MrQwerty posted:

Ginette Reno posted:

I still don't understand how he managed to stay in character and keep trying to do the bit. He had to be in awful pain right there. What a maniac

Gavok posted:

Sydney Bottocks went over a bunch of it, but I might as well effort post it. Vince never stopped running WWE. Still, for many years, it was expected that Triple H and Stephanie McMahon would eventually get the keys once Vince... well, died, since that's the only way he's going to stop. Triple H has many problems -- he's an rear end in a top hat, a tremendous egomaniac and a racist -- but he at least seems like a comparatively sane human being and has an understanding of how wrestling has evolved. People can argue over whether it would be good, but Triple H running WWE as a whole would be a more coherent product.

There are also certain Vince McMahon yes-men who were absolutely hosed the moment Triple H would ascend, especially head director Kevin Dunn. So there was that to look forward to.

Triple H was in charge of the future of the company. Not only did he oversee the Performance Center (a training facility for rookie members of the roster) but NXT, the developmental brand. For a while, NXT was an hour-long show streaming on the WWE Network, taped four episodes at a time with 4-5 special PPV events a year. Not only was it a way for new wrestlers to figure themselves out on a smaller scale, but for veteran indie wrestlers to understand WWE's direction style. Triple H kept hiring popular wrestlers from the indies and other countries because it made him look good to the fans, the match quality of NXT shows went through the roof and it helped WWE deflate any chance of opposition.

It was basically a variation of how Vince destroyed the territories in the 80's. He even succeeded to some extent as the UK was in the midst of a new wrestling renaissance. Triple H started up NXT UK, they scooped up all the big names and the UK wrestling scene straight-up died. They were planning on doing NXT Japan before the pandemic happened.

The problem was that Vince still ran Raw and Smackdown and he never watched any NXT. That meant that when somebody had graduated from NXT and made it to the main roster with a fully-formed character and built-in fanbase, Vince didn't know what the gently caress. Triple H could tell him who they were and how great they were, but Vince made his own conclusions and their fate was a crapshoot. Sometimes Triple H was Andy at the end of Toy Story 3, telling Bonnie about how awesome and meaningful Woody is, only for him to wind up buried in the closet by the next movie. NXT wrestlers would be afraid of graduating because being a big fish in a small pond was a better fate than being booked as a loser virgin under Vince's rule.

Seriously, NXT had a can't-miss prospect who went to the main roster and was constantly made fun of for being a loser and a virgin.

But hey, this was temporary. One day, Triple H would be running things and NXT people would thrive on the main roster.

Wrestlers Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks were getting huge buzz and WWE was trying to sign them. It seemed like such a done deal that Vince, Triple H, Stephanie and Shane cut this big promo on TV about how they were going to start listening to the fans more as a prelude to them announcing the signings. Instead, at the eleventh hour, those three guys decided to be on the ground floor of AEW and see where that could take them. Not only did Vince look stupid, but he had potential opposition for the first time in 20 years. Triple H's "sign everyone" strategy had already become moot.

When AEW announced that they were getting a TV deal, WWE announced that NXT was also getting a TV deal. On the same night at the same time. They wanted to strangle this promotion in the crib. Vince and his people took more interest in NXT because they wanted their developmental show to crush the other promotion's main show. They threw everything they had and even got a couple wins here and there, but AEW dominated the Wednesday Night War. Eventually, NXT had to retreat and move to Tuesday nights.

Vince was PISSED and blamed it all on Triple H. Triple H was demoted and NXT was deemed a tremendous failure. Now it's run by Vince's yes-men with less emphasis on indie darlings and more on large, muscular guys with little experience and stupid gimmicks. Like one of their most prominent characters is a dude with the gimmick of "evil woke guy." But hey, making fun of millennials works on some level because while NXT ratings are in the garbage, the people who DO watch it skew to like 65 year old on average.

There was a video of Triple H at the Performance Center, talking up the changes that were going on and the dude looked just so defeated and sad. Then sometime after, he suffered some kind of heart attack. Word is that when recuperating, people were told not to call him up about anything involving the company's business. There have been very few pictures of him since and nobody seems to know what's up with him.

Meanwhile, the guy who has replaced him as Vince's righthand man is Nick Khan. Nick Khan gives no shits about wrestling or who's getting pushed or what storylines are going on. He just cares about the bottom line and has gone on multiple firing sprees. A lot of his victims are Triple H's guys. For instance, Khan fired Samoa Joe. Triple H ended up rehiring him (presumably for less money) and within a few months, Khan fired him AGAIN.

It's worth noting that WWE is firing all these people despite making record-breaking profits lately. It used to be that they were afraid of firing people because AEW could take them in, but now they're like, "Haha, they can't hire EVERYONE!"

The spite continues into some of Triple H's favorites from NXT. He spent like a year and a half pushing this guy Karrion Kross as this generation's Triple H and had him win the NXT championship while being undefeated. Kross -- as champion -- was called up to the main roster where he debuted by losing to Jeff Hardy in 3 minutes, being forced to wear the doofiest armor, losing some more, then being fired.

WWE is an utter mess right now held up by TV deals and Saudi blood money. Some say that they're maneuvering to sell. Some think they're just cutting the fat for the hell of it. If something happens to Vince, the company will probably end up in the hands of someone like Nick Khan, John Laurinaitis, Bruce Pritchard or whoever. But probably not Triple H. Not anymore. He probably would have made it a better show, but drat if it isn't great schadenfreude.

Gavok posted:

Goldberg likes to psyche himself up pre-match by slamming his head into a locker. This has worked against him time to time, like when his head kept bleeding during a promo and he started trailing off.

So Goldberg concussed himself via his pre-match ritual and had to put on a 10-minute match with the Undertaker. At one point he went for his finisher, the Jackhammer, where he holds Undertaker upside-down and is supposed to twist and slam him safely on his back. Instead, he fell over and dropped the Undertaker straight down on his head. Now the Undertaker was out of it and when he went for the Tombstone, he didn't do it safely and Goldberg's head bounced off the mat. In the end, Undertaker did a chokeslam that was more of a "choke-push" and upon getting the pin, was openly pissed off about everything that just happened.

Pope Corky the IX posted:

He's also ironically an anti-mask shithead, gently caress him.

Seth Pecksniff posted:

when Vince finally goes into the Great Darkness they are either gonna a) Weekend at Bernie's him or b) do some absolutely bizarre and horrific skit that involves either him being a zombie, a "look-alike" that acts like the now dead Vince but sounds like one of their regular stable, or something like blowing up his casket at his funeral and Stone Cold comes out of nowhere and busts a beer over his corpse

you can bet on it

Elephant Ambush posted:

McMahon Jr. is Shane and he got fired the day after the Royal Rumble. If he intends to leave any kind of meaningful power to Stephanie and/or HHH at all then nothing will fundamentally change.

If you want to see what a sane billionaire does with a wrestling company then watch AEW.

Speaking of which, AEW Dynamite is on tonight at 7pm CST on TBS if any of you lapsed fans want to try getting back into wrestling.

Seth Pecksniff posted:

Good on Goldberg for saying no but holy poo poo how did anyone ever think that was a good idea?

Dementropy posted:

He kind of (big question mark) did that with The Rock in Wrestlemania X-7 (because the mashup of Roman and Arabic numerals seemed cool at the time?) - but that was also weird because neither Hulk nor Rock were invested in the wrestling scene.

But I look forward to a more insightful write-up from someone more knowledgeable.

FullLeatherJacket posted:

ok, so I was waiting on Cornwind to finish, but to answer the TNA question:

So, as mentioned, TNA is a company named after a sex pun that came into being solely because Jeff Jarrett aggresively burned his bridges when he left the WWF and needed somewhere to work. Since then, it has gone through (I think) four name changes and five different owners, and has persisted for twenty goddamn years, outliving WCW, ECW and Ring Of Honor, despite the fact that at no point in its history has it ever made a single goddamned dollar of profit. It is a big idiot hole into which rich idiot morons throw their idiot moron money, and yet somehow it is also an absolutely critical factor in the change in wrestling styles in the last twenty years, and also a key reason why women are now allowed to wrestle wearing clothes.

Now, for everything that's said about VInce McMahon being old, and producing old wrestling for old people to look at with their old eyes, at least you can say that he has a very clear vision for the product he wants to make. There is an idea that is Rome and then everything else runs down through all the other old people he pays to run his show. TNA was the exact opposite of that. It was a wrestling show that existed for no purpose other than for Jeff Jarrett to have a job, each show seemingly (and quite possibly legitimately) written by a different person who was left no notes about what happened last week or what the plan was for the pay-per-view. It was a world where things just happened, and they happened because they did. As such, I can only present TNA's history as a series of discrete events, devoid of context, as they were originally intended to be viewed:

- As mentioned, hiring Kurt Angle immediately after he was released from WWE on the basis that if he was going to keep doing oxys until someone found him dead in bed they'd at least not be held responsible for it

- As mentioned, a PPV main event match between Jeff Hardy and Sting where Jeff was clearly hosed up when he came out and that consisted of Sting hitting his move and then physically holding Jeff down for the pin. No alternative main event was presented and the show went off the air.

- Hiring Mick Foley, who was forcibly retired by WWE in 2000 after he stopped being able to remember stuff, as a main-event wrestler

- A ladder match where the prize was a contract attached to a clipboard, except early in the match the paper contract fell off and so several men fought for the remainder of the match over an empty clipboard

- An Ultimate X match (don't ask) where the thing you had to climb and grab to win kept falling down of its own accord, so eventually one wrestler just stood under it and caught it and was declared the winner

- Kurt Angle winning all of the titles (including the tag title) by himself

- Jeff Hardy rebranding himself and wrestling as Willow The Wisp, a character approximately equivalent to something David Bowie would come up with if he made of career out of sustaining head injuries

- Rob Van Dam debuting as a surprise by beating Sting in 30 seconds and then being beaten down with a baseball bat for literally multiple minutes to ensure absolutely no-one got over

- Dixie Carter losing their TV deal with Spike after promising network execs that Vince Russo wasn't involved with the product any more, and then accidentally sending an email meant for someone internally to a wrestling journalist confirming that Vince Russo was definitely still involved under the table

- A six-week run where they went head-to-head with Monday Night Raw and were hideously beaten, and which began with a match in some weird thunderdome structure and where it was then scripted for Homicide to climb the inside of this thing and escape through the top. This is basically requiring someone to do a full muscle-up fifteen feet off the ground, and shockingly Homicide was not the right choice for this and was shown on camera trying to get out for an increasingly uncomfortable amount of time

- Dustin Rhodes, in the depths of his addiction problems (one of which appeared to be hamburgers), debuting an 'Evil Goldust' character called Black Reign, who brought a pet rat to the ring. if you now mention Black Reign to Dustin on Twitter, he will block you

- Hiring Pacman Jones after the NFL suspended him for starting a strip-club brawl that ended with a man being shot, being shocked that his NFL contract prohibited him from moonlighting as a pro wrestler, and then making him a tag-team champion despite him being unable to physically interact with any of the other wrestlers

- Christy Hemme vs Big Fat Oily Guy, a big fat oily man in a thong who was himself a rip-off of WWE's Big DIck Johnson

- The women's title changing hands in a random prize draw

- Allowing Hulk Hogan to bring in his friend Bubba The Love Sponge, who immediately said something racist enough to get one of their other wrestlers to quit. When Mick Foley's contract was up, he was scripted to do a bit where he punched Bubba on the way out, so Foley legit punched him as hard as he could before as his last act on tv before finally retiring for good

- On pay-per-view, presenting the single worst televised professional wrestling match in history, between Booker T's wife (not a wrestler) and a woman off Survivor (also not a wrestler) and which can only be done justice by the Bryan & Vinny review of it

- A separate legendarily bad women's match featuring Shelley Martinez (remember Ariel?) who sold a groin stretch by yelling "MY VAG, MY VAG" and when asked "whaddya say?" by the ref to see if she's going to submit, then responded with "I SAID, MY VAG HURTS"

- On pay-per-view, a blindfold match (already conceptually a terrible idea) where the hoods wouldn't stay on the wrestlers heads and so they pretty much had to just stand there with their eyes closed

- On the same pay-per-view, an electrified steel cage match, where when someone was thrown against the cage the lights in the arena would flicker and the dude would sell by flopping around like The Rock taking a stunner, but where the fans immediately booed heavily and the wrestlers repeatedly grabbed or hit the cage out of instinct with no effect

- A reverse battle royal match, where sixteen men started around the ring and had to fight to get in, with the eight remaining eliminated, and then the eight men in the ring had a battle royal where they had to throw each other out. This determined seeding for an elimination tournament where the guy who won the battle royal lost in the first round and the final winner was a replacement who hadn't been in the battle royal

- A Last Rites match between Abyss and Sting, which is in every other way identical to a casket match except the casket is now in the middle of the ring and the wrestlers take extremely painful-looking bumps off it, plus they went to Donny's Discount Movie Props and bought plaster tombstones and candelabras, to ensure that the fans booed and chanted for Russo to be fired during this match that two men nearly killed themselves to perform

- Stripping RVD of the world title because he's injured (read: his contract ran out of dates), and then organizing a tournament to crowd a new champion, the final of which was held on a pay-per-view that RVD wrestled on, having already come back

- WCW announcer Tony Schiavone showing up on a single early show as a heel for no real reason, before immediately leaving and going to work at a Starbucks instead. He would show up again as part of the Kenny Omega angle two decades later, telling Tony Khan, "You know, I worked here once. Then I quit the business for eighteen years." in a wonderfully deadpan voice

- An ECW nostalgia pay-per-view (again a complete WWE rip-off) which was somehow of lower production values than the original ECW and was of such poor quality that it finally killed off ECW nostalgia forever

- Getting a young Kazuchika Okada on a developmental excursion from New Japan, being told explicitly that he was going to be a big deal, and then having him lose on the B-show every week to Frankie Kazarian for a year

- Roddy Piper showing up in what is either his normal state or day three of a seven-day binge to confront Vince Russo by accusing him of being behind the segment where Owen Hart died, a great and highly tasteful way to encourage people to buy tickets and want to watch wrestling matches

- A festive barbed wire christmas tree match, where the barbed wire tree was hung like a pendulum from the ceiling and the wrestlers had to run the ropes in semi-circles around it

- BG & Kip James (fka the New Age Outlaws) being rebranded as the Voodoo Kin Mafia (VKM, like Vincent K McMahon, geddit?), and then showing up in ponchos and sombreros while challenging "Higginbottom and Levesque" (i.e. Shawn Michaels and Triple H) to a legit fight at the Alamo at high noon, ostensibly based on them being offended that they were reprising the DX gimmick and making a bunch of merch money while the Outlaws were stuck in TNA doing TNA things

- Dixie Carter, freezing an actual million dollars in case Triple H and Shawn Michaels show up to have a fistfight as two grown men in their 40s. They did not.

- Ken Anderson, gracefully selling his panic and worry at Tito Ortiz being the guest enforcer

- Sting appearing out of nowhere in Eric Bischoff's office and preventing him from going to the ring with a mean birb who was tasked to watch him

- Samoa Joe was once kidnapped by ninjas, this was never explained

GolfHole posted:

mr mcmahon vs bret hart cage match 2022 lets go

Charity Porno posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByO5l00uxKY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znqCR8IVRxY

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

cody knew what he signed up for

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

ric flairs last match was so hosed up and disturbing that everyone involved should be in jail for elder abuse

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

pastamania was ahead of its time, brother

Literally A Person posted:

Hopefully this is just brain trauma from too many DDT's but do I actually remember a DDP movie. Or maybe it was just an episode of something? Am I nuts??