9 hours ago, sek69 said:

It still feels weird having a national wrestling promotion that aren't controlling weirdos about not letting their wrestlers talk to one of (if not the) top pro wrestling site. 

Speaking of which, sort of, Mox is now gonna face Josh Barnett at Bloodsport on Mania week-end. So, it feels weird but it feels good too.

Did Dave really said latinos don't like Bad Bunny?

As a south american, I can assure him that's really not the case. People hating on reggeaton and trap under 35 years is very small (and people older than 40 don't really care or know about dude, I'm 33 and don't really care about dude or reggeaton). The percentage of people that LOVE BB is waaaay bigger than people hating on him.

 

 

On 2/21/2021 at 1:26 PM, Jmare007 said:

Did Dave really said latinos don't like Bad Bunny?

Not that exactly, what he *did* say was that Bad Bunny isn't beloved by every Latino which is obviously an unnecessary thing to say as no one person is beloved everyone. I'll just copy/paste my post from DVDVR on the topic:

I won't call Seltzer a racist like other folks have over the Bad Bunny clip solely, but I find it funny he says he's not loved by everyone in the Latin community. I don't think there's a single person in any community that's beloved by everyone, so that's a meaningless thing to say. But yes, Bad Bunny is a household name in North America, South America and in several countries of Europe (namely Spain and Italy).

Back to Bad Bunny, WWE is smart for bringing him in. He's a massive star and is actually a wrestling fan (as is DJ Luian who used to work with him and who's done appearances on local indy shows in Puerto Rico and was at Ric Flair's wedding, but obviously not as popular as Bad Bunny). Regardless of the show he's on, he's going to bring in a lot of viewers from the Hispanic community which maybe won't be reflected in TV ratings as the younger folks spend more time streaming stuff and on social media as proven by him breaking merch sale numbers and social media interaction. The clip he posted of him slapping the Miz got something like 26 million views or something in 1 minute. Just ridiculous.

The other positive thing is he's clearly being used to elevate Damian Priest's popularity.

Given there's not much touring Bad Bunny can do now due to the pandemic, I can see him sticking around after Mania. As I said, the dude grew up a WWE fan, so he obviously loves what he's doing and is making a ton of money, so he definitely wouldn't mind sticking around.

There's nothing "funny" about it, really. People are like "Bad Bunny is gonna get WWE the Latino community audience !". Meltz basically only said that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans communities were very different and that's it.

13 minutes ago, El-P said:

There's nothing "funny" about it, really. People are like "Bad Bunny is gonna get WWE the Latino community audience !".

Yes and that is 100% spot on.

13 minutes ago, El-P said:

Meltz basically only said that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans communities were very different and that's it. The anti-Meltz virtue signalers are just the worst.

No, that is not what he said in the clip that's been posted everywhere and his blind defenders are just as bad as his blind detractors.

And yeah, no point in following up with this "he said," "he didn't say," argument as it will fall down the Jackson Martinez Arsenal Twitter meme, so I'm done with it.

Edit: And my post maybe OOC a bit as it was meant as a reply to folks on DVDVR, not on here, but most of it still applies here.

10 minutes ago, Edwin said:

No, that is not what he said in the clip that's been posted everywhere and his blind defenders are just as bad as his blind detractors.

Ok, I'm referring to what he said on the following WOR, which maybe you haven't listened to. That's the issue with listening to short clips posted solely for Twitter outrage (also see : Twitter outrage GIFs).

On the clip that has been posted everywhere which I have just listened to, he actually says that he (Bad Bunny) "helps WWE with the latin audience to a degree", that Bad Bunny is very famous and very well know but not necessarily *loved* by everybody, and that he (Meltz) did not know what the latin audience wants pro-wrestling to be. So there. Much ado about nothing, as always. 

Note : I had edited my first post because I did not wanted to come off too mean, but really... yep.

41 minutes ago, El-P said:

On the clip that has been posted everywhere which I have just listened to, he actually says that he (Bad Bunny) "helps WWE with the latin audience to a degree", that Bad Bunny is very famous and very well know but not necessarily *loved* by everybody, and that he (Meltz) did not know what the latin audience wants pro-wrestling to be. So there. Much ado about nothing, as always.

Yes, I'm not arguing that as it's exactly what I said twice and then I elaborated on what Bad Bunny brings to the table.

As I mentioned, most of my post was a copy/paste from DVDVR where there were folks calling casual racism which I of course mentioned I couldn't agree on before moving on as that was an obvious stretch.

3 minutes ago, Edwin said:

Yes, I'm not arguing that as it's exactly what I said twice and then I elaborated on what Bad Bunny brings to the table.

Just FTR, the "virtue signaler" comment wasn't directed at you. I was just amazed to learn that some people actually screamed "racism" over this.

Watching a section of WWE apologists lose their minds about the Observer awards and bitching about AEW bias and anti-WWE bias is hilarious. A year with some of the worst booking in WWE history while they lost a record amount of viewers has led to WWE getting shafted in the awards, how shocking

NJPW wins awards > WWE brand-bots going "It would get 5 stars at the Tokyo Dome lulz"

AEW wins awards > WWE brand-bots going "Meltzer is an employee of Tony Khan !"

Even Dave thought Moxley and Jericho placing second and third in Best Box Office Draw was absurd. That's definitely a category where MMA should be split off from pro wrestling because the current nature of the business makes it impossible for any pro wrestler to be in the same galaxy as top UFC stars when it comes to drawing power.

2 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

Even Dave thought Moxley and Jericho placing second and third in Best Box Office Draw was absurd. That's definitely a category where MMA should be split off from pro wrestling because the current nature of the business makes it impossible for any pro wrestler to be in the same galaxy as top UFC stars when it comes to drawing power.

Completely agreed that MMA and wrestling should be split off for box office draw. Apart from the reason you correctly stated, the nature of the business of wrestling and MMA has become so different too. MMA is now a primarily PPV industry, while wrestling is a ratings business now 

With regard to the awards, this strain has always existed among WWE fans. This disbelief and resentment that people are capable of enjoying some wrestling more than they enjoy WWE. For 35+ years, WWE has trained its fans to think like this and has operated its company this way. It reminds me of how in the late 90s, the wrestlers on the WWF side saw the competition with WCW as "real" while on the WCW side, it was just business and nothing more. It becomes real for fans too, which is dumb in a lot of ways, because everyone is expected to pick a side and stay loyal to that side instead of just taking good wrestling as they find it, wherever they find it.

Meltzer

On 2/28/2021 at 1:03 AM, Loss said:

t reminds me of how in the late 90s, the wrestlers on the WWF side saw the competition with WCW as "real" while on the WCW side, it was just business and nothing more. 

This is interesting. Can you elaborate? I know a lot of people who post here were active on the internet during the Monday Night Wars. 

In other news, Meltzer repeated about 5 times how Shane McMahon failed "utterly, miserablycompletely" when he ran his business in China, while actually defending some stupid storyline decision to get an MBA. He genuinely had me howling with laughter. 

2 minutes ago, MoS said:

This is interesting. Can you elaborate? I know a lot of people who post here were active on the internet during the Monday Night Wars. 

A lot of people in the WWF were seriously believing the "WCW wants to run our little family company out of business" while for the most part guys in WCW were just looking to cash those Billionaire Ted checks and didn't really give two shits about the WWF. 

Like I legit believe Vince was under the impression Turner spent every waking hour trying to destroy him personally, when Ted just had a soft spot for rasslin' because it helped create his TV empire. 

It's a perception Jericho perpetuated when he jumped ship and was ostracised by the WWF locker room. One of the criticisms that came back to him was that he worked too much like a WCW wrestler and he had to train under X-Pac to learn the WWF style. Supposedly this observation originated with The Big Show who was brought in with tremendous fanfare but it was quickly discovered he wasn't at the level of other main event talent like Austin, Rock, Foley etc.

Now I can see how somebody can draw the conclusion that WWF took the 'war' seriously but I don't necessarily buy it. The WWF locker room was dog eat dog where guys would get buried for any minor indiscretion. Jericho was initially brought in because Russo saw him as a main event level antagonist which didn't sit well with others in the locker room who scratched and clawed. If it wasn't for being 'tarred' a WCW wrestler, it would be because he uses lifts in his shoes or because he's stiff. The WWF locker room was hyper critical and they would pick apart any weakness of a wrestler, just look at how they tore down Ken Shamrock the year before because of his promos.

There's been a lot of stories about how both sets of locker rooms were political mine fields. However, there's also been a lot of stories where both sets of locker rooms would find themselves at the same city and they would live it up. Guys would visit the other teams locker room and vice versa without any concerns.

Again it only became a problem when these guys were jockeying for other spots.

11 hours ago, MoS said:

This is interesting. Can you elaborate? I know a lot of people who post here were active on the internet during the Monday Night Wars. 

Sek basically said it. On the WWF side, Vince had everyone believing that Ted Turner was genuinely out to bankrupt Vince and put him out of business because of a personal vendetta. Everyone thought WCW's purpose was to make it impossible for them to earn a living.

Vince's mind is a scary place. JJ Dillon told a story in his about about how when he quit the WWF, Vince managed to convince himself that it was part of an elaborate scheme by Dillon to extort Vince for more money to prevent him from airing the company's dirty laundry on the weekend of Shane's wedding.

I want @Matt D to reply to this.

 

9 minutes ago, Jmare007 said:

I want @Matt D to reply to this.

 

Cena sure sold a lot. But I can see how Dave might have missed that?

Apart from a few matches against monsters (yeah, I know about the infamous Umaga match everybody loves), most of Cena's big match stuff (Orton, Batista, Triple H, Orton, Orton, Rock, Orton) was indeed the super-pattern WWE self-conscious epics with finishers kick outs galore. Hell, I coined the self-conscious epic phrase from a famous and typical Cena match (against Punk). And honestly he never was better and more fun than when he decided he was gonna go batshit with the spotfest style to try and catch up with Owens or Styles (who's not a spotfest worker BTW but that's another matter, he just could do stuff Cena had never seen before) later on, despite always having a crappy looking execution. Cena's selling only got him boos from half of the audience after all, while Cena doing Canadian Destroyers got him WTF cheers.

PWG Cena was later though. I do agree he was truly awesome in a ton of big time matches that had a high spot-finisher-repetear formula that had selling up until the final sequence started. I know Matt has been a huge proponent of the "Arn was a big part of Cena turning into a good (great?) main event wrestler" argument, so Dave putting it like that made me curious about what his take on it.

 

 

Gonna be honest, I find PWG Cena completely unwatchable. The match against AJ at Summerslam 2016 might be my literal least favorite match of all time. It's a large part of the reason I can't consider Cena a great worker despite being involved in quite a few matches I consider great.

52 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

The match against AJ at Summerslam 2016 might be my literal least favorite match of all time.

Funny that, greatest Cena match to me, by probably a wide margin. The fact he could work such a match against AJ at this point of his career made me re-think about his case (although I doubt I'd call him a great worker in the grand scheme of things, but a guy who could have great matches with the right opponent, absolutely)

I rank the Summerslam 2016 match in my top 5 of Cena matches and had a blast watching him go indy trying to adapt to the new guys coming up on the man roster. I'd consider him a great worker, he's the only wrestler in modern WWE to get everyone invested in his matches especially the big ones. My only regret we didn't see grapplefuck Cena.