NintendoLogic

It wouldn't surprise me if wrestlers in WWE and AEW were specifically instructed to stand down if some idiot tries to get in their face. These days, laying a finger on someone outside the ring is a lawsuit waiting to happen. That reminds me of something I've always wondered about. Are there any actual documented incidences of Bill Watts firing someone for losing a bar fight?

Aries in a nutshell:

I've always kind of wondered about how stadium shows worked out financially in the days before stadiums selling out for wrestling was a thing. Even if you draw 20,000 or more fans, the overhead from running in a 70,000 seat stadium has to be astronomical compared to a 15,000 seat arena.

There's no use in denying it. Dynamite's ratings have been in a free fall since Revolution. The 1-2 punch of hyping up a Christian signing and the exploding ring that wasn't may have done even more damage than we realized. Overpromising and underdelivering to that degree is just about the worst thing you can do when you're trying to present yourself as the anti-WWE.

Seemingly every Brazilian professional athlete is an outspoken Bolsonaro supporter, so I wouldn't be too hopeful.

They moved the event to a stadium (it was originally scheduled to be held at the Omni) so they would be able to claim they outdrew Mania. It didn't work out that way, of course.

She's in between DBS Jr. and JBL. I'm sorry, what?

I thought Joe Higuchi was the interpreter/babysitter for the foreign wrestlers.

It was actually done at the behest of the cable industry. Hogan/Savage was on track to shatter business records, so Vince tried to pull a power play and demand a bigger cut of PPV revenue. In response, the cable companies asked Turner to run a PPV to go head-to-head with Mania. Less than a quarter of the homes wired for PPV had the ability to order both shows, and most of the others were in Turner's corner. Vince eventually backed down, but it was too far along by that point to simply call the show off, so it became a free Clash.

The story I'd love more details on is how Baba managed to get Steve Williams allowed back in the country after he got busted for pot at the airport. There had to have been more to it than simply calling in a favor.

If Kip goes to WWE with Penelope, he'll end up in a million humiliating cuck angles designed to break them up. Can't have midcarders punching above their weight.

You're all forgetting about the millions of lapsed Attitude Era fans who are sure to tune in.

The pandemic has obviously put a damper on things, but both NOAH and Stardom just outdrew them at Budokan. If that isn't cause for alarm, I don't know what is. I'm kind of worried that the whole deal with Ospreay and Priestley was a harbinger of more wild angles to try to heat things up.

I think it's generally accepted that WWE has so many talented workers and produces so much content that some greatness is bound to break through. Being sentenced to watch every hour of WWE programming every week would be a fate worse than death, but it's quite tolerable if you cherry-pick.

There's nothing wrong with the new belt per se, but the original design was perfect and didn't need to be changed. It's the New Coke of belts. As for New Japan's struggles at the gate, I hate to say it, but could Ibushi be the problem? It could be a classic case of people being more into a guy chasing the championship than actually being champion. Then again, they've done a piss-poor job of setting up compelling challengers.

I don't know if you can pin that one on Scott. My understanding is that Turner execs had decreed that Sting was the new rising star and were scared to death that he might get booed on live TV, which is why they booked the angle where his team got locked in the dressing room. And the relationship had already become strained under Crockett due to him pulling Flair from several advertised tours.

It's like I was saying in the thread about the aging of wrestling fans. A title match should be able to sell itself. Asuka's the champion. Rhea wants to be champion. You don't need to add a third competitor to add layers of plot and intrigue.

The funny thing is, Hogan/Andre was the match at WM3 with a pure sports build while Savage/Steamboat was the one with a sports entertainment build. The former was a straightforward world title match. The latter had Steamboat trying to gain revenge on Savage for crushing his throat with the ring bell along with all the ancillary nonsense with George Steele.

That wasn't directed at you, my man. It was for all the folks in this thread saying that the quality of matches doesn't matter and all they care about is good vs. evil storytelling. The notion that pro wrestling needs some kind of storyline hook to work is belied by the fact that some of the most successful promoters in history (Giant Baba, Sam Muchinck, Vince the Elder) stuck to basic booking patterns and almost never ran angles. Really, why does every match need a story? Do people need promos and video packages to explain why Patrick Mahomes wants to win the Super Bowl? Of course not. The motivation to want to be a champion is self-explanatory. Feuds rooted in personal issues are great and all, but winning championships should be presumed to be every wrestler's default motivation. Promotions where there's a complete disconnect between wins and losses and championship success (late period WCW, TNA for most of its existence, current WWE) are rightly regarded as the worst of the worst.

A heel destroying a babyface's boombox sounds like a 90s WWF feud. In fact, I'm pretty sure something like that with the Headbangers and the New Age Outlaws.

If the fans want to turn her face, why not turn her face?

The same thing happened in WWE. The women's audience went down as the women started being pushed more. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that women as a whole want to watch women's wrestling, particularly ultraviolent women's wrestling. The exception is when the wrestlers are pushed as teen idols and role models to young girls. Bayley could have worked in that role, but we know how that turned out. Other than that, the best way to draw women has historically been with good-looking pretty boys who can sell sympathetically. And reality TV.

The trainee's name was Hiromitsu Gompei. Hase had personally recruited him into pro wrestling and promised his parents he'd be taken care of in the dojo. I think Scott Norton said in a shoot interview that Sasaki suplexed the kid to death, which sounds to me like a bullshit pro wrestling story. In any event, Hase was never able to get a straight answer about what had happened, which is what led to him leaving New Japan. It should be noted that Hase and Sasaki did end up teaming again several years later, so I guess they worked it out.

Personally, I hope all the footage has to be edited to the point where it becomes completely unwatchable and it ends up being a huge black eye for both NBC and WWE. It's what they deserve.

That might predate Peacock. I've seen posts from years ago referring to "technical difficulties" on the WWE Network during the Johnny Be Gay promo.