Thanks.

Small aside, but remember when they had all the coffins at WM? Of all Taker's defeated foes?

 

Did anyone else think .... "hmmmm, taking that DQ win over Giant Gonzalez is a bit rich" I mean, Taker left that Mania on a stretcher and Gonzalez was relatively unscathed. The coffin is a bit much.

 

yep, great catch!

 

btw, if you think about it from the perspective of booking at the time...gonzalez really should have won at mania, shouldn't he? if they were going to drag out the feud through the summer then he really needed the cred. makes me wonder if that was originally meant to be another one-and-done mania program.

 

it's interesting when you look at how clear-cut the undertaker's other early WM matches (i.e. before WWF realized The Streak was a thing) were. he fought guys on their way out of the company (jake, diesel), totally washed-up hulkamania stars (snuka, bundy, bossman), a heel champ who wasn't drawing flies (sid)...there was no way they could have reasonably booked him to lose any of those. it's just funny to me that with some of those big names during this period, the only two guys who would have made any sense beating him were kane and giant freakin' gonzalez. well, i forget if they were acknowledging the streak for the first HHH match, so if they weren't then he would definitely fit as well.

 

i guess they saw him as a special attraction due to his gimmick and felt he couldn't do jobs, but that's still a pretty nice streak of luck considering there were a couple matches he could and arguably should have lost!

Jim Ross mentioned 9-0 after Undertaker won the first HHH match at WM X-Seven, so they were definitely acknowledging it, even if they weren't giving it top billing like they would later on.

I think the streak was first mentioned back in 1997 by Taker himself at the Slammys. It wasn't called "The Streak" but he mentioned he'd been undefeated at WM by that point.

The first real STREAK match to me seemed to be the handicap against Albert/Show at XIX, because obviously he was the massive heel and favorite to win at X-8 against Ric.

Believe it or not, the "undefeated at WM" factoid was dropped at WM11, against Bundy. Obviously it was just an aside and not a major part of the match.

And he'd only had 3 wins by then so maybe mildly impressive at the time. The streak itself was never as impressive to me as how well he worked so late in his career against guys like Shawn, Batista and others. It did build up this fascinating and engaging narrative that it sort of represented the fight within him to carry on after so long.

Yeah, it had been mentioned before, but 17 was the first one where they started to really push the idea. And it was several years later before it became the selling point for him.

I really think they should have done a network special one night tournament to crown the champion, with Rollins getting a first round bye (and maybe bracketed vs. the winner of Reigns vs Ambrose).

 

Then do MITB as a normal PPV. That's how you get people to buy the network.

Certainly sounds like a prime opportunity to pimp the network. You're right about that.

 

But I wonder how difficult it would've been for them to schedule an event of that size and importance, book a venue, etc. in time for it.

They only seem to run one house show at a time on Fridays. They're in Providence on the 20th. There's your date.

The Twitter for DiGiorno Pizza was a riot last night.

IMAGINE IF UR FRIEND INVITED U OVER 4 PIZZA BUT WHEN U GOT THERE IT WAS ALL GONE. THAT'S PROBABLY HOW BRET HART FELT IN MONTREAL IN 97

DOES AMBROSE LIKE THE SAME PIZZA TOPPINGS AS REIGNS? WITH NEW DIGIORNO DESIGN A PIZZA KITS IT DOESN'T MATTER

THE WYATT FAMILY'S ENTRANCE IS LIKE DELIVERY PIZZA; IT TAKES WAAAAAAY TOO LONG

There are more, but those were my favorites.

yea digiorno was doing the same schtick last week too. luke harper hiding pizza in his beard and all sorts of similar wackiness.

 

fyi there are a number of corporate twitter accounts like that. typically it's somebody from "weird twitter" (search for that phrase, basically it's internet comedians who either came from something awful or aped its style) manning the account. but yeah, you'll see the official world of warcraft account making Doge references, or nature valley talking about anime and getting flooded with nature valley bars photoshopped into anime scenes. it's just one of the newer forms of marketing to nerds!

Of all the 80s stars out there, I love that Missy Hyatt is the one who keeps up with current wrestling on a weekly basis, including watching minor NJPW shows. Her twitter is fun.

Yeah but it seems like a lot of her opinions though are parroted from F4W/WON

She actually wrote a lot of the "Mystery Worker Has Opinions" columns that appear on the WON site, Dave accidentally published one with her name on it once.

Those were excellent. She doesn't want to publicly bury her peers.

Was watching some Portland wrestling this morning and during a Buddy Rose vs. Cocoa Samoa match I was completely stunned at the announcer saying "Light crowd on hand, to be truthful with you tonight." Just never heard a wrestling announcer be truthful about a subpar crowd before.

Was watching some Portland wrestling this morning and during a Buddy Rose vs. Cocoa Samoa match I was completely stunned at the announcer saying "Light crowd on hand, to be truthful with you tonight." Just never heard a wrestling announcer be truthful about a subpar crowd before.

 

That announcer in Portland does that a lot. When I first heard him do it, I had to rewind several times to make sure I heard what I thought I heard. He might be the only guy in wrestling history to give an accurate representation of how many people were in the building. Sometimes he'd say it's a light crowd, other times he'd estimate the stands were "about 80 percent full" or some other number.

 

He had journalistic integrity!

Bonnema always carried more of a family feel to me. You felt like you were part of the neighborhood or something.

Here's a random comment that doesn't warrant its own thread:

 

Is it safe to say that the "This is awesome!" chants are the bastard offspring of the old "Eee-See-Dubb" chants?

Definitely, I have an article coming out about that same thing sometimes soon.

Anyone else irrationally hate those chants as much as I do? I think it's because it's the crowd drawing attention to their own status as smarks.

 

"This is awesome" = "We're the sort of fans who like this sort of thing and we're enjoying playing our roles as members of the crowd"

 

I don't like crowds to be self-aware.

I agree Parv. The mid 00s TNA crowds were the worst

When did that stuff filter into WWE crowds? I'm thinking around the time of the ECW shows.