Robert S

Wasn't Caruso the only of those more or less interchangeable backstage interviewers who had some kind of personality and seemed to give a shit compared to the other robots, or am I mixing her up with someone else?

Either that, or Patterson was the only one who was able to play the "yes, and"-game with Vince.

Considering what professional wrestlers do for a living, is it that surprising that a lot of them lack the intelligence to get the concept of moral highground?

Does that link rick-roll to a QAnon page?

Also, in lots of martial arts doing "showcase fights" is not an uncommon thing. I did Judo for a couple of years as a kid, and we did one or two exihibitions a year that besides individual technique demonstrations always contained a showcase fight or two. Furthermore, I once attended a guy doing an evaluation either for the 1st kyu (brown belt) or the 1st dan (black belt), I don't remember exactly, that contained a five minute demonstration fight, that was basically a worked match.

Is he still together with Charlotte?

At first I read this as Shane being the spoiled brat and Vince Jr. being the failure as a businessman who only ended up being rich thanks to Vince Sr. Which, if you think about it, might not be that far from the truth either. If you read Vince Jr.'s Wikipedia bio you might think that he was a successful promoter before buying (if you want to call that deal that) WWF, but he bankrupted at least one earlier business he founded. And we all know, how all Vince's non-wrestling businesses went later on (Ico Pro, WBF, WWF New York, XFL twice and I am sure others I cannot currently think of). So if Vince Sr. would have sold WWF to another buyer, Vince Jr. very likely would not have gotten filthy rich and Shane could not have ridden on his father's success.

It has to be nostalgia. Shane was gone... looking... what? only 7 years? I would have sworn he was gone at least 10 years. Anyway, he was a part of the Attitude era and (1) people were having fond memories of his matches against Test at Summerslam 00 and Vince at Mania 17 plus (2) the way Shane left, him coming back was a bit of a cold day in hell (nothing like Bret coming back obviously). So I can see why he got the initial pop. That said, this match should have been a squash (slaughter) and Shane should have never gotten back into the ring after this. Instead, he has wrestled at 15 PPVs, was a tag team champion, won the "World Cup", was the last surviving member of his team at two consecutive Survivor Series, went one on one for 20 minutes with main eventers etc.

So should Austin Theory change his ring name to Austin Scientific Facts?

Yes and no. All movie DVDs & Blu-rays I own are split into chapters that are often labeled. Even TV shows have chapters for each act (plus the opening credits). I am not even sure if I would agree with the searching part. They host sports like the Premiere League as well and searching for "Harry Kane goal" does not seem so far-fetched.

It depends on which kind of customer service Peacock has. If they have the same level as the WWE Network does, no NBC (or I guess Comcast) manager will ever hear about that.

You would expect that if Peacock is willing to spend 1 billion dollars over 5 years for the content that they would also be willing to spend a couple of hundred grand to improve their apps so that the new customers won't feel irritated from the beginning. As always the first impression it the most important one.

Reading Hornbaker's book (Death of the Territories), I would not even consider most of the stuff he did dirty compared to his rivals. A lot of promoters played at going national, were shipping their tapes around to non-local stations and so on. Vince Jr. was just the one, who gambled the hardest (and someone lot of the other promoters did not consider a rival on the national stage, believing him when Vince claimed having to interest in being a national player). You could consider the way he bought the promotion from his father dirty (paying an undervalued prize from the future profits), but Vince Sr. could just have directly handed over the company to his son as well (I guess the minority owners got screwed, though were there at this point any other minority owners besides Gorilla?).

I didn't say that they had any idea how to book a lightweight division (which never really changed). ;-)

Which is why I wrote 93-96. When TAKA was coming in, Attitude was starting. They actually pushed him as a serious junior heavyweight for a couple of months, before he became Bradshaws little buddy and "choppy choppy your pee pee". But yeah, trying to get over as a serious wrestler until let's say the Radicals came in and WWF toning down in 2000, next to impossible.

American Dragon and Lance Cade worked a tour and I guess also got to train in the FMW dojo (Danielson credits Masato Tanaka as being one of his trainers). I would not even be surprised if HBK only did the FMW gig to get Danielson & Cade those FMW bookings. You can say what you want about Michaels (especially 99 + 00 Shawn Michaels), but he was sure fighting hard for his trainees. There is also the story that when WWF (I guess JR) was reluctant to give Danielson, Kendrick, Cade and Shooter Schultz development contracts, HBK threatened to take his guys to WCW. Considering that was 2000 WCW, that was a weak threat, but it worked. If it was the best thing for those guys to get those contracts at this point, who knows, at least Danielson got the train with Regal.

Liger also got over, probably thanks to his high profile match against Pillman (plus the costume). Thinking about Japanese 90ies wrestlers without a very special look, I think Hiroshi Hase and Shinjiro Ohtani could have done great in 90ies US wrestling. Ohtani had the wild facials that IMO were one of the reasons that Tajiri got as over as he did and Hase is a guy that always oozes with charisma in ring. And yes, I realize that both have done a couple of WCW shows, though usually wrestling matches happening in a void. Of course it always depends on which period you are talking about, on the high point of the Attiude era, barely anyone would have done well, 93-96 though, the door was much further open.

I guess by "MLB" you mean "MBS" Mohammed bin Salman? Or are there any problems between the US president and Major League Baseball?

Omori is definitely true, though the question always has been if Misawa did not see anything in him or whatever happened regarding the Hashimoto match put him into the dog house. Rikio got two clean pinfalls over Kobashi during and ending the Kobashi superman run. Though once he got the title, apparently (I have never seen the match) he stunk up the ring in his first title defense against Saito (you could argue that it was not a good idea to book that match, but a safe first defense is not strange or bad booking, IMO; Saito was good enough to have a good match against, even as a non-super worker). At this point his title reign was completely dead (being put third on top on the Tokdyo Dome show did not help him either, obviously). Shiozaki got the classic booking, working high profile tag team matches as a youngster. The only thing you can complain here is that Misawa booked him too old fashioned. I agree regarding Kea and Morishima, Kea I guess was a bit the gaijin thing, choosing Rikio over Morishima was a mix of cosmetic decision and Rikio's sumo background. Akiyama probably was killed by jobbing to Kobashi in Dec. 2000 and being put on top when Kobashi was gone for 1.5 years, so he felt a bit like a second rate ace (and him always being a bit of a heel (or at least being much better in that role), you might not even call him ace).

Evolve is dead since last summer and WWE purchased their tape library and trademarks.

I think the Benoit & Malenko vs. Windham & Hennig match at SuperBrawl IX was not 2/3 falls match but technically two tag team matches in succession. IIRC, that was the final of a double-elimination tournament, where Hennig & Windham beat Benoit & Malenko during the regular part of the tournament, but Benoit & Malenko did not lose another match. So the stipulation was that Benoit & Malenko had to beat Windham & Hennig twice in succession, which they failed to do (though, I guess, you could also call that a 2/3 falls match where Benoit & Malenko started one fall down).

https://imgur.com/a/NW1WG page 4

Yes and no. Time distance wise yes, but while the business changed at least twice completely between the early 80ies and the mid 90ies, there was only one big and a smaller, gradual change of mainstream wrestling since the Attitude era (hence the talk that you could watch a 2004 and a pre-COVID Raw back-to-back and besides having the wrestlers being exchanged, would not notice a huge difference).

Jesse always was a bit of a double-edged sword to me. He often got too aggressive and too loud on the one hand, which meant that the heat that should have gone to the heels in the ring somewhat went to him instead and other the other hand he sometimes made the heels motiviation too understandable, which took some heat of them. It's somewhat like with referees, heel referees suck as the best you can get out of them are midcard comedy matches (like Jericho vs. Nick Patrick) while superman referees (like David Manning) emasculate the heels.

Teddy Hart's life is the funniest sad, often disgusting thing there is.