Bix

Slipped out of the vault. I procured it and sent it to a handful of people. Really bad match after the cool headlock reversals of the first few minutes.

nah

SLL on selling, realism, and MMA: This guy gets it. So one of my favorite websites to peruse in my spare time is TVTropes.org, wherein they collect and classify all sorts of tropes/cliches/related phenomena throughout fiction. Some of the more interesting stuff I've read on the site came from this entry and others with a similar theme: "Reality is Unrealistic" "It probably says something about certain segments of the population that many people, when exposed to an exaggeration or fabrication about certain real-life occurrences or facts, will perceive the fictional account as being more true than any factual account of the same. In effect, some are foolish enough to perceive the TV/Hollywood version of something real as being more true than the real thing." To wit.... "-Actual rain never looks like real rain on film, which is why they use a hose and sprinkler. -Mice don't particularly like cheese. They like peanut butter a lot. They ate cheese because in an average household... what was most smelly and edible? -Generally speaking, gunshots don't make gigantic bangs and ring out across three city blocks. Real gunshots are often mistaken for firecrackers. -On most hand grenades, pulling the pin isn't what makes them go boom; the pin is just a final safety catch for the lever, which when released sets off the time-delayed detonator." And so on and so forth. But there's another side of this story we have to consider: "The Coconut Effect" "An element that is patently unrealistic, but which you have to do anyway because viewers have been so conditioned to expect it that its absence would be even more jarring. Maybe it's Hollywood Science. Maybe it's Hollywood History. If it's reached this stage, it's probably pervasive enough to be on this wiki. The best example of this is the sound of horse-hooves. From the days of radio, banging two coconut halves together was the standard way to generate the sound effect of horse-hooves. Anyone who has ever actually been around a horse knows that horse-hooves rarely sound anything at all like that, and never sound more than just a very little bit like that. All the same, that sound became so ingrained in the public consciousness that, even when it later became possible to insert much more realistic sound effects, for many years, the coconut sound effect was still used, because the audience wouldn't be able to accept horse-hooves making a sound not generated by coconuts. (This was parodied in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail: They didn't actually have horses, just coconuts; where they got a tropical fruit in medieval England is one of the first questions asked. Revived in the Gatorade Quest for G commercial, with Alicia, the Girl who made horse-trotting noises.) While audiences have finally outgrown that particular quirk, there are others which persist, such as the Bang Bang BANG effects of guns — particularly the thwpt sound of a gun with silencer (which sounds nothing like an actual silenced pistol), the ping sound made by a specular reflection, the click of a remote control, the loud thump of lights turning on or off, or noisy explosions in space. There's also all fistfight noises — the completely madeup sound of a person getting punched in the face in a movie, as well as the exaggerated smack of a boxing glove, both of which are considerably quieter, more muffled and less dramatic in real life. Also note that, in a more medieval setting, whenever a sword is unsheathed, there is always a sound of scraping metal, even if the sheath is made of leather. In sword duels, there's always a loud, echoey clash of metal, when in reality, swords just make a small 'tink' sound. This is constantly done in "Wildest Police Chases"/"Wildest Security Camera Video"-type programs; generally speaking, the gun blasts, squealing tires, and crunchy crashes are all dubbed in after-the-fact, especially in the case of security camera footage, which rarely features an audio track." Professional wrestling isn't real, and Pro Wrestling NOAH, in many ways, in especially unrealistic. I mean, Forrest Griffin is able to gut his way through some serious shit, but if he got dropped on his head as many times as Mitsuharu Misawa has been in real fights - provided his opponents could get him into position for said headdrops in the first place, an unrealistic feat itself - he'd be dead. Fuck, Misawa only gets "fake" headdropped (and I use that term very loosely here), and he's a fucking wreck. So a NOAH juniors match is one of the last things you want to defend because it's "realistic" to begin with. But even putting that specific aspect of the argument aside, it's important to remember that "reality" and "realism" aren't the same thing. Reality is that which is actually real. Realism is what we accept as a reasonable facsimile of reality is things that aren't actually real. In professional wrestling - as with all forms of fiction - realism is generally preferred to reality, even when reality is unrealistic. Fiction often calls for a certain shorthand way of communicating certain things in an understandable and dramatically satisfying way that might have many different effects of varying degrees of visibility, complexity, and dramatic viability in real life. "Space Does Not Work That Way" "Largely thanks to Speculative Fiction, space is probably one of the most consistently inaccurately portrayed things in modern media, to the extent that complete falsehoods are widely accepted fact. This is a very specific kind of Did Not Do The Research, which may have been partially justified in earlier media as the Research back then wasn't up to much. Modern portrayals of space, however, still haven't changed much from the rock-filled, noisy place which will make an unprotected human instantly explode into clouds of ice. Some of these are due to a lack of research or just uninterest. But most of the modern portrayals of this like are due to the Rule Of Cool (things with sound are cooler than things without sound – although not as scary, as a famous tagline pointed out), artistic license, or simply the belief that audiences wouldn't accept it any other way." "Instant Death Bullet" "In real life, being fatally shot almost always leaves the victim the option of 1-2 minutes of essentially normal activity before they finally fall unconscious. In fact, it is not uncommon for the victim to fail to realize they have been shot. Police trainers report that many officers are hurt or killed when their target fails to instantly fall down when shot, "like they do on television," but instead retaliates. On the other hand, sometimes people who have been shot (or even just believe they have) fall over as if dead even if the bullet does no serious damage. Among the reported causes is hydrostatic shock, neural damage caused by kinetic energy transferred in pressure waves, which can disorient or incapacitate even from impacts on bodily extremities. .... Consider the Showdown At High Noon, or any other pistol duel. Screen renderings of these "quick draw" gun battles would be rendered relatively silly if a common outcome was that one combatant was fatally shot, and then took careful aim and fired back, fatally wounding the opponent. There's a reason there were never many experienced gunfighters; the Instant Death Bullet makes for a better story, though." "Realistic Diction is Unrealistic" "Speech in fiction is fictional: too good to be true. People in fiction do not speak like we do. In Real Life, we encounter: * Repetition. * Stu-stut-stuttering, slurrring. * Mutual incomprehension. o Huh? + Huh? * Um, er, like, disfluencies, y'know? * Losing the thread and trailing off mid- * Bad grammar use with the sentence. * Mummelinthizanhavintoorepeadem o Jesus! MUMbling things and having to rePEAT them! * Speakers talk "Yes, th"NO THEY DON'T"ey do." ing over one another. * Repetition. * Repetition. * People calling you "dude" every third word. (Properly this is the idiolect, i.e. the unique vocabulary with which someone writes and speaks.) * Personal speech tics in general, right? * And of course, Repetition. In fiction, characters inevitably come out with well-formed sentences. They may have a poetic flavor filled with Shakespeare-like similes and luminous golden metaphors that most people in real life aren't clever enough to come up with on the spot. They never stumble over their words or say the wrong thing except for deliberate comedic effect or to show that the character is trying to suddenly come up with an explanation. Even "realistic" dialogue is often relatively free of errors and padding. It's almost as if they prepared and rehearsed their conversations the night before, with each and every word intricately reviewed and assessed by a team of professional writers." "Technicolor Science" "When the subject of a TV show includes the use of deadly toxins, radioactive materials, or biological or chemical agents, you can almost be sure Special Effects artists will make them look a lot more interesting than they are in real life. This is because the vast majority of chemical compounds are colorless, odorless, tasteless and could easily be substituted with a glass of water. They just don't look exciting or menacing, so they tend to get totally unrealistic spruce-ups." In professional wrestling, the fact of the matter is that "Realistic Combat is Unrealistic". Yes, people in MMA can get their legs torn to shreds and tough it out, but that's real combat. In professional wrestling "realism", when KENTA's leg gets torn to shreds, he's expected to act like it actually hurts, because selling is the established shorthand a wrestler uses to tell us he's in pain. If he doesn't use it, it tells us he's not in pain, and we have no reason to care about what's been happening to him thus far in the match. We also have no reason to care about Nakajima. He totally went to town on KENTA's leg, and it accomplished jack squat, so why take him seriously? Because he has the belt? The belt, storyline-wise is supposed to be on the best wrestler. If the guy with the completely ineffective offense has the belt, what does it say for the belt? What does it say for all the people competing for it? And what does it say about KENTA that he's content being the big fish in a small pond? So by not using that handy selling shorthand, KENTA is effectively saying that he's not in pain from the work on his leg, Nakajima's offense is ineffective, the GHC Jr. Title can't possibly be that big of a deal because it's around the waist of the guy with the ineffective offense, that every other guy in the division must be even less effective that Nakajima, and that KENTA is vastly superior to all of them, but not ambitious and/or talented enough to go for a bigger prize. And yeah, I realize that's overthinking it, and one match where KENTA doesn't sell properly isn't going to kill NOAH's entire junior division, but that is the longhand version of what KENTA's shorthand is saying. It's might be reality, but in pro wrestling, it's unrealistic reality.

Was Andre even billed as this big back in his heyday or has the legend only grown onwards since he died? Those were his late career billed stats. What match is this? Somebody gimmie.

From the F4W boards, in a thread about the Dana White video blog fallout:

He was Dick Murdoch's sidekick for 25 years. IIRC, it was their jokes that led to Andre letting his joke out that led to the confrontations with Bad News Allen.

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/2009/03/31/8956556.html Really interesting stuff, figured I'd give it its own topic. I presume that the two racists on the 24/7 Black History Month round table that Heyman is referring to are Watts and Dusty? Odd that there's no reference to Madusa also being Jewish when she's mentioned or the fact that Cabana's name change to Scotty Goldman was clearly an attempt to "Jew up" the character.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/12677.cfm Figured I'd post it here since we all love talking about the WWE vault.

Previous PPV.

Just the deification of the wrestling business and all that. The rest isn't at all.

His mom was who molested him, hence the tennis court being a weird action.

Also: Yes, in the Moolah era, where everyone was trained to work the same hair-mare match by Moolah, women's wrestling was based on ability. Plus, Wendi Richter was given her push because she was considered the best looking Moolah trainee. The only period where this could even arguably be true was when Glamour Girls-Jumping Bomb Angels was the main women's program in the WWF.

That's correct.

Bingo. Only about half a page, but he's there. How does his entry end?

That seems to disprove the theory that Vince holds Savage's abuse of Miss Elizabeth against him (either falling for his own con or offended that his con was exposed), despite the heavy eulogizing after her death. Whoops that was supposed to say '98, the sleaze thread date somehow ended up there. Sorry for the major slip-up. Could you guys edit your posts accordingly to fix the flow of he thread? Thanks.

Emailed Dave to clarify: - He was first given the "he's too crazy" excuse around '01-'02 (the sleaze thread was '04). "[T]he 'he's too crazy' stories were after I had heard the rumors, but the rumors weren't very prevalent as they later became." He said that he refused to believe it for years "even though people who knew Vince real well insisted they were true. Just sounded like wrestling b.s. But the 'he's too crazy' didn't add up that is wasn't covering up something." - He agrees that Savage couldn't have been fired for it based on every reason cited. Vince told him personally that he'd love to have Savage back as late as '98 (EDIT: The original post said '04 as I had the date on my mind to mention the sleaze thread date but somehow transposed it without noticing. I apologize for the major error.

It's obviously not a tough conclusion to draw, but where has this been confirmed? That Savage was abusive in some way? The WON Liz obit didn't say he beat her, but did give examples of emotional abuse, like forcing Liz to stay at home with frozen dinners because he didn't want her leaving the house, as well as ordering her out of a pool after she started talking to 2 "very obviously gay men" who recognized her. There's also the whole matter of the Bolleas apparently convincing her to leave him.

"Even if it didn't happen, Vince believes it did" seems to be the most logical explanation though "Oliver knows" implied that something did happen. Someone reminded me that Vince and Linda were very close with Savage and Liz. Even if Stephanie wasn't involved in any way, shape, It can't be the initial departure, given Vince seemed willing to do business for close to a decade afterwards, so it's not the initial "betrayal" of leaving or anything having to do with the Slim Jim sponsorship (as someone speculated at the F4W forums a few months ago). Maybe Savage spent enough time w/ the McMahons to be around Stephanie a lot? Maybe Vince and/or Linda didn't know he abused Liz until after she died for some reason and then decided to shun him? It doesn't exactly make sense given Austin's presence and the fact that it's wrestling, but I can't think of anything else that would be deemed so bad by Vince. They've tried to do business with everyone else. Even after the latest blow-up with Warrior over the DVD, they still let Jakks work out deals to make Classic Superstars action figures of him, but they refuse to let Jakks make Savage figures as part of the line (the deals are done through Jakks and not WWE, which is why they released a Bruno figure). Foley (in TNA) and Savage are the only wrestlers he banned THQ from putting in the Legends of Wrestlemania game (it covers through WM15 in case you were wondering about Benoit). Even with Vince being crazy, he's always been willing to do business with everyone from Ventura (came down on the company hard Re: Owen Hart, didn't lose his spot after his union proposal pre-WM2) to Slaughter (fired for talking union and making his own merchandise deals) to Warrior (held him up for a huge amount of money) to Hogan (various things that led to Vince declaring he'd never be back over and over) to Bret Hart (punched him in the face among other things) to Superstar Graham (accused his #2 of child molestation) when he thought they would benefit his company or if he was in a forgiving mood. So if it doesn't involve the Stephanie rumor in any way (even if it was Vince believing a false rumor) what did Savage do so bad that when his name is brought up, everyone gets terrified and Vince spews a level of venom that nobody else gets?

Also...who posted about it in the sleaze thread? I've been told that the rumor originated in the company, and based on what Dave says, I presume he never heard about it until after the sleaze thread. Part of me wonders if the post in the sleaze thread was a joke and it just happened to be true. So now it seems that for whatever reason, Oliver Copp has the best knowledge of what happened, but...why? How does a German TV announcer/part time computer programmer turned MMA reporter know the specifics that eluded Dave Meltzer and a large amount of current and former WWE personnel?

From the new WON: Not a surprise or anything but it sure looks bad in print.

Printed this out from microfilm yesterday:

Me too, but I never thought that Vince knew at the time if it was true. It's not that ridiculous to think that she may have gone on a European tour as a vacation of sorts. And yes, Savage was on the last German tour before he left. Or I'm just reading too much into the mention of Oliver Copp "knowing the story." Has Oliver said anything on the F4W boards about it since last night?

Last night on WO Radio, Meltzer said that he now believes that the Stephanie rumor is true because at this point it's the only story that makes sense and everybody in the company believes it. He also said to "talk to Oliver, because Oliver knows...See, now I got Oliver in trouble!" which I presume is a reference to Oliver Copp, who does MMA stuff for the WO/F4W site and used to be best known as the creator of TNM. Maybe it happened in Germany?