February 9, 20241 yr comment_6017951 Fuck. Just gets harder and harder to be in love with this business. And my best mate (Dav'oh #2) is taking me to Iron Claw on Monday...
February 9, 20241 yr comment_6017956 2 hours ago, Dav'oh said: And my best mate (Dav'oh #2) is taking me to Iron Claw on Monday... I am now imagining an 80s tag team where the names of the wrestlers are just "Dav'oh #1" and "Dav'oh #2"
February 10, 20241 yr comment_6017972 5 hours ago, TheDuke said: an 80s tag team where the names of the wrestlers are just "Dav'oh #1" and "Dav'oh #2" Wasn't far off happening...there was an exhibition match in a mall, and afterwards we jumped in the ring and put on a match. A promoter in attendance offered me a gig, but not Other Dav'oh. Given they named me Diamond Dave, we would probably have been the Diamond Daves, #1 and #2.
February 10, 20241 yr comment_6017983 17 hours ago, ...TG said: Very sad story out of Portland, Billy Jack Haynes shot and killed his wife and had a standoff with police. (He's not named in the story but Jim Valley has confirmed it's him.) This is going to make me sound flippant about this, so I want to stress I'm not trying to be, but I'm almost surprised took this long for something like this to happen since he seemed to be sounding more and more unhinged over the years.
February 10, 20241 yr comment_6017985 For sure. Billy Jack has sounded completely unhinged and deranged for 20+ years. I don't think it is flippant to think something like this was a long time coming. Sadly.
February 10, 20241 yr comment_6017993 John Cena's new comedy looks fun, but Cena on-screen is always fun.
February 11, 20241 yr comment_6018040 Sadly, it looks like Cena's OTHER recent movie (Coyote Vs Acme) will not be seeing the light of day, but that's veering into off-topic.
February 19, 20241 yr comment_6018285 Rita Chatterton was a guest timekeeper for one of the matches on that show, which makes it even more egregious.
February 19, 20241 yr comment_6018290 5 hours ago, NintendoLogic said: Rita Chatterton was a guest timekeeper for one of the matches on that show, which makes it even more egregious. holy shit, really? that's insane.
February 20, 20241 yr comment_6018322 Just a thought I've had floating around for years now: Charlotte Flair has both the worst Flair/Fargo strut and WHOOOOOO of anyone who had adopted them even in a mocking fashion. You'd think that Ric would have pulled her aside and showed her how to do them over the past decade or so.
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018513 Speaking of progeny (Edit: should've written, "Here's Kevin Owens meeting his favourite serial killer, Ed Kemper.)
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018522 Had a question about something in an old Observer and couldn't find anywhere better to ask it so here goes. From the January 7th, 2002 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: Quote The 1986-87 period with New Japan changed pro wrestling in that country forever. The feud with Maeda, Takada, Fujiwara and Yamazaki against the New Japan wrestlers was huge box office, and created a hardcore awareness of submissions like armbars, kneebars, Fujiwara armbars and half crabs as finishers. But the less spectacular submissions, while building up great heat and selling tickets for a hot feud, also was apparently so technical that it hurt casual fan interest and TV ratings in prime time started falling, which eventually resulted in New Japan's TV show being taken out of prime time and moved to Saturday afternoons. Years later, it was moved to Saturday nights past midnight, a death time slot, although it still did very strong business with the bad time slot. But it was a style years ahead of its time, and while older fans didn't understand it, when the kids who thought it was cool got older, it spawned the education and understanding of a new form of realistic pro wrestling, and later actually real pro wrestling, which led to the MMA boom that changed Japanese wrestling forever. Can anyone speak to this claim Dave makes about shooty matwork being to blame for NJPW "losing casuals" and getting its TV timeslot moved? Never heard anything like that before. Seems more likely to me that it was due to any number of other issues NJPW had in the 80s. Not sure if the timeline even matches up here, when exactly did that show get pushed to Saturday afternoons?
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018531 When it first got TV in the early 70s, New Japan aired on Fridays in prime time. In October of 1986, it got to moved to Monday evenings. It bounced back and forth between Monday and Tuesday until being moved to Saturday afternoons in April of 1988. I doubt the UWF style being too technical for casuals was the sole or even primary cause of the ratings decline, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a contributing factor.
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018533 Isnt't the general story that UWF's success at the very least forced NJ and AJ to get rid of screwy finishes (i.e. count-outs and DQs) almost completely?
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018536 Imagine being told after seeing JBL is Poopy that one day John Cena would lend his voice and likeness to a Mortal Kombat game.
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018542 Somehow not even the most shocking wrestler-turned-actor trajectory out there. Big Dave Batista is out there working mostly with big hitters and doing artsy shit. An actual talented actor with DEPTH.
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018543 4 hours ago, brockobama said: Had a question about something in an old Observer and couldn't find anywhere better to ask it so here goes. From the January 7th, 2002 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: Can anyone speak to this claim Dave makes about shooty matwork being to blame for NJPW "losing casuals" and getting its TV timeslot moved? Never heard anything like that before. Seems more likely to me that it was due to any number of other issues NJPW had in the 80s. Not sure if the timeline even matches up here, when exactly did that show get pushed to Saturday afternoons? New Japan's TV ratings began to fall in the second half of 1983 and fell below All Japan in October of 1985. The broadcasting contract they had with TV Asahi at the time was from April '84 to March '86. In October of '86, TV Asahi replaced New Japan on Fridays with Music Station, a Japanese version of Top of the Pops that is still running to this day. New Japan switched to Mondays, however TV ratings continued to fall below 10%. TV Asahi tried to do something desperate by combining pro-wrestling with variety TV. In April of '87, they launched the new variety show format combining studio segments with broadcasts of the matches, using comedians and such. Ratings fell below 6% and that was the death knell for New Japan being broadcast during prime time. As with all things, it was a combination of factors. New Japan's boom peaked in '82 and there was a steady decline from thereon out, mostly because of the talent they lost. Once they lost the Friday 8pm slot, they lost a chunk of viewers who didn't follow them to the Monday and Tuesday timeslots, and then the new variety show format was a disaster. The matches stopped being broadcast live and by the end of the Showa era in '89 there was no wrestling being broadcast in primetime on Japanese TV. I think the worst you can say about the UWF guys is that they didn't boost the ratings and salvage the time slot. However, I don't think you can say that they were responsible for the huge ratings drop. That started when the whole Inoki scandal broke and everyone quit.
February 25, 20241 yr comment_6018544 Also, let's not forget that Inoki drew huge ratings doing faux-MMA matches in the 70s.
February 26, 20241 yr comment_6018545 The realistic style NJPW was going for 1985-1989, especially with the UWF feud, wasn't a huge TV draw but it did draw a lot of fans to the shows themselves, and UWF did big business 1988-1990 so it's hard to blame the UWF stuff for NJPW's TV issues in the 1980s. As others explained, there were multiple factors at play.
February 27, 20241 yr comment_6018575 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.
February 27, 20241 yr comment_6018578 I saw all the 86 TV. You were just as likely to get Mad Maxx and Super Maxx as you were to get Maeda or Fujiwara.
February 27, 20241 yr comment_6018579 1 hour ago, PeteF3 said: 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. That's true to some extent. UWF was very popular in Tokyo and eventually Osaka, but they struggled in smaller towns because more traditional fans were less exposed to the nuances of the style.
February 27, 20241 yr comment_6018583 I came across this the other day and I thought it was interesting and rather fun to watch. Stuff like this makes me wonder how much the US wrestling industry would have changed if we had something similar to the UWF revolution here before UFC took off in 1993.
February 27, 20241 yr comment_6018591 There's probably an argument that UWF is the single most influential wrestling promotion to ever exist.
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