NintendoLogic

Big guys doing cool acrobatic shit will always get over more than smaller guys doing the same shit. Sucks to be you if you're a smaller guy, but life's not fair. The flip side, though, is that smaller guys performing impressive feats of strength gets over more than big guys doing the same thing. That's why someone suplexing a much larger opponent always gets a huge pop. In fact, that's what made Vader so great. He may have taken some of the shine off the smaller wrestlers by doing moonsaults, but he made those smaller wrestlers look like world-beaters when he let them throw him around and bounced around like a pinball for their offense.

Veda Scott does a good job on Dark, I think.

So did WWE.

When Bret came back in 2010, he was cutting some of the best promos in the company to promote his match with Vince. I don't know if it was more a case of him dramatically improving on the mic or a guy who was considered average at best when pro wrestling promos were actually good standing out simply because standards had fallen so dramatically. Also, as brother TTK noted, he had become a trained actor, so the move to a scripted format was probably to his benefit. Roddy Piper is another guy in the latter category. By the end of his career, he was usually embarrassingly bad when given a live mic and no script. But because he was an experienced actor by that point, he could knock it out of the park when called upon to deliver scripted material like in the Piper's Pit right before Survivor Series 2010.

I have no desire to see Mauro in AEW, but how many of you have seen enough of his non-WWE work to have an opinion on it? I remember him being fine doing New Japan on AXS. His boxing and MMA commentary also seems to be well-regarded. Given everything we know about WWE, I don't think there's any reason to think he would be more insufferable without their direction.

Wrestling can be choreographed and still look good. I have never seen a wrestlers huddled up waiting for someone to dive onto them spot that didn't look like absolute dogshit.

I don't know where this idea that JR bent over backwards to put over everything in WWE came from. He subtly buried matches and segments he thought sucked all the time. He even had phrases like "bowling shoe" to signify that things were especially bad. It was that willingness to respect the intelligence of the viewer that gave him the credibility to put over the stuff that really mattered.

From the latest Observer: Additional info from PWInsider: I'm not exactly a Keith Lee fan, but even I wouldn't call him one of the five guys on the roster most in need of remedial training.

Wrestlers having supernatural powers is one thing, but that doesn't mean other wrestlers have to be terrified of them. Fear in top babyfaces should take the form of cautiousness or bewilderment. Only heels and jobbers should engage in shrieking hysterics.

Kobashi did not start out at 235. Rookie Kobashi looks like a technically sound young boy, but there are scores of technically sound young boys who never amounted to anything. From what I've seen of rookie Taue, he may have been more advanced right out of the gate.

If anything, the anti-Charlotte sentiment is even stronger on the F4W board. It seems that a lot of people turned on her after she went full Low Ki on Kairi Sane at TLC. Not only did it show reckless disregard for the safety of her opponent, it exposed her as someone who can't improvise and has to stick to the script no matter what.

Ric himself has called Charlotte the female Orton. But he meant it as a compliment. https://talksport.com/sport/wrestling/692171/ric-fair-randy-orton-wwe-charlotte/ Has there ever been another wrestler so universally praised by his peers that most fans couldn't give less of a shit about?

Even after the Charlotte feud, Becky would have been one and done against Ronda at Survivor Series and likely would have been back in the midcard going nowhere by Mania had Nia not broken her nose. And Charlotte being inserted into the Mania match for no reason turned it into a clusterfuck and made the result a lot less meaningful than it would have been had Becky beaten Ronda straight-up.

She elevates people simply by allowing them to share the ring with her and bask in her greatness. So Asuka was elevated by Charlotte ending her unbeaten streak right before losing the title to Carmella. And the NXT women were elevated by Charlotte coming down and beating everybody and then dropping the belt without being pinned or submitted. People call her CHHHarlotte for a reason.

Sure, but the only joshi wrestler in the Hall who retired when she was supposed to and stayed retired is Dump Matsumoto. And even she came back eventually. As for Taue: look, I love the guy, but he was far from a cerebral worker. He was a guy who liked to throw bombs. I'd also dispute the notion that he got a raw deal in physical ability relative to the other Pillars. He may have looked physically awkward, but you don't make it to sekitori rank in sumo without some natural ability. Kobashi, on the other hand, had no sports background at all. Looking at him at the beginning of his career, he had no obvious physical gifts that jump out at you. He was just insanely driven to be the best he could possibly be.

Cade had Shawn Michaels advocating on his behalf, for all the good it did him. One major difference is that Orton is a second-generation guy (third-generation, actually), which gets you quite a bit of leeway in WWE. Look at how long Ray Gordy managed to stay on the roster.

Brother Matt left himself wide open with that Ray Stevens aside, but I'll pass up the low-hanging fruit to discuss Orton's drawing power. VOW analyzed his record at the end of 2013: http://web.archive.org/web/20131225144451/https://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2013/12/20/is-randy-orton-a-draw/ The upshot is this: from 2004 to 2008, Orton-headlined PPVs performed above the company average, sometimes significantly so. From 2009 on, they've performed below the company average. And even in the good years, there are some caveats. For example, Survivor Series 2004, headlined by Team Orton vs. Team HHH, did well by 2004 standards but poorly by Survivor Series standards. And he faced Undertaker in a Hell in a Cell match at Armageddon 2005, so you can't really credit him for the buyrate there. At best, he's the guy who works with the guy who draws the money.

My biggest problem with WarGames is the fact that the match can't end until everyone is inside the cage. The opening minutes when it's one-on-one are fine, but once the ring starts filling up, there's too much going on to keep track of and no real reason to care about any of it.

It's a point Dave has made many times. Athletes who've achieved a high level in real sports are used to having their egos coddled and are more likely to push to be paid they think they're worth while wrestlers with non-sports backgrounds are just happy to be living their dream and earning more than the average Joe.

As several have pointed out, War Pigs is an antiwar song, so using it as a WarGames hype song is like thinking Born in the USA is a feelgood patriotic anthem.

PWO is great for wrestling discussion, but it's pretty useless for giving a sense of the broader consensus. If you were around back in the day, you might be fooled into thinking that Taue being a better worker than Kobashi was a widely held viewpoint.

Also, ROH won the coin flip in the ROH/CZW Cage of Death, but that was a setup for Danielson turning on Joe in the middle of the match.

Nobody could have predicted that putting 120-pound women in a car-crash gimmick match just to fit the theme of a particular show might have negative consequences.

Thatcher's a talented worker with a unique style that stands out. He's not the kind of guy you can build a promotion around, but he'd be great as the number 2 or 3 guy in a heel stable with a manager as a mouthpiece.

Welcome back. I have a question I was hoping you could provide some insight on. Why was the red belt such a hot potato in 1995? Aja Kong entered the year having held it for over two years, and Bull Nakano held it for nearly three years before that. And Manami Toyota held it for a year after winning it in December. But in between, there were four title changes in the span of a little over eight months.