Loss
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Everything posted by Loss
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In progress. Weird to see a Bret cage match with little heat and so many fans up and roaming around. Not a good match, but Yankem works hard and hits some nice moves. Lawler has a fake nosebleed, which is great. Bret wins, presumably to signal that he is done with all of this midcard crap.
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You know Bill Watts is booking, because they're talking about Dean Douglas' "$7500 fine" for interfering in the six-man. Anyway, during the Dean squash, Vince talks about the Syracuse beatdown where 10 thugs brutally attacked Shawn and both of his eyes are swollen shut. Shawn does a phoned in interview saying he's going to be at In Your House one way or another.
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I enjoyed this quite a bit. For the four corners tags I've seen so far on yearbooks, only 6/9 is clearly better (I guess I just have 12/95 and 5/94 left). I agree with Ditch that it's better than their January match, which I guess is the least of their series for me so far. Kobashi in particular was far less over the top here than in the 6/9 tag. But this is a match I look forward to rewatching a few times, because I think I'll pick up on additional things worth liking about it over time. I like Kobashi getting his arm worked over as something different, just because it's a departure from the usual. In general, this felt more like a match about selling than a match about big offense, even though there is plenty of big offense. Misawa getting worked over so long, Kobashi's arm and Kawada's knee are the big themes.
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Actually, I would say it never, ever should -- at least in the way we talk about matches. But that goes for any medium. In the way the promotion, the wrestlers or casual observers watch, sure, why not, but when breaking down the whole of a match and looking at its ingredients, I don't think it should be a factor. If you look at a critics picks list of best movies for 2011, then look at the biggest blockbusters, the lists aren't going to be the same. And that's okay. But Hogan/Andre again backs up by Michaels/Ramon example, which is that we've seen matches before between equally big stars (like Austin/Rock) that have delivered all the things they need to deliver for business reasons, yet still managed to be fundamentally good or excellent wrestling matches. I won't say that the mechanics are the only thing that matters. Austin and Rock being Austin and Rock helps make the match too. So maybe I'm agreeing with you without realizing it, I don't know.
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It is a slippery slope, but it's still something which needs to be taken into account to some extent. To go back to the movie metaphor: I don't expect the same things from Apocalypse Now compared to what I expect from Hobo With a Shotgun. I adore both films with all my heart, but they're clearly not even trying to accomplish anything close to the same goals. There's no good objective, universal paradigm for evaluating both of them under an identical set of criteria. Along those lines, I've never understood why so many people are willing to bury Andre/Hogan '87 as such a terrible match. Why was it bad? Because it was kinda slow? Who cares? Despite what many people think, "fast action = great match" isn't some kind of unbreakable commandment. So why else was it bad? Blown spots? No, there really weren't any, aside from Andre's airball when headbutting the post. Bad psychology? Hell no, they did everything almost perfectly in terms of choosing what to do and when. What else? I'm at a loss to think of any other reasons why we'd call this match a dud. The only logical explanation for why it gets so much hate is simple popularity backlash. Much like a James Cameron movie, Andre/Hogan gets hated on simply because it got SO over and drew so much money, and some people (coughMeltzercough) don't like the idea that this sort of wrestling seems to be what most fans really want to see. (And besides, those guys had several matches together which were MUCH worse than the one at the Silverdome. Whenever someone's bitching about this match, they seem to forget all the shittier encounters that these guys had.) Hogan/Andre was a bad match because of bad mechanics. Things like Hogan gingerly falling on the mat when Andre reversed the piledriver attempt on the floor looked awful.
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Fair enough. I get where you're coming from. But I think about something like the Michaels/Ramon ladder match that has the great highspots but is still fundamentally a wrestling match too. There is a focus to it and there is a "why" behind most of what they do that's a little deeper than most WWF matches, which is why I like it so much. So while I do think there is something to that and it's mostly correct, it's also worth bearing in mind that sometimes the matches that are intended to be a collection of daredevil spots accomplish that goal while still being a fundamentally sound match. Those matches should be held as the gold standard.
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You do realize that many times in wrestling match with special stipulations, a wrestler will do something that "doesn't count" out of instinct, right? It's a way of getting over the stipulation. Pillman/Rogers I thought was a pretty fabulous match, with a hot Center Stage crowd and a great daredevil dive from Pillman. It's not perfect -- I think they were trying to do spot where Rogers would have won at the five-minute mark had he kept his mouth shut, but they botched it. But that's really the only flaw I found in this.
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So matches are good based on if they accomplish their stated goal. Were Hogan and Andre trying to have a good match? No, and they succeeded. So does that mean by not having a good match, they had a good match? I think going based on wrestler intent is a slippery slope.
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Flair wants Sting to come out, and he dares him to deny him this time. Sting says no again. But this time, Flair brings a bunch of little Stingers in the ring (see, they DO exist!) and Sting reluctantly agrees to team with Flair, but tells him if he swerves him, he will leave him for dead. Dead dead dead.
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Buddy Landell continues to ROCK. Here, he does a frighteningly accurate Tommy Rich impersonation, even getting in "Somebody said something about ...", then segues to hype some of the gimmick matches taking place around the horn. Buddy and Cactus are battling it to see who the best promo in wrestling is for sure.
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Classic. Cactus builds a whole match around headlocks just to piss off the ECW crowd and it works like a charm! The crowd starts doing the wave out of boredom, thinking they're clever when they're being worked like crazy, which is fun to see. El Puerto Ricano is a good athlete. Great finish, as Raven does a DDT on the outside behind the ref's back, then Cactus wins the match by performing an inside cradle. The post-match beatdown that Raven orders Cactus do to actively works against what they were trying to accomplish here, but leave it to Raven to muck things up and get in the way. Tommy Dreamer makes the save and gives both Raven and Cactus DDTs and does the Cactus elbow to the floor. Raven and Cactus cut him off and this goes too long.