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That closing segment was the best AEW angle in months, possibly the best since Starks laid out Steamboat.

Check out WWE Vault on Youtube. They've uploaded a video of Takeshi Morishima's WWE tryouts and are actively soliciting suggestions for more. Maybe Hidden Gems aren't quite dead yet.

@Matt Dand I were in a Discord the other day discussing this and I thought I'd bring it here. It was just a general discussion of move names with some other folks and Matt said this: "It boggled my mind a couple of weeks ago when I realized Kox was doing the brainbuster in the 60s (70s, sure, but not the 60s). One of the biggest quirks of the French footage was that you'd see every move under the sun (1950s ranas and power bombs like they were nothing) but even into the 80s I didn't see a standing vertical suplex, not once in hundreds of matches. I'm sure I came across this at some point but Kox had runs in Japan in 66. Could it just be that he did the brainbuster there before almost anyone else was regularly doing standing vertical suplexes?" There was some other stuff about what came first--the brain buster or the big, theatrical, standing overhead suplex, which seemed to mostly came out of the old rolling-front-chancery that you saw guys do in the '50s up through the '70s as well as the "winglock suplex" popularized/invented by Ed Virag and Sandor Szabo going way back. By the '80s, the modern vertical suplex had made its way to the UK and it's not unusual to see in the '80s WoS footage, though it was still more of a fall-ender and you didn't see it as often as it was seen in the US at the same time. Even wiry little Johnny Saint busts one out a time or two. But I've noticed that you never, ever see the back suplex in England. The double-arm? Yes, you saw that well before the vertical suplex by a lot of different folks. Gut wrench? Not as often, but it was done, sometimes closer to a tilt-a-whirl-type than the more standard kind. But the one and only back suplex I've ever seen in a World of Sport match was by Billy Robinson in his one-off TV return against Lee Bronson in 1978. The previously-subdued crowd reacts with a comparatively huge "OOOOH!" clearly having never seen it before and thinking that Bronson may as well have had his neck broken. And as Matt pointed out, neither the back nor vertical ever seemed to make its way to France. I don't know if Robinson got the move from Japan or not, but if so it's not like he was the only European working over there and bringing things back from the Far East. Power bombs are not an unusual sight in either France or England even in the 1950s--sometimes a pure modern-style bomb and sometimes more of a rollup/folding press. But that doesn't really become a thing elsewhere with myriad setups and variations until the late '80s. It's interesting to see what moves crossed over to where...and which ones didn't.

That's not really that crazy, timeline-wise. The WWF never went so far as to have a negative title reign but they certainly taped stuff weeks in advance of PPVs for years. They also just didn't do title changes as frequently as WCW nor did they have as many titles. Had they stuck to that format it's not inconceivable that they could have done the same thing.

11:30-1 a.m. Saturday on NBC is a TV institution in the U.S. going back to Saturday Night Live's debut, which was a cultural phenomenon in the '70s, in a down period in 1985 (think New Generation WWF), and then would become one again with another cast makeover in the late '80s, and has had ups and downs since but is ultimately still on the air 50 years later. It's not the same as a prime timeslot but people know of it and it's been "event television" for a chunk of its run. I'm not sure how this was in Europe and I can't fully explain it myself, but Saturday nights in the U.S. actually used to be good TV nights. Huge shows like M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, All in the Family, The Bob Newhart Show, and others aired on Saturdays either for part of their run or all of it. I've never quite gotten a good explanation of how this changed other than maybe the rise of the VCR and houses getting multiple TVs made it easier to set a timer and go out and watch it later instead of still getting a captive audience even on a night when people go out. But in 1985 it still hadn't gone to all newsmagazine shows and college football yet.

Yeah, that's some of the stuff I was talking about, it was a mix of '88 and '92 now that I look over my lists again. And it's been on Youtube for 10 years and most of it's got a fraction of the views that a bunch of Matt's '50s and '60s stuff has.

Jeff Lynch had 30-odd-hours of '80s British wrestling in his tape lists years before the Wrestling Channel was a thing. It wasn't much compared to what would come, but it's way more than anything we got out of '80s France (Lynch did have the 1992 EWF stuff as well). I think it also says something that Plantin doesn't touch this era hardly at all either on Facebook or on his ALPRA blog. When he does, it's matches involving guys in the '60s and '70s in their twilight years. Were promoters spending money on gimmicks like Mambo because they were awash in cash or because they were desperate?

Still there for me. The channel doesn't have any of its own content that I've ever seen, just Playlists of other channels' stuff.

I don't entirely disagree it with it being a joke but *Oasis* is the hill we're dying on to that point?

How have we not mentioned the greatest lost film since Theda Bara's Cleopatra: Santo Gold's Blood Circus?

Kudos to Rich Eisen for keeping full kayfabe, mentioning that Tony Khan is the first NFL exec to do the draft one day after getting piledriven. AEW and Jack Perry were actually mentioned by name on NFL Network draft coverage. Of course, with ESPN's coverage, the Jags' war room was the only one they didn't show.

Meltzer actually made a fairly compelling argument that Danielson should have gone over Ospreay. If Ospreay just wins non-stop through All In or whenever he gets the World title, he'll have no challengers. If his first loss is closer to All In, how does he get a World title shot? A Danielson loss would give him something to fight for that goes a little beyond, "Has great matches." But then, Danielson's "aw shucks, I just want to put guys over" act is in its own way as selfish as stuff not working for Hogan, brother.

This would not apply to the standard 90-day termination notice since the wrestler is still under contract and still being paid. It would apply in cases like Renee Young, who was a WWE employee who put in her two weeks' notice but her contract called for a 1-year non-compete clause if she left on her own. It also doesn't go into effect for 120 days from now and that's assuming it's not delayed or killed by resulting lawsuits.

They also call the uncensored, international version of the Ron Bass-Brutus Beefcake angle together. One team I don't think we ever got, even though they overlapped in WCW, was Ventura & Solie.

The switch to taped after-the-fact voiceovers started with the same TVs the Event Centers did (after Mania 4). Before that, commentary was live-to-tape in the arena. Not sure about the intros, though.

The Event Center started with the first TVs after WrestleMania 4. Lyons and Rougeau did the ones for Canada (and Lyons did local interviews for Canada as well). And yes, the Event Centers allowed the wrestlers to cut one generic promo for most markets while Mooney did the grunt work (but at least got to sit down while doing it). On some occasions you would get market-specific promos: New York, Boston, and Canada mostly, or if a market was getting a unique match (Hogan/Boss Man vs. the Powers of Pain comes to mind). If there was no upcoming house show in the market, you'd get wrestlers cutting generic promos putting themselves over, or Event Centers for the upcoming PPV. This also applied to the Event Centers that aired on cable. Around Mania 9 there's another shift: Mooney leaves, and around that time Gene mostly goes back to doing the Event Center and Gorilla starts doing Update. In the summer of '93, in an attempt to drive up house shows, they switch from the Event Center to "Face to Face" with both wrestlers in the match or feud cutting promos on each other, or having an actual conversation with the host. Gene did this up until his departure and then it was taken over by various folks including Joe Fowler and J.R. I think this lasted for a year or so before getting replaced by Live Event News which was essentially a dressed-up Event Center (with more graphics and background music).

Conversely, wrestling and movies, being cheap escapist entertainment at the time, actually did very well during the Depression (and movies did very well during the Great Recession).

Also, much is made of World Class' production values but their team's most underrated facet was their ability to make the dingy, rat-infested Sportatorium look like a classier arena than Madison Square Garden.

I believe Watts was planning to move his base to Atlanta if he'd gotten the full TBS deal. Honestly, I think the only other major contender to go national successfully based on markets would be Verne, and he'd never have a national vision. But he had Chicago, he had the Bay Area, he had in-roads in Canada, he had two other good-sized markets in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver, and if he'd had the foresight to try to seize upon L.A. upon the closing of the Lebell territory, like had with San Francisco, then he'd really have something. But as much as the AWA is underrated as a wrestling product, it didn't have the consistency or compelling storytelling of Mid-South, Memphis, Crockett, or post-expansion WWF.

Meltzer vigorously debunked that figure. It's a good figure but not near $4.5 mil/year. Tokyo Sports is about as reliable as your average Apter magazine.

And it was the other way around--Puder did a number on him. This other guy got a few wins on Sunday Night Heat and was apparently someone that Stephanie McMahon was weirdly really high on, seeing him as a future star.

Where is it being reported that Copeland was hurt? It seemed to me that injury angle was a way to get Garcia into the TNT title match without Copeland having to do a job. It seems like if he were hurt to the point of needing to be written out, he wouldn't have wrestled a full match first.

Maybe Kris and Bix are oversimplifying, but the narrative on the Between the Sheets podcast is that the UWF and subsequent NJPW feud drew great in Tokyo but didn't draw so great in the non-Tokyo markets.

I...don't think Hangman was selling at the end of that match.

Regardless, Meltzer has an absolutely brutal week. In one issue of the Observer he had the CMLL-AEW policy mess, he named Tommy Dreamer as the head of creative for TNA which PWInsider and SRS both raced to debunk, and then somehow in his Smackdown recap he recapped a backstage segment between Rock and Triple H from like 10 years ago that was making the rounds on Twitter for some reason. Somehow Triple H looking 10 years younger (when many including Dave himself have pointed out how much he's aged recently) and Stephanie's presence didn't tip him off that this was old footage.