Robert S

I would put the end of the "good" run earlier. A bit after King of the Ring, they started doing unbearably boring, stupid four way segments with Vince, Austin, Undertaker and Kane that took half of the show. Plus, you know, choppy, choppy, your pee pee.

damn, that's rich

I would agree if Raw did not do such great ratings in 98 and 99. A couple of years ago, I tried to watch through that period of shows and while they were hot in the first half of 98, starting from the summer, the shows became garbage that it makes me questions humanity that they did such good numbers.

Okay, but is this a new thing? I feel that this is going on for 20 years now. How long did it take until they finally gave Jeff Hardy a real chance? How did they book Benoit and Rey when they had the belt? How did they react when Zack Ryder got himself over huge by his silly youtube show? Cesaro was multipe times at most one win or good angle away from being a hot main eventer. Remember how Danielson was booked because they thought he was a B+ player, not deserving the reaction he got?

I was wondering how they came up with the number of 15, considering that he only debuted the Ziggler gimmick in late 2008 and he never wrestled in the Rumble as Spirit Squad Nicky until I realized that they probably are counting the "Greatest Royal Rumble Ever" as well.

Considering who was brought back for the women's Rumble over the years, I am somewhat surprised that they have neven brought back Rockin' Robin, Wendi Richter, Velvet McIntyre, or someone from that era. I mean at least one of the semi-relevant 80ies WWF women has to be in good enough shape for a battle royal (and after a quick look, two of them are actually younger than Ivory and Richter is only two months older than Ivory). Leilani Kai is also only slightly older and the Jumping Bomb Angels are the youngest of that list (and Yamazaki even lives in the US).

"WCW, everbody"?

Plus, they already know how to cycle.

To be fair, if you come up with a somewhat common German name, chances are that there was a Nazi (or Wehrmacht soldier, which is not really the same thing) of that name. The German Wikipedia lists three Günther Stark and the u-boot commander is not one of them, i.e. he was not a very prominent Nazi. And with that name, he could form a team with Roderick Strong (because "Stark" is the German word for "Strong").

Just an aside: the Elimination Chamber PPV was called No Way Out on German TV for obvious reasons. When WWE reused the No Way Out PPV name in 2012, in Germany that one was called No Escape. Afterwards, they used the No Escape name for Elimination Chamber.

That's probably true for the US, Canada and Japan (except the occasional historical candidate that gets reevaluated due to new information popping up), but other places? Mexico voters for a decade are complaining about the log jam due to having too many valid candidates that the votes disperse too much and I am sure that there enough European (and probably people from other less spotlighted regions of the world) people that belong in if the same level of information would be widely available as it is for NA and Japan and would get voted for if there would not be a generic "rest of the world category". With all the footage that has popped up for example, it is clear that there was a hot wrestling scene in France in the 1950ies and 60ies.

On the other hand, cryptocurrency feels like a Ponzi-scheme and lots of them are straight scams (and Hit(man)coin was right there).

Let me check... okay, he would be available.

Bret Hart is jumping on the NFT business I suppose at least it's no cryptocurrency...

The Architect The Monday Night Messiah The Kingslayer The Visionary Am I missing a stupid nickname?

Roddy Piper was announced as being from Glasgow even though he had not the slightest Scottish accent.

Kawabata was a pretty solid guy. He did not get any push at all in NOAH, but he even managed to get something watchable out of post-injury Kentaro Shiga (who was dreadful at that point when not doing straight comedy).

It took me a couple of seconds to realize that you mean Haruka Eigen and not Michael Elgin. When talking about Family Gun members, you probably should also add Mighty Inoue, who in the couple of IWE matches I have seen of his (the ones that made the DVDVR 80ies "Other Japan" set) always looked good.

Yes, it was McAfee. That was a really annoying performance. Don't shout around in a pre-show match as if it was the main event of Wrestlemania or whatever.

Who was the guy who was shouting around like crazy in the preshow match?

COVID numbers are exploding (in the first couple of waves, the highest number of new cases per day in the US was about 300k, two days ago, the number was close to 600k), stuff like this was just bound to happen.

or this show is

As I am using ad-blockers forever, it took me very long to realize that youtube is supposed to have ads at the beginning of professional videos.

I would guess one reason is that in "1st world countries" illnesses that were more or less eradicated by vaccines are so long gone and not many people alive even remember them. I mean the last big polio wave in "the west" was 65 or so years ago. A year or so ago I read a very fitting statement: "vaccines have become victims or their own success" If you have never seen a case of smallpox or diphteria, how would you know how big achievement the victories over those diseases were?

It is available on youtube (probably in full):