joeg

I think I never picked up on it because a lot of insults thrown at Cornette in Mid South and Crockett like "sissy", "punk", etc were insults I associated more with insults and euphemisms for somebody who was weak, cowardly, entitled, or effeminate. Which were the character traits he regularly showed. Anytime a babyface insinuated Cornette was gay I just thought that was a wisecrack about a guy who was less masculine than most. I never actually thought the Jim Cornette character was somebody who liked to company of other men. If anything I thought Cornette was "gay" in the way a 12 year old will loosely toss the word around to describe something not masculine or annoying. Maybe I didn't pick up on it as a kid because by the time I was seeing Cornette on TV in the early 90s those references had been dropped? Or maybe it could be that I've never known any gay man to talk or behave like Jim Cornette did? I dunno, I just never picked up on it. Also I thought his legal, Christian name was James Cornette, so how is it a joke on Barnett?

Since when does WWE care about things being a bad look?

Yeah none of that made any sense what so ever..... He beats those two guys by himself. Then he loses to them when the numbers are even. Then the next week Andrade and Garza beat Viking Radiers clean. Then the next week Orton beats Big Show... Its almost as if the weekly TV for WWE the past several years has been put together by people who never watched wrestling before. AEW at least has the feel of being put together by wrestling fans with no actual professional experience.

Damn... I don't remember those one liners at all. Its crazy to see the zingers that were ok for TV in the 80s. I think when The Network moves over to Peacock in a week or two I need to re watch some Crockett from 85-86.

@sek69Huh. I never knew it was a rib on Barnett and I never thought of it as gay. I always thought Watts was calling Cornette cowardly, weak, entitled. I always took the terms sissy and punk literally as a less vulgar ways of calling him a pussy. Saying he was too cowardly to fight his own battles and needed somebody else to do it for him. Which happened quite frequently in his storylines. Cornette was never the most masculine guy, but at no point did they come out and say it the way they did with Adrian Street for example. But I've been proven wrong. I learn something new on this board all time.

I think you hit the nail on the head. That and Shane has mostly been a babyface on TV while Steph has mostly been a heel on TV. And everything written on one of the dirtmags or said in a shoot interviews has been mostly negative about Steph and positive about Shane. For 20 years the public persona of Steph was that she's a cold hearted bitch and the public persona of Shane is that he's the guy you want with you in a foxhole. WWE went through a lot of trouble to create these public personas. I think that has a lot to do with the public opinion of the two of them.

I thought that was the purpose of Drive Thru, but it wasn't doing as well numbers wise so he's been doing his shtick more and more with Drive Thru. Best thing to do is go on youtube and pick and chose the segment or topic. That's what I've always done, so I mostly miss the obnoxious stupid shit he says.

well Omega did have a match with a blowup sex doll in DDT. And in his time in DDT he was in a tag team called the Golden Lovers and he did work against Danshoku Dino and Michael Nakazawa quite frequently.... not saying that Cornette's comment's aren't crude or offensive, but they aren't innacurate. When Omega first got to Japan, he was involved in a lot of bad comedy wrestling that leaned heavily into stereotypes of homosexuals. That's true. This is another one of those, "you aren't wrong Walter, you're just an asshole" moments that Cornette has so frequently. I never read Cornette's gimmick as a gay stereotype... I always took it as every negative characteristic I'd want to punch in the face rolled up into one person. Entitled. Inherited wealth. Sharpe tounged. Incredibly obnoxious. Narcissistic. Unprincipled. Cowardly. I mean, he wasn't well dressed and singing show tunes every week, that might have gotten laughs not boos. He was being a horrible person on TV every week. And it made him good money. The combination of being obnoxious and funny is still making the guy money with his podcast.

I think a common thread between many of the guys discussed in this thread is that either they were legit athletes who competed at an extremely high level of free style wrestling, greco roman wrestling or some other form grappling based martial arts (judo, sambo, catch, etc) before entering pro wrestling. Angle, Tamura, Volk Han, Jumbo, Murahama, Dynamite, etc. There's got to be something said for having mastered skills such as rolls, throws, sprawls, body control, joint manipulations, etc. from childhood rather than having your first roll ever come when breaking into wrestling.

The claim of Christian being a top 5 guy in the Attitude Era got me thinking. We all dismiss the Attitude Era as trash TV, which it was. But it was well booked trash TV with guys who were over. Edge and Christian were a top 5 tag team maybe? possibly? (Rock and Sock, Brothers of Destruction, Outlaws, Hardys, Dudleys, APA, etc ) All of whom were over like rover. Flipping back and forth between Nitro and Raw in 2000 you would think the 7th or 8th WWF tag team were bigger stars than Goldberg, Scott Steiner, and Booker T.

Robinson vs Inoki comes to mind. One of the Destroyer vs Mascaras matches does as well.

So just watched the main event. I think what made it so bad wasn't that the explosion was a dud (the explosion at the end of IWA KOTD was every bit the dud) what made it bad was that Kingston sold it like it was Hayabusa vs Onita and the announcers did too. Had everybody's reaction been in proportion with the size of the explosion I don't think it would have been a thing. Instead its another LOLTNA moment in AEW. I'm glad I didn't buy the show. I said in another thread that AEW missing on the little details will eventually catch up to them. I think last night might have been it. And they are doubling down on their fuck up by addressing it on TV on Wednesday. If I were them I'd be scrubbing any video of that debacle from the internet, not replaying it on national TV.

I thought Danielson hadn't resigned yet. His contract was up this spring/summer and he's been talking in interviews about wanting to wrestle a reduced schedule since his kid was born..... that might be the guy.

@C.S. really it was that tough to join the board back in the day? Damn. I'm lucky to have been one of the puroresufan/puroresu.tv guys that migrated over here during GWE.

How about Pat McAfee as the surprise? Punters/kickers rarely get into the NFL HOF but if one from the last 10-15 years gets in, he'd probably be the guy. Cody and McAfee have been taking jabs at each other in the press. And Tony K being a rumored PWO lurker, we can assume he's read the various threads about wrestling not reaching out to a wide audience. Or it could be LA Park and I would be just as happy.

Yep. they keep doing so many good things then shooting themselves in the foot.

Yeah I never watch BTE. If they're working angles on their youtube show and then never mentioning it on TV and assuming that people will get it, that's just as bad as assuming that the casual viewer tuning in to see Shaq will know who Onita is. They need to explain these things. Either through the commentators or vignettes or something.

I know I was posting at 3 am but I thought that was the point I made. I guess I didn't. They hot shotted the War Games because attendance had been down for months. Then COVID happened and they abandoned the Cody vs Jericho and Cody vs MJF feuds all together and never really picked it back up. They did the big match at Double or Nothing but by that point Elite vs Inner Circle had just sort of been dropped and Cody had moved onto Shawn Spears. (Which by the way it still drives me nuts that the whole company broke kayfabe over that chairshot). So it didn't make a lot of sense for the Elite guys (who were going their own seperate ways at that point) to go over the Inner Circle when there was no steam behind the match. The more I think about it, as described in this thread and others, wrestling's problem in attracting new fans or young fans isn't just failing to create and market young stars. Its that there hasn't been a coherent wrestling show on a major American television network in years. And there hasn't been a major feud booked properly from start to finish on major television in years either. Those are the things that bring in casual viewership and increase fanbase. There have been some truly great matches over the last decade. However, no new/young fans are going to see them if the most accessible weekly TV shows are incoherent reality trash TV, there are no new stars being created/promoted, and there are no feuds being booked properly.

I dunno. Dark Order was such a part of the show it turned me off and probably a lot of other people too. They didn't seem to really know where they were going with Page and Omega. Then it got dropped with COVID. The Elite vs Inner Circle feud had a lot of potential with a potential War Games but that got dropped too. And even more telling were the attendance numbers. They were horrible from like summer of 2019 to right when things got shut down. Which is probably why they were hot shotting the War Games match, so they wouldn't have 2500 people in an 10000 seat arena when they ran New Jersey. The show did have a lot of young, talented fresh faces on it which was refreshing, but it wasn't really going anywhere with them. That's still sort of the case a year later

Yeah. I think you are giving them way to much credit. That doesn't make sense. At all. Just like how it doesn't make sense that after somebody hospitalized your father, you'd spend 5 minutes talking to them about wanting to kick their ass rather than actually fighting them. Watching AEW reminds me of the Kevin Nash one liner about how wrestling is a show about sex and violence that's written by people who have never thrown a punch or gotten laid.

I think eventually the little things not making sense will hurt AEW. I lol'd at "Malnourished Matt and Not Slick Wish My Hair was Thick Nick" but I was like they shouldn't bury their top babyfaces like that. Then I though weren't the Young Bucks heels on the last PPV? When did they turn? I dunno, they just did I guess. And weren't Gallows/Anderson at odds with the Bucks because they were invading AEW? I guess not. All in one segment. It's all entertaining but at some point things being entertaining but illogical is going to hurt them. I think their saving grace is they are compared to WWE where things are neither logical nor entertaining.

Somebody should hire Loss to to book their company.

Oh absolutely. Its funny. Probably the most engaging online sports personalities right now are either Pat McAfee or the guys at Barstool. WWE does a tie in with McAfee in a attempt to reach a wider audience, and he's not only more athletic than EVERYBODY on the show but he also has more personality and charisma than EVERYBODY on the entire show. The purpose of bringing in pro athletes and celebrities to wrestling I thought was to give the wrestlers a rub and get them over, not to show them up lol. So even when an American wrestling company tries to appeal to a younger, broader audience with celebrity cameos it only seems to get the celeb over. I worry about the same thing happening with the Shaq in AEW. I've never met Shaq. But I've met Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning, and those guys towered over me. I saw most of the AEW roster on the indies, and I towered over most of those guys. Its has the potential to be comical how much bigger and how much more mobile Shaq is than most of the AEW guys.

Roman Reigns is Samoan. You are correct. For years here there was debate over whether his push being hamstrung was intentional or just out of sheer incompetence. Same goes for the New Day who are black. Was their push hamstrung intentionally or just out of sheer incompetence? I don't know, and I'm not saying its because of race. I'm just saying that the reason the fanbase is what it is and the ratings are what they are is that its been nearly 20 years since any American wrestling company successfully promoted, booked and marketed anybody who would appeal to anyone outside of the diehard fanbase. And I seriously question whether they even tried. I could go through every point you made over the last 24 hours, google them, and prove many of them factually inaccurate. However I'm tired and am now going to bed. I have work tomorrow and will not be continuing this bullshit in the morning.

I don't even remember your points. I don't think you ever made any sort of valid points.