Robert S

It's pretty strange for a 93 WWF houseshow match to be booked like a Attitude era PPV main event. I mean the walk-out-fake-finish was a staple in WWF at this time but the rest?

I was watching the Owen Hart documentary on the WWE DVD. Some random thoughts: - The whole thing is not very deep (70 minutes main feature + 45 minutes of stories), but a good enough watch. - There is no reason for Beth Phoenix to get 5 minutes or so airtime on an Owen Hart DVD. I guess they crew flew out to interview Edge and took some footage with Beth as well, but still. - The announcement of Owen's death by JR during the Over the Edge broadcast is so surreal. In the background you see a mixture of shocked fans and fans who thought the whole thing was part of the show (including a 10-year-old flipping the bird in direction of the camera). - I don't get why they had 10 guys telling their version of the "Owen prank calls a guy in the hotel" ribs. After the third time it gets really repetitive. - The way they covered Owen's dead on the documentary is really bad. They go really fast over it (like 2.5 minutes on his death plus 1.5 minutes for the "Raw is Owen" show) and the gist is "Owen fell from the ceiling and died, it was just bad luck", even Bret summarized the whole thing that way ("It was an accident, just a horrible accident and no one could have known how bad it would go that day."). No talk why he was there, no mention of the quick release mechanism, of course no mention of the law suits etc. - Obviously the name "Martha Hart" is not mentioned at all (and neither are his kids for that matters).

funny typo (or auto-correct)

Is it just me or were all matches except the women's match just guys running from spot to spot? The diva's championship match was the only match where I felt any build up at all. I know that the WWE style developed a lot in that direction in the last few years (let's say with Cena vs. Punk MITB as a starting point), but there have always been exceptions. Now everyone is working that way, which makes the shows really repetitive.

Danielson got 12% from active wrestlers.

Meltzer's (and Alvarez') comments about the main events were strange. Meltzer claimed that Lesnar's blood was hardway (though intentional) and both were talking about how Vince flipped backstate during the whole match, even implying that Lesnar (literally) throwing out the doctor was a shoot. Oh yes, and the line from Cole (or JBL, I forgot) that Wyatt and Reigns are only wrestlers number 34 and 35 to enter a HiaC match was really (unintentionally, of course) funny.

The finish did indeed look really strange. It's as if Smothers missed the third corner and either Hildebrand or Smothers telling DWB and the only solution he came up was to redo the whole long sequence.

Good to see that he is still around on the WWW. I remember him posting 15 years ago on a German (pro wrestling) message board. Back then I was amazed by the amout of data he had gathered (for example I got from him a list of all CWA matches that Vader had, I remember being surprised at some of the cities Wanz was running shows, I though it was (for Austria) Vienna, Graz and Linz and that's it, but he also ran some small towns like Zell am See).

That is because they did not upload the archives to the new servers until a couple of hours ago.

On the negative side functionality wise it is a complete mess as member login does not work (it seems as if the user database has not been ported yet). Alvarez sayed that they had to switch to the new site months before they planned to do without having it tested (or apparently having all functionality in place).

Definitely possible, though my mind immediately went to a Lioness Asuka tribute. Ah, that's a "K". To me at first it looked like a stylized "R".

I think another guy besides Funaki who I remember Dave saying that he got huge support from Japanese which put him in was Masa Saito.

Is this online somewhere? I couldn't find it when I was looking for it some time ago. I have it on VHS somewhere but I have not hooked up my VHS player in like 10 years and I fear that it won't work anymore.

With the huge list of testimony they have the whole thing reads like a pretty straight forward thing to me (without knowing anything about law further then what you see on TV or in movies). Funny things in the reports: - Youtube links nowadays are valid exhibits. - The people writing report did not realize that "Buddy Rogers" is not the real name of the original Nature Boy and therefore his wife wasn't named "Debbie Rogers" (either that or Rogers changes his name to his work name). - Muraco is transcribed as "Morocco" (as in "This is even before his match with Morocco.").

In principle yes, but if you want to add it the the general gate to indicate the profitability no. I mean you don't add net merchandise sales to the gate either.

Six-figures sounds a bit high. Even if DVDs were 20 bucks or whatever you have to consider production, shipping etc. so I would add 25k to the gate, not more.

Agreed, the numbers would be really interesting. Though I would assume that the biggest spikes in sales could be seen on events with big Samoa Joe matches (Punk vs. Joe II, Punk vs. Joe III, Joe vs. Kobashi).

I suppose Swagger, Axel and Sandow have the biggest chances of not surviving 5 years on the roster (maybe not even the next roster-cut round). I would have put Kingston and Woods on that list too but the New Day act saved them.

Much of his big matches in the last 5 years or so is built on real physical punishment, something you can only do every now and then. To me this is the opposite of what a good worker should (be able to) do.

Shawn Spears, wrestled in my local promtion here and went to OVW in 2006. Has been in and out of WWE for years and even had an ECW run. Man Neo Spirit Pro was so great. You had Shawn Spears, Eric Young, Bobby Roode, Angelina Love, Cody Deaner, Tyson Dux. What a company. Even Lawler was there once. Spears had a feud with Cabana in OVW in which he looked pretty good. On one of the Six Flags shows they promoted Cena vs. Spears which some people called the best face vs. the best heel in wrestling back then. He had the bad luck to be brought up in 07/08 which probably was the worst times to be brought up from developmental to the main roster. Remember Scotty Goldman or Braden Walker?

It's funny hearing people shitting (Will calling him bush-league) on Tye Dillinger considering that in 2007 people on DVDVR called him the best heel in the business.

It seems WWE felt embarrassed that there was a Kevin Steen figure in ROH's upcoming line before they could market a Keven Owens one. It's not something a billion dollar company should be quite that upset about, but I get the impression it was an ego bruising that someone couldn't handle. Yeah, there's no way that's true. What store is carrying ROH Dolls? It's not like there's an ROH Toys section at Target next to the WWE Toys. And a WWE Doll would be Kevin Owens, not Kevin Steen. In conclusion....bullshit. Meltzer talked about this on the last podcast and he indicated that the current mentality in WWE is that they don't want to promote a guy on the main roster who was already markteted on a national level by another promotion which is the reason why Samoa Joe is only working NXT.

For those who watched the whole G-1: What would you say are the top 5 or must see or whatever matches?

Mantell had a great line: "My contacts just fell out, I did not see anything." (about Ron Wright raising from the wheelchair and interfering into the match) - did Bobby Heenan ever use that one?

Funny that when Lawler was acknowledging that Savage beat everyone he first mentions Hogan and in the next sentence talks about Savage wrestling in WM 3 "in front of 93.000 people".