knew that he was the new Cena, so in many ways he inherited the disdain that Cena caught without really picking up any of the younger fans along with it. The booking idea, supposedly, was to take Bryan and the other top babyfaces out of the match early so that the fans would rally behind Reigns. What actually happens is that when the Rock makes a surprise appearance to help Reigns at the end, the fans booed the Rock when he raised Reigns hand. And that... was it. This was now the Reigns era, whether the fans were keen on it or not. Punk was gone, Bryan would retire shortly thereafter, and aside from a period where Reigns would have to step away due to a genuine leukaemia diagnosis, Roman Reigns has been the main event of every Wrestlemania from 2015 to present. The Disney guys won, and the hardcore fans lost. And, to a certain extent, that's fine. I'm definitely one of the people that believes that if the secret to pro-wrestling was copying Ring Of Honor, then Ring Of Honor wouldn't have gone out of business. Anyone who tells you otherwise should be viciously wedgied. And good lord, the one thing they need to do is to start making new fans instead of running their existing poo poo into the ground. But WWE couldn't have its cake and eat it. There was an idea that they could go full-bore for a casual audience and that the hardcore fans would stick around for good, but in practice Punk and Bryan are now in AEW, which regularly beats WWE in the 18-30 bracket despite doing half the numbers overall. WWE's audience is desperately old and declining, and there's a seeming fear to cut back on content in favour of actually trying to make those new fans. They have a TV deal and a Saudi sportswashing deal (which coincided with the Kashoggi incident and further alienated A LOT of fans) that allow them to lean fully into nostalgia and a couple of handpicked guys, but whatever audience was there for Punk is no longer there in a world post-AEW (with a lot of credit also going to New Japan making inroads into the US market for the first real time, but that's a story for another day). I think the question of what happens after that is a question of who manages to find the next big babyface star. Like, mainstream star. I like Hangman Page, but I'm not sold on him right now as the next Steve Austin. If he shows up in WWE and they don't kill him off in the cradle, then tides can turn very fast. If he shows up in AEW, then WWE might suddenly be on shaky ground. SirPhoebos posted:thread seems dormant. Is vince still old? just checked he is
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:12
|
|
|
FullLeatherJacket posted:FullLeatherJacket does a great recap that perfectly sums it up better than I could. In regards to the thread being dormant, I'm not done with Cena (Jacket saved me a little trouble there) and there is at least one more thing I'd like to post about at length, and who knows what people might suggest that I could post about (I wasn't planning on posting about Triple H until someone asked)
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:31
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:thread seems dormant. Is vince still old? he's getting younger actually
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:32
|
|
|
Seems like now would be a good time to have Nikolai Volkoff's "son" make his debut in the WWF.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:35
|
|
|
fwiw i have zero objection to anyone covering the same material but with more objective facts and less simpsons references and airings of grievances three-ring circus rules apply in the wrestlethread
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:48
|
|
|
I hope that everyone with an emotional investment in AEW and the drugged up human glass menagerie amusement of a trust fund creep has a wonderful time tonight and really enjoys all sixty eight matches of AEW Revolution. I really do. I plan to watch it on fast forward later just so I can see the next six new hires they unveil and then get shuffled off to youtube shows. (hopefully that means Cody too)
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 01:59
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:I hope that everyone with an emotional investment in AEW and the drugged up human glass menagerie amusement of a trust fund creep has a wonderful time tonight and really enjoys all sixty eight matches of AEW Revolution. I really do. mark
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:01
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:I hope that everyone with an emotional investment in AEW and the drugged up human glass menagerie amusement of a trust fund creep has a wonderful time tonight and really enjoys all sixty eight matches of AEW Revolution. I really do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:03
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:Jesus christ LOL imagine being this mad at wrestlemens I felt unsafe in other wrestling threads because they use terms like and the far more hurtful "mark madden"
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:05
|
|
|
I get that you’re going through a great deal of adversity rn, Mr. Levesque, but your sour grapes are definitely showing itt
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:13
|
|
|
the game would never post on a forum that he did not already own
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:14
|
|
|
I want to hear more about backstage crazy antics and the stories behind them. This thread has been great to read.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:32
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:I hope that everyone with an emotional investment in AEW and the drugged up human glass menagerie amusement of a trust fund creep has a wonderful time tonight and really enjoys all sixty eight matches of AEW Revolution. I really do. source your quotes
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 02:59
|
|
|
Ad by Khad posted:source your quotes https://www.reddit.com/r/WrestleFapMeetUps/comments/t1m1v0/kik_throwawayps118_hmu_and_tell_me_which_one_youd/
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 03:20
|
|
|
Is it absurd to believe that Vince will try to make sure that WWE self destructs as soon as he dies? Whether he succeeds is a different story, but I do think he's going to try something. He seems like the sort of person that would say "After me, the flood". Except he never heard the quote and if you explained it to him he'd tell you it's the dumbest thing ever.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 03:27
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:Is it absurd to believe that Vince will try to make sure that WWE self destructs as soon as he dies? Whether he succeeds is a different story, but I do think he's going to try something. His will is having all the wrestlers entombed with him
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 03:55
|
|
|
Prof. Crocodile posted:holy crap that’s a promo and a half. I actually kind of want to see this match now. Dude. Pirate if you have to. If you like wrestling watch this match.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 04:09
|
|
|
Big congrats to AEW for landing the equivalent of Golden Palace . Com sponsorship in 2022.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 04:12
|
|
|
Someone make an effort post on how WWE wasted Bray Wyatt.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 04:25
|
|
|
where does Seth Rollins fit into all of this And how does this work out for the old dudes like Big Show or whatever wrestling into their 50s? Do they just get paid as like consulting fees or something for specific appearances?
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 04:26
|
|
|
(I AM NOW GOING TO SPEND AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME NOW NOT REALLY OR JUST BARELY TALKING ABOUT JOHN CENA OR WRESTLING BUT LAYING THE GROUNDWORK OF CERTAIN UNDERCURRENTS) In 1983, the video game industry crashed so hard, it was dubbed…well, the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. What the hell does this have to do with John Cena? We’ll get there. At the time, Atari ruled the video game roost, with its system, the 2600, standing on top of a pile of second-stringers. In ten years, video games had gone from the curiosity of Pong to big business…and big business promptly almost strangled the industry in what would have been its crib. Success brought greed and laziness, and Atari was beset by terrible games (and at the time, outside of a magazine or two, virtually no way to tell in advance if a game was terrible before you bought it. Imagine if somehow Cyberpunk 2077 had no one able to form an opinion or assessment of it before it was released). The one two knockout punch was an utterly atrocious port of super-hot arcade game Pac-Man (made worse when later people showed that a 2600 could have been used to create a near perfect arcade port of said game), and of course, E.T. A game that Atari thought would be such a hot seller that it manufactured more copies of it than Atari 2600 system existed, thinking the game would sell systems, five MILLION of them. And a game that Atari wanted out by the Christmas season. And a game that instead of spending money to make money, Atari more or less gave one person six weeks to create the game from scratch. Cocaine was involved, I am certain. Quite frankly, while E.T’s a bad game, it’s amazing that it’s playable at all. Its badness might even be overstated. You could argue that all things being equal, it plays better than the mentioned before 2000 disaster Daikatana. Or 2011’s Duke Nukem Forever. In any case, Atari consumers did what they should. They got sick of being burned, and they stopped opening their wallets. The industry fell off a cliff, and if Nintendo hadn’t snuck back in a few years later by marketing the Nintendo Entertainment System as “a toy” at first instead of a “video game system”, as that term had become marketing poison for a time, it might not have ever caught back on in the west, or been limited to computers (you ever wonder why the NES had so many barely functioning gimmick controllers, like the Power Glove, Power Pad, R.O.B, and so on? It was to present the illusion of it being ‘a toy’ before the mark of being a 'video game system' vanished). And Atari infamously buried who knows how many unsold copies of E.T in a desert landfill, a story that reached mythological status to the point where it became doubted that it was anything but that, a story, until said burial site was actually discovered and exhumed in 2014, revealing that yes, it existed, though it wasn’t just E.T games that were buried there. — I once read an article about someone working in the WWE who was asked about what was considered the subpar treatment of an internet-loved wrestler. The person’s response was something along the lines of “What does it matter what we do? Those people will tune in anyway.” And lo and behold, when not exactly great stuff happened to said wrestler on the next week’s show, the people spoken of erupted in fresh snarls and grumbles, and the writer of said article said the person just chuckled away. Because they were still tuning in. Yeah, maybe they weren’t buying stuff, or actively stealing from the WWE via pirated PPV’s, but they were still tuning in. They still cared enough to devote time and energy to the product. And really, what’s the difference between someone who does and loves it and does it so they can spew rage over every small detail? Of course, this was written in the days before stuff like Twitter harassment came along, which might have given these sorts and their nastier vermin hangers-on a direction to their offence, but that’s asking people to predict the future. — In the mid 80’s, a young Brian Warner (who also has nothing to do with John Cena) was attending a religious fundamentalist school in his pre-teens and early teens. He spoke of his teachers talking about how the devil was already among them (specifically saying that since Ronald Reagan had six letters in all three of his names, Ronald Wilson Reagan, that meant he was the Antichrist. You can tell that this was when these evangelical types were still splintered on politics before the true psychopaths swept everyone else out and united behind grifting and telling people they could violently harm and kill anyone who they hated or were scared by, but I digress) and being scared of the Rapture that his teachers kept saying was coming. And eventually, getting utterly sick of being terrified and how religion just fed him hostility and fear when it claimed to serve the opposite; the tipping point was him bringing in a picture he’d taken from a plane window where the clouds seemed to form a vague angel shape, thinking his teachers would like it, only for him to be more or less spat on for bringing ‘blasphemy’ to their classrooms, as for SOME reason such a picture rang counter to whatever twisted nonsense passed for faith in their heads, and they reacted as such sorts do. At which point, Warner rebelled and began doing everything he could to get expelled from the school outside of outright criminal acts. But, after numerous ‘edgy’ and ‘sacrilegious’ efforts just got him everything except expelled, he realized that since his school was in a location where it had to accept a large number of ‘poor’ kids whose parents couldn’t pay some form of fee to the school under some tax law, and his parents didn’t fall under that and hence had to, and did, pay the school’s fees, that they would never kick him out because they needed every paying parent they could. The lone choice was for him to walk away himself, which he did. The experience heavily defined his personality and viewpoint of the world, as you might know Brian Warner better under his stage name of Marilyn Manson, and that his moment in the ‘sun’ in the late 90's was basically the musical equivalent of taking a huge dump on everything practising religious people held dear. — You might see where these three other points intertwined with John Cena. With Atari and the Crash, it happened suddenly and immensely, a direct stab to the carotid arteries instead of a shallow stab to the stomach that nicked the large intestine. And with the story of that worker’s viewpoint and Warner’s life, it showed that it was a ball in the court of Cena critics that they never quite grasped. In the end, they had to get up and walk away, and do it in sudden large numbers, not a long, drawn out trickle that allowed the WWE to keep bailing out one segment of their sinking ship while another slowly filled with water, and then go over to bail that out as water filled up what they’d just emptied. Then again, hindsight is 20/20. But there’s a few more things. One is the same one that every entertainment industry has: the ‘fans that aren’t’. You know the types. The ones completely lacking in introspection and self awareness, the possessive, creepy, nasty types, the ones that formed the backbone of things like Gamergate and the misplaced backlash against the 2016 Ghostbusters (whose issue was never that it was a reboot with women, but that the trailer had nothing SPECIAL about it, and indeed, the film’s script had no pop as well. The creation was just bland, it had nothing to do with gender, but of course, that’s what so many zeroed in on) and harassing Kelly Marie Tran with racist threats because they didn’t like the storytelling of a Star Wars movie, a misplaced baseless hostility that everyone would be better off without (no wonder more manipulative people managed to spin giant chunks of it into what would become the Alt-Right). To me, there are two kinds of hardcore fans. One is just that, a fan. Devoted. Maybe they’ll be disappointed if a product released is subpar, or not like the direction, and they might even complain at length. But in the end, they recognize their place in things, and just what they are obligated and not obligated to. The other is basically akin to any other addict. They have that first experience and want it again. I’ve heard more than a few stories of these types sitting in the theater for Star Wars and being blown away as the gigantic Star Destroyer flew in from offscreen, a moment they’d cherish forever…and want more of. Except, just like any addiction, the first high can never be replicated. No matter what. And just like addicts will destroy their lives, their relationships, their health, and more so chasing that impossible first high, those types of fans will gobble down media even as they profess they despise it, and will attempt to exclude others as ‘not being true’, or react with hostility and rage if they perceive that ‘their thing’ is being ‘taken’ from them, which is utter poo poo; ‘their thing’ doesn’t belong to them either. In essence, many fans of the latter stripe think that if they were in charge (and boy oh boy will they excoriate you for that fact being wrong), they’d be able to pull their desired product to heights of quality and profit like the world has never seen. They don’t realize that no, they couldn’t do that. Not with anything near the assurance they think they could. We talked about how stupid so many people in the entertainment industry are, and many of those cases are based around the fact that these people recognize that their jobs are so reliant on luck that they might as well take their company’s coffers and dump them on the nearest roulette table, and hence their main focus is making themselves look competent, emphasizing all success and dismissing all failure…with the main target of their efforts mainly being their fellow entertainment runners who are all trying to do the same thing. In essence, they’re not tackling their problems the right way and only various quirks and holes in systems let them keep doing it long after the point where they should be expelled for it. Basically, a lot of John Cena criticism comes from a place of bitterness and bad faith, and desires a solution that they cannot get. The sole choice is to stop opening your wallets and walk away. That was what happened in the 90’s, and it forced Vince to actually swallow his damages and listen to the fans for several years. But the John Cena problem isn’t exclusively the property of those who kept showing up at Raws, Smackdowns, and PPVs to boo Cena and sing “John Cena Sucks” along to his theme music. Far from it. — Very few people can create a genre, or at least get all its general parts organized into what is considered ‘the first’; one should never aspire to be the next Tolkien (fantasy) or Carpenter (slasher subgenre of horror films) or more regrettable types like Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created John Carter of Mars and Tarzan, and whose pulp and science hero archetypes and genres were marred by eugenics (Tarzan, a white male infant from a noble family, rising to become champion of the jungle and better than all its natives because he’s of ‘higher stock’, that ‘good breeding’ can not only overcome such a scenario but establish utter dominance over it). Basically, most anything creative is going to follow in the footsteps of something, and it really can be hard to define when terms like “classic” cross over to ‘trite” and “cliche”. One should never underestimate the power of ‘classic’. The Twilight series, despite god knows how much analysis over how utterly terrible everything in it is, sold books and tickets by the truckload because it tapped the most classic of tales, a love story, and a buried fantasy of many women, the idea of a partner who was incredibly ‘powerful’, and yet enthralled, even submissive, to them. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with such a fantasy, as long as you recognize it as such. Because another field where that sort of idea applies is pornography, and I’ve never heard a good story from anyone who tried to have sex having solely learned of it from porn. Another example of the power of ‘classic’ is in the Game of Throne series, or more specifically, its book origins (A Song of Ice and Fire) and how said books initially ‘got over’ by not just defying the classic tropes, but setting them on fire before burying them alive. Unfortunately, my own analysis makes me think that such writing came from the wrong place; rather than ‘do things differently’ or even ‘do what would really happen’, Game of Thrones reads with a strong undercurrent of ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, as if writer George R.R. Martin had read so much stock fantasy in his life that he became sick if not outright hateful of it, and wrote his work to not just get away from such oft-repeated tales, but outright throw what people expected back in their faces. For a bit, it worked; the first three books came out over a period of five years and were utterly thrilling, often from their insane plot twists based on defying conventional storylines. And then, after Book 3, by far the most exciting, dropped in 2000. The next book didn’t come out until 2005. And the one after that in 2011. As of now, neither the sixth or seventh promised book have been released: the whole Game of Thrones show premiered just before the fifth book was released, ran its course, and ended in 2019 with no sign of more work in the actual book series save a chapter or two every now and then. Many are deeply concerned Martin will die before he finishes, or that he has completely lost all energy and passion and is just procrastinating and doing other things instead of writing, overwhelmed by how big and complex his plot and world has become. But me, I think part of it was just how intensely Martin took a shredder to all ‘classic happenings’ in his world…and found that instead of going down new roads less traveled, he was now stuck in place with all the roads ripped to pieces and unable to be repaired. That maybe, there was more to so-often-repeated things in such series than just cliche, and that by attacking them so utterly, he wrecked if not outright destroyed his own ability to continue. And still yet…the concept of ‘classic’ is super slippery. You never know what might come down that renders ‘classic’ as ‘dead’. You ever heard of Amadis of Gaul? Probably not, but in the 1500’s, it was one of the big hits in a genre of chivalric romances, of stories of knights going forth full of nobility and superiority of blood and family, making attempts to find someone to love into a crusade akin to actually slaying a dragon, and then lamenting their failure with atonement that would be better suited for someone who did something like accidentally burning a village down. Then as the 1600’s started, a writer who tired of the genre wrote up a little book poking fun and exposing the holes of the whole idea, a little ditty called Don Quixote. Within a generation, the chivalric romance idea was dead, and while exactly what Don Quixote stands for has changed over the centuries, it’s still well remembered today. I’ll wager you recognized THAT name, after all. Or hell, for something more recent, the pulp era of boys’ adventure stories, of young preteens and teens being stranded in some very out of the way place and having a jolly good time of it, good breeding overcoming all. Then in 1954 some guy decided to try a piece on what would be more likely to happen with young male human beings in such a crisis situation, and penned a book I’m fairly sure you read in school, Lord of the Flies. Hell, the book even name drops one of the big books in the former genre, The Coral Island, at the very end. Lord of the Flies and ‘the human being is at best fallible and at worst one step away from being a beast’ concept promptly took over that idea, expelling the old concept as near impossible and hence, bad fiction. Never mind that there was a case of more or less the exact thing happening in real life a mere 11 years after the novel was published, and as it turned out, the teenager boys, while not having a grand old adventure of it, did not turn on each other and become beasts, but instead worked together and managed to set up a livable situation for 15 months before they were rescued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways But you sure as heck won’t be seeing that idea used in fiction much any more. There’s a reason that popular ATM TV series Yellowjackets both shares a name with an insect and the theme of that book. And sometimes, classics don’t fade, but evolve. After all, it was only in 1905 that some woman named Orczy, I think she might have been a Baroness, wrote some book based on a play she also wrote about some woman named Marguerite who is so exasperated with her empty headed English fop of a husband, Sir Percy Blakeney, and she really couldn’t focus on that, the Reign of Terror is happening and they’re trying to find some unknown hero rescuing nobles from the guillotine, who goes by the name of his flower, the Scarlet Pimpernel. Who could that be? Well, it could never be her husband, a shallow dandy who barely comprehends the world. Never. Just like the 1919 hero Zorro could never be the lackadaisical layabout Don Diego A La Vega. Or how in 1939 the dark, terror of crime everywhere figure known as The Batman could ever be blithe, uncaring, bored with the world millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (or how the spineless shrinking reporter Clark Kent could ever be the godly man among man with the power to shape the world noble hero Superman, but Batman fits the theme better). The world mocks timid, meek Peter Parker but half the time thrills and champions the colorful quipping hero Spider Man. The world hates and fears mutants, yet are defended by them despite that, barring occasional storyline deviations. And so on. There can be plenty of life and veins to mine in a classic. It’s all about execution, and recognition. — (I AM ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT JOHN CENA AGAIN HERE) So, why exactly did Cena have so much trouble, if there’s nothing wrong with being a classic? Well, first of all, forget events like the infamous ECW One Night Stand in 2005: those were filled with people who tended to lack perspective and took themselves just a little too seriously. You can jokingly put up a banner that says “IF CENA WINS, WE RIOT”, but if somehow they decided that yes, Cena would win, it would not justify the crowd, which should have been filled with the smarkiest of the smarks, in rioting, and I would not be surprised if they did it anyway, so caught up in their self-righteous outrage. But that was just one VERY unique crowd. No. The problem with Cena going backwards into the Hulk Hogan superface archetype is the same if you picked up at his peak, at his best, fresh as a daisy and with all the determination in the world Royce Gracie and dropped him into modern MMA. He’d get destroyed. The sport has evolved too much, changed too much, and you can’t pull it back. Heck, I think something like that did happen in one of the later but before they cracked 100 UFC PPV events (I think we’re up to around 260 or so these days); Royce returned, with several adaptations based on changed rules (he couldn’t wear a judo gi any more, for example), but he was swiftly dispatched by his opponent. Brazilian ju jistu just couldn't compare to, well, mixed martial arts. By the same analogy, when Hogan was the invincible superface, the wrestling world was very different in how much NARROWER it was. You had, in general, one show a week, which likely only showed wrestlers beating up jobbers. You might occasionally get a top star to do an interview, or a wrestler vs wrestler match, but if you actually wanted to see Hulk Hogan wrestle, and do his Hulk up and defeat his danger, you had to either go to a house show (which generally would be one a year, MAYBE 2 or 3 at the very most if it was a very hot market) or purchase the PPV, which only happened a few times a year. Hogan was far less exposed, and even with that much lower exposure, it only carried him for about five years and change before people had started getting bored of the same old thing. Now you take Cena, who was tasked with doing the same rough thing, except now he’s doing it on two weekly shows, if not a third one here or there. And a PPV every month. AND house shows. AND it’s a retread of what’s come before. Because the person in charge knew there was no competition, and nothing that wrestling fans could turn to easily. And there was the general contempt there, that they’d watch no matter what, and that hence you could do anything, what were they gonna do, leave? And then they went and had Cena on top never changing his spiel for over ten years. It was around September 2006, when the Marine came out, that Cena fully discarded all aspects of the ‘Doctor of Thuganomics’ character that had gotten him over to begin with. Now he was the pure good champion of…well, Never Giving Up, his fans were the Cenation, not the Chain Gang, and he actually started incorporating aspects of the military/Marines into himself despite never actually serving in it, like wearing dog tags and saluting. Which, considering the deeper issues of ARE TROOPS, didn’t win him any favors with his critics. And I’ll admit, I do think it took Cena some time, even after Wrestlemania 22, to really get into a groove and get his workrate down. Unfortunately, by the time he did fully develop, the viewpoint had calcified. Cena ‘couldn’t wrestle’. Any attempt to disprove it, like adding moves to his signatures like a top rope legdrop headrop/Fameasser, a springboard Stunner, or doing stuff like rolling onto a fallen opponent, swinging them up onto his shoulders, and then delivering his finisher, just deflected off the bitter barriers that the anti-Cena fans refused to lower. Oh yeah, that finisher wasn’t the F.U any more, because it was around then that the WWE went PG, seeing the better market in the children Cena drew. Now it was “the Attitude Adjustment”, which I found mildly amusing because I knew that name from Lex Luger’s early wrestling days, when he used a pilediver as a finisher with that name. Obscure smark pride knowledge, I know, I admit it’s very silly. It soured matches like the one hour match he had with Shawn Michaels on a Raw in mid 2007, because the bitter refrain kept you from getting lost in the match. And while that aspect would get a little better with other opponents (CM Punk was very good at actually letting Cena work in a way that slipped around the guard of the Anti-Cena fans), it never went away. It made people keep insisting that Cena should turn heel, like that would fix all the problems; never mind that would just disappoint the children, while the hardcore fans would likely swiftly get bored of it anyway, which meant you lost BOTH markets. And really, in the end, the hardcores didn’t understand the markets anyway. It might irk me that Wrestlemania 23 (with the Vince/Donald Trump nonsense) and Wrestlemania 28 (Cena vs long retired to Hollywood save for guest spots the Rock) had the largest buyrates solely because of those outside, freak show factors, whereas if we’d been handed the book, our dream card of amazing wrestling playing to every wrestler’s strength probably would have sold a fraction of those shows. Now it’s 2022. Cena, like Rock, has mostly retired to Hollywood. While The Marine (and Cena’s performance) hardly set the world on fire at the time, save for a few mocking memes (but did well enough that they made a video series of sequels that first starred of all people Ted Dibiase Jr before the Miz more or less inherited the series), Cena’s later efforts began to surprise a lot of people, like his original-get-noticed minor performance as a meathead boyfriend of one of the main female characters in the 2015 film Trainwrecked. Or his role as one of the human heroes in the 2018 film Bumblebee. Or his most recent effort as his take on the DC character Peacemaker. You’d think, why couldn’t we have gotten THIS Cena? Doesn’t he realize that if we had, I wouldn’t have spent (checks) 4000+ rambling words about the finer points and whys and why nots of the Let’s Go Cena/Cena Sucks decade? Well, as said, I don’t really have to go over a bunch of career highlights or lowlights like I did with Triple H, partly because FullLeatherJacket covered it pretty well, so I’ll close next post with one final analysis on the whys of Cena’s wrestling career. --- Hollismason posted:I want to hear more about backstage crazy antics and the stories behind them. This thread has been great to read. My next series will be about perhaps the biggest known one of such events from modern times. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Mar 7, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 04:31
|
|
|
Hollismason posted:I want to hear more about backstage crazy antics and the stories behind them. This thread has been great to read. The wrestlers once assembled a slip n' slide in a hotel hallway. There was a prostitute positioned at the end. Perry Saturn strapped a dildo to the top of his head and attempted to make history.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 04:40
|
|
|
Animal-Mother posted:The wrestlers once assembled a slip n' slide in a hotel hallway. There was a prostitute positioned at the end. Perry Saturn strapped a dildo to the top of his head and attempted to make history. Well did he?
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 06:01
|
|
|
If you didn't watch AEW's PPV tonight you missed one of the best events ever done.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 06:04
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:Big congrats to AEW for landing the equivalent of Golden Palace . Com sponsorship in 2022. i dont know what you're referring to but nice hatewatching all that gross bitching and you're following the show even closer than most of PSP lol
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 07:00
|
|
|
having a grouchy but harmless hater-in-residence is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. the forums are healing
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 07:12
|
|
|
Cornwind Evil posted:By the same analogy, when Hogan was the invincible superface, the wrestling world was very different in how much NARROWER it was. You had, in general, one show a week, which likely only showed wrestlers beating up jobbers. You might occasionally get a top star to do an interview, or a wrestler vs wrestler match, but if you actually wanted to see Hulk Hogan wrestle, and do his Hulk up and defeat his danger, you had to either go to a house show (which generally would be one a year, MAYBE 2 or 3 at the very most if it was a very hot market) or purchase the PPV, which only happened a few times a year. Hogan was far less exposed, and even with that much lower exposure, it only carried him for about five years and change before people had started getting bored of the same old thing. A quick count had Hogan wrestle on national TV in 1987 7 times, 2 PPV, 4 Saturday Night's Main Event, and one time on Superstars. He also was on 14 times on various local northeastern cable shows (MSG network, etc.). Cena in 2007 wrestled 46 times nationally between weekly TV shows and PPV.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 16:47
|
|
|
I get that Cena was marketable and kids (and women) liked him, and the business they did with him in that position was seemingly more worthwhile than listening to other demographics of their audience. I get that nobody cared that I and many others didn't enjoy Cena. But I always felt like it didn't have to be that way. The problem was never John Cena himself, but always what WWE was doing with him, and I don't believe they HAD to make him this polarizing centerpiece of their business. But WWE's problem has often been - as we've highlighted many times in this very thread - they're just really bad at telling stories. If they had been better at it, there wouldn't have been any reason that more of the audience couldn't have gotten behind Cena. And keep in mind that, at the time I was watching, there were 3 separate shows for 3 separate rosters. You would think that, hey, if you don't like Cena, then there's other options WWE would be putting out that might be up your alley. Cena's only one guy. Cena's only in one match, if that. You have an entire rest of the show that might have something in there. If not, maybe you'd like Raw, or ECW. Again, I will refer back to the many tales we've already shared in this thread to explain why that didn't work. When wrestlers are released, it's often attributed to the excuse of "Creative has nothing for you." The late Chris Kanyon is said to have given them the perfect response to this when his time was up. "Fire Creative, then."
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 19:05
|
|
|
Vince is old and carny as gently caress but let's be real we're now here for the fascinating and educational effort posts. I spent a good chunk of this weekend watching wrestling promos and I gotta say that even though I go back as far as Wrestlemania X being the first PPV I watched (on VHS, not live) and grew up firmly entrenched in the Attitude era, stopping around Wrestlemania XX? I like Cena. Heck, I love Cena's mic-work because I get his gig and as someone up-thread already said, he knows how to galvanize a crowd, regardless of whether they're behind him or not. I also dig The Miz because that's a kind of petulant "I am always done hard upon" whiner that I can get behind as a heel, and R-Truth got me some genuine belly-laughs. Then I look at Reigns and I feel... Nothing. He's a physically built dude with no charisma but he's trying to be packaged, again as said above, like a Hogan, or a Cena, and he's not. Nothing I watched was from after his return in 2020 where his gimmick has apparently been met with acclaim if Wikipedia is to be believed so who knows? All the above is detatched from watching any actual matches so it might be these people are utter dogshit in the ring in which case, fair enough.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 19:17
|
|
|
roman reigns had to get leukemia for the crowd to finally cheer him as a face instead of boo him
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 19:21
|
|
|
vince tried the same thing in the new generation era when he tried to make Kevin Nash the next Hulk Hogan and had a promo where Kevin Nash turned down money to sign some autographs for some kids which is the most unrealistic thing to have ever happened in wrestling ever lmao
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 19:34
|
|
|
It honestly wouldn't have been so bad if they'd have switched up the writing a bit. They basically had two modes: Cena vs Monster of the Month (who often was big and intimidating, but didn't make for the most entertaining matches and by their very nature had to be 1-2 month feuds) Cena/Batista/Orton in some combination They let the bench get pretty shallow going all in on 3 guys (with a bit of guest main eventing from the upper-card of Michaels/Edge) for so long and it got pretty stale. The "Cena wins with his 5 moves" was some power rangers stuff that works for syndicated children's TV, but the shelf life for a live show is pretty short. They eventually backed off that, but it had long wore out its welcome by that point. If anything it was an even more stringent version of the Hogan booking, trying to run a lot more shows (as mentioned) with a lot more repeat stories, and not a lot of interest in trying to build up a deeper undercard to let some fresh matches happen. OTOH, they sold shirts and made money, so by those metrics everything was fine, TV ratings only matter when there's competition.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2022 19:45
|
|
|
16-bit Butt-Head posted:roman reigns had to get leukemia for the crowd to finally cheer him as a face instead of boo him hell, even that didn't really happen it's probably not too trite to say that roman reigns never got cheered, joe anoa'i got huge cheers twice - once when he announced that he had to leave to get treatment, and then once when he announced he was cancer-free, and then as soon as he was back in character it went back to bleh very quickly except maybe for a few months where people didn't really want to boo a dude with cancer someone pointed out at the time that wwe released backstage footage from when he left where he's making no real effort to be a wrestling character, and he's infinitely more likeable in like three minutes as joe your samoan buddy who'll smoke a joint with you after the show than he'd been in multiple years of television shows with vince mcmahon writing a script where he's the demon spawn of clint eastwood and angel from buffy there's a real skill in having 20+ professional writers and managing to make people less relatable than they are if you just talk to them DeadButDelicious posted:Nothing I watched was from after his return in 2020 where his gimmick has apparently been met with acclaim if Wikipedia is to be believed so who knows? they ended up doing the thing that they were never willing to risk with cena, which is to turn the guy getting booed every week into a heel and that works, for a guy who looks like he'd murder you but doesn't necessarily spark the crowd, the only issue they have now is that this is then someone where they would make a great foil for a main-event babyface... IF THEY HAD ONE instead their current plan for wrestlemania this year is babyface brock lesnar vs heel roman reigns, a terrible plan leading to gently caress all
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2022 00:09
|
|
|
Even better, they're supposed to unify the Smackdown and Raw titles but WWE has already told reporters that they don't think a single champion is viable in modern times so at some point in the next few months they're probably going to just create a new title out of thin air and then the unification will have been meaningless lmao
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2022 00:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 12:25 |
|
|
vince is so stupid lmao
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2022 00:30
|
|