I’m sorry, but I just keep hearing “Boats ‘n Hoes” now once the cadence stuck in my head.

I need MJF to out Homelander Cody with his new heel pro America gimmick.

Suzuki's beating the shit out of Jericho, god damn.

Last night was a good one for the old guys. Jeff Jarrett giving Danielson a Gipper speech and helping free Swerve sets him up as a Team AEW veteran. I could watch Suzuki torture Jericho every week for the rest of the year. The show as a whole didn't click for me, but I'll live.

Also, Dean Malenko doing the intro for Blood and Guts was great.

Love the call for the next n°1 contender for Grand Slam. It's gonna be an awesome with either Swerve or Danielson (Swerve would make way more sense as a story though).

I think we're all mature enough and long enough viewers or at least historians enough to acknowledge both WWE and AEW War Games are better than JCP/WCW War Games ever were.

I'm not denouncing the new.War Games/Blood & Guts, as for the most part I have enjoyed them for what they are. But I still think there is a big difference between them. 

Previously War Games was presented as a hate filled, gritty, blood feud, last ditch effort to get the cheating heels and give them no way out (well at least the early ones thru 94, I won't defend anything post Hogan)

These new ones are spectacles full of high spots, plunder, and death defying moments.

Athletically, the new ones are a thousand times more exciting than the originals. Spot wise, they probably are as well. But to me they lack that feeling of the originals, the stakes if you will.

When the Horseman or the Dangerous Alliance were finally forced into that cage, it felt like they were FINALLY going to get what was coming go them. It's never been made to feel that way for The Undisputed Era or The Elite. But, that is probably just a problem of modern booking and not the match itself.

However, because of it, I will still take Wargames '92 over anything produced by WWE or AEW 

18 hours ago, strobogo said:

I think we're all mature enough and long enough viewers or at least historians enough to acknowledge both WWE and AEW War Games are better than JCP/WCW War Games ever were.

Nah, last year's Blood & Guts and at least the NXT's War Games were bloated as all hell and not touching the best ones from JCP.

WarGames is an inherently flawed concept. If the match can't end until everyone is in the cage, there's no reason to care about anything that happens beforehand. Anarchy in the Arena (or at least the first one) manages to distill the best aspects of WarGames while eliminating the biggest flaws.

JCP/WCW did a million of them, even before they were a yearly PPV thing no matter what, they just ran that shit on tour. Story and work wise, they were almost always just aimless brawling and blading you'd get in any cage match. There wasn't some big "finally the heels get what is coming to them" type story. Even before War Games made it to specific PPV event, it was just what cage matches had become in the 90s, or HIAC had become post 2005 or so.

Everyone loves the concept and the visual, but there's a reason people only talk about one or two War Games as being memorable (usually 1991 and 1992, I might argue 1996/1997 as well). There's rarely any kind of story in the match beyond general heels advantage.

What's so hard to understand about "Two gangs fight with ever changing odds without weapons and gasoline with no rules until there's one rule?" 

I know '91 and '92 are great but the 1987 Wargames where The Road Warriors try to kill JJ Dillon is the classic. The last stretch has the old school cage match logic where being stuck in the cage is an opportunity for babyfaces to get revenge, but the alternating entrances means you still get heat, as opposed to something like the first Rockers/Rose & Summers cage match that's all shine.

It's not hard to understand, but the majority of OG War Games are uneventful brawling and blading. Cage matches in general to me in all eras are hard to buy into as some ultimate brutality getting thrown into a fence. At least the old school bars WWF cage was like yeah you'd get fuck up if you got slammed into those no give bars. 

 

Well, the psychology of cage matches originally was to either prevent a heel from running away again, prevent another double countout, or prevent interference. Any brutality caused by the cage was a bonus, not necessarily the goal. The old cages were supposed to have sharp spots to cause cuts and therefore blood loss. But really all you need to do is suspend disbelief a bit

Dustin and the Von Erichs vs the Undisputed Kingdom was a really great TV main event. As someone who started watching non-WWF wrestling with episodes of World Class on ESPN, it was surreal hearing a Dallas-adjacent crowd losing their minds for the Von Erichs.