NintendoLogic

Why does Aja need to be split off into the female ghetto for GOAT purposes? She had a lengthy run as the ace of a highly successful promotion. She main-evented at the Budokan and the Tokyo Dome. She's regarded as one of the best workers of her generation. Those are things that most men don't do.

Which, in itself, is kinda sexist. Such an attitude implies that women are incapable of defending themselves. That may be true of your average battered housewife, but female wrestlers are portraying characters who are supposed to be badass warriors. Is it too difficult to believe that, say, Cyborg couldn't knock the shit out of plenty of male MMA fighters in her weight class? As usual, wrestling is far behind the times. Look at modern action movies. It's very common to see female characters who are kicking the fuck out of male characters. It's a commonly accepted part of today's pop culture, and has been for years. But since wrestling still has this bizarre desire to be seen as more "real" than other fictional performance arts, it clings to the old sports traditions even when there's no longer any reason to do so. We're long decades past the point when wrestling became regarded as a cartoonish joke in our society; trying to go back to the industry's carny roots is something which shouldn't even be discussed as a serious possibility. I wouldn't take this too far. Wrestling is a genre of fiction, but it isn't completely fanciful. Just because people can buy Wolverine tearing Sentinels apart with ease doesn't mean they'd buy Rey Mysterio physically dominating The Great Khali. Women wrestlers may be badass warriors, but male wrestlers are badass warriors who are usually significantly larger.

I'd much rather listen to Sleater-Kinney than Nickelback.

The only way I could see someone not liking joshi is if they didn't care for Japanese wrestling in general or had some kind of psychosexual hang-up about women performing the manly art of professional wrestling. I can understand not liking the Manami Toyota sprint style, but that doesn't warrant writing off the genre as a whole. At its heart, wrestling is about storytelling. There's no reason women should be necessarily inferior at that to men.

Charisma is definitely something that transcends language barriers. Kobashi is actually a notoriously bad interview, but his charisma is off the charts.

I might as well tackle this while my brain is still in lucha mode. El Dandy vs. Negro Casas CMLL July 3, 1992 First fall: A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I didn't really care for lucha-style matwork. It's started to click for me more recently, and I've developed more of an appreciation of the style. Granted, there are a couple of things that will probably always bug me. First of all, some of the holds they use are too contrived for me to maintain my suspension of disbelief. Second, the matwork rarely plays into the finish of any given fall. Most of the time, what happens is that somebody misses a move and then the other guy gets an instant tap-out or does a majistral cradle or something. It leaves me with the impression that they were just killing time until it was time to bring it home. With all that said, watching two guys do hold and counterhold can be really fun to watch if it's done well. And in this fall, Dandy and Casas do it very well. They disappoint me a little by going for the ropes a couple of times, but for the most part, it's just reversals and escapes. Casas reversing an armbar into a seated abdominal stretch was especially swank. About five minutes in, the action spills outside and they start trading chops. But they take it back to the mat once they take it back in. The matwork ends when Casas kicks his way out of an arm wrench, leading to a lucha exchange. From there, they start unloading with strikes. The end comes when Dandy hits a short-arm clothesline and goes for a second but misses. Casas counters with two Rock Bottoms and applies a Sharpshooter for the submission. Second fall: Casas takes it right to Dandy from the start with a dropkick. After working a control segment for a while, he backs Dandy into the corner and kicks him in the nuts. This struck a sour note with me. Sure, heels have engaged in underhanded tactics when up a fall since time immemorial. But I thought the whole point of the title match style was that both participants worked a clean technical match so that the winner could truly claim to be the best wrestler. Anyway, this leads to Dandy getting the upper hand with a tilt-a-whirl backbreaker. From there, he dominates the rest of the fall, getting the pin with a leglock/bridge combination. Third fall: In a reversal of the previous fall, Dandy takes control at the outset with a series of dropkicks, including one while Casas is on the apron that knocks him to the floor. He then hits a plancha from the top rope to the outside, but Casas actually recovers first. He goes for a superplex, but Dandy headbutts him off the turnbuckle and hits a missile dropkick for two. A second missile dropkick takes more out of Dandy, and Casas goes back on offense. I'm not really a fan of that as a transition, especially twice, but whatever. After taking firm control with an elbow drop and a senton, Casas brings out the big guns, following a belly-to-belly superplex with a Macho Man elbow. From there, we get a kind of reverse Oklahoma Stampede, a Stinger splash, a thunder fire powerbomb, and a second top rope elbow drop. Dandy fights back with a Northern Lights suplex that gets two. I have to say, this is some incredibly high-end offense for a lucha match. It feels more like a New Japan juniors match than typical lucha. I guess it's not too much of a surprise, though. From what I've read, Dandy and Casas both made a point of trying to incorporate Japanese style into lucha. Another superplex attempt by Casas, but Dandy fights out and hits a flying axehandle. Missile dropkick followed by a tilt-a-whirl backbreaker gets two, as do a pair of small packages. The referee takes forever to get into position to make the count for the latter. Between that and doing nothing about the low blow, I actually thought it was a rudo ref the first time I saw this match. After a final flourish from Casas, Dandy gets the pin with a majistral cradle. Is this the best lucha title match of all time? I'm a relative lucha novice, but I'd say it's between this and Satanico/Cochisse, though I'm inclined to give this the nod for now. I wouldn't call this a lucha gateway drug, but between the matwork, brawling, and highspots, it pretty much has something for everyone. Final Verdict: Great

Finally watched the match. ****3/4 is a stretch, but I thought the match was really good. It was clearly a Naito carry job, but Okada held up his end. Naito's leg work was good, and Okada targeting the head and neck to set up the Rainmaker was a nice touch as well. Okada's selling of the leg was a little spotty overall, but I didn't have a problem with the dropkick spot. I distinguish between fighting through cumulative damage and going back to selling immediately afterward and no-selling (or delayed selling) the immediate impact of a move. To me, it was closer to Misawa hitting someone with a rolling elbow after his arm had been worked on and then collapsing than Kawada popping up after a German. Overall, it was 2012's first true MOTYC. What the hell was with that dude in the crowd decked out in two-tone gear? He looked like he belonged at a Specials concert, not a wrestling show.

The Angle/Benoit vs. Edge/Rey match that won WON MOTY is also worth a look.

The problem with using the economy as an excuse is that there are too many examples of wrestling doing well despite bad economic numbers. In 1982, the US was in the middle of a severe recession. That year, 1.3 million people attended wrestling events in the state of Texas alone. By comparison, total attendance at all WWE events worldwide in 2011 was 1.98 million. In addition, puro did huge business during Japan's Lost Decade. Hell, Jim Londos was a monster draw during the Great Depression. It's true that a lousy economy would disproportionately impact the spending habits of children and the poor and uneducated. But it's not an accident or an act of God that those are the WWE's primary demographics. It's because the product so frequently insults the intelligence of the viewer that that every other demographic has been largely driven away. This isn't just speculation on my part, either. Look at the most recent TVN survey of sports fans. Not only is the percentage of fans who say they have no interest in wrestling higher than it's ever been, interest is down among every income and education bracket except for high school dropouts and those with family incomes of less than $20,000 a year.

He's a Canadian with a technical gimmick. That's enough to make him an icon in some circles.

Nah, Benoit/Malenko would've been lousy anywhere in the world.

What about Jake Roberts during his "Trust Me" period?

It's not that the economy and prices and illegal streaming aren't factors at all. But I think that the terrible booking is a bigger factor.

Benoit is way too high, and Liger probably is as well. But overall, that top ten list looks solid. It's once you go beyond that that things get muddled. Are you saying that Rey's ranking is unfairly low? Who on that list absolutely has no business being ranked above Rey other than DK and Takada?

I think the cost factor is overblown. A five-dollar increase alone doesn't cause a drop from 5 million buys in 2008 to 3.6 million in 2010. Dave made a couple of posts on the F4W board a while back. In the first, he talked about two friends of his who are elementary school teachers. According to them, wrestling was huge a couple of years ago, but now no one cares anymore. In the second, he talked about Raw viewership. In 1999, when the product was at the peak of its raunchiness, 2.83 million kids watched every week. Today, that number is 940,000. So the WWE is as third as popular among kids now as it was when it was as kid-unfriendly as it's ever been.

My personal pick for best tag match in WWF/E history would be the 1994 Kliq tag match from Action Zone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCYiRCQLFBg

Attendance and PPV buys are the two primary indicators of who is willing to pay to see the product in real time. Not coincidentally, Vince himself has said on many occasions that he considers them to be the main indicators of whether the product is really clicking for the fans. Since WWE is a publicly traded company, we can look at its 10-K reports and get the figures going all the way back to 1996. I'll have a more detailed write-up later, but suffice it to say that the numbers aren't pretty. It's worth noting that PPV numbers have been artificially inflated for a while now by international buys. Does anybody know exactly when the UK stopped getting all the PPVs for free?

http://www.fcwwrestling.info/salazar1.html Who the hell is this dude? Is he supposed to be some kind of Dr. Wagner ripoff?

So La Resistance broke up?

Also, the neck of every single Mexican is made of tissue paper.

Speaking of Kawada, his right leg has been a weak spot for nearly 20 years.

21 times in 1998, which is a pretty decent number given (i) no matches in January, and (ii) no matches after 12/7. In fact, just one match until 3/2 and just one match after 11/16. 18 matches in between those two dates. 19 times in 1999. Just once in Feb, and was done in the first week of November due to the injury. Not a massive impact of SmackDown on that number as it only was just starting when he went out. I would be surprised if any "anchor" wrestler in the WWF had wrestled on TV 20 times in a year prior to 1998. That's setting aside stuff that aired on MSG/Spectrum/NESN/Z Channel, and just counting stuff like the syndication, USA Network, SNME and The Main Event. Doubt Shawn worked that much on TV in 1996, Nash in 1995, Shawn or Bret in 1997, Bret in 1993-94, Hogan in 1991, Warrior in 1990, Hogan in 1989, Savage in 1988, Hogan in 1984-88, etc. I think we could say Austin was there at the change. John I had him at 19 matches in 1998 and 17 in 1999. Regardless, that's 40 TV matches combined over two years. I guarantee you Cena had more than that in 2011 alone.

I really like his Three Stages of Hell match with Austin. The first fall alone is probably the best sub-15 minute match in WWE history.

Austin didn't wrestle on TV very often in 1998 and 1999. It didn't seem to hurt ratings too much.

Or maybe they want to create the next Hornswoggle by having a sentient fart cloud be Nattie's companion like in that one Ren & Stimpy episode and interfere in her matches.