May as well go through this myself...
1. Vince is the Devil and directly responsible for everything that goes wrong with the world.
Yep. The government's response to Hurricane Katrina, the state of Iraq, the death of Anna Nicole Smith, Ohio State's ass-whomping in the BCS title game...wouldn't surprise me at all if Vince had a connection to each.
Anyway...my own view he's done more harm than good. Yeah, WWE is tops now, but the overall wrestling audience is a fraction of what it was 20-30 years ago.
I don't hate Vince, and I respect how successful he's been at what he does. But I can't say that I like the guy, either--whether as a person or as a performer. (He was great on-screen in 1998, though.)
Oh, I hated the "You sold out!" nonsense when it was going on twelve years ago in ECW. I'm happy that guys are able to make a good living doing what they love. At the same time...it doesn't put any money in *my* pocket, so I'm not going to blindly praise something just because it draws money. I'll acknowledge the effectiveness of it, but I don't have to like it.
I dunno, I think most of the IWC hates TNA. At least, they do with Russo in charge. I don't know of many people who would actually try to claim that Angle is in a right state of mind. This seems like a strawman argument to me.
Yeah, I scare myself with this sometimes: I'm 25 and I'm already turning into an old "Get off my lawn!" fart when it comes to wrestling, and music, and modern media and culture in general.
But, like I said above, wrestling *was* being watched by far more people "in the day" than it is now.
(Not to say that there wasn't crap, in every territory, including Japan.)
The fans cheer for Cena now because Edge--the true Wrestler of the Year for 2006, if you ask me--was such an effective heel that they didn't have much of a choice. Then they effectively booked Umaga into the top heel slot with a straightforward story: Big Unstoppable Monster vs. Babyface Champion. The simple plotlines are the best ones.
Never seen a full ROH card and won't until the 2/23 show in Dayton. I will now burn my IWC Smark ID card in shame.
The HHH/Steph real-life relationship started...what, like late 2000? That real-life power trip was *really* bad up through '03, with things like turning the freshly turned Steve Austin into a subservient b**tch (thankfully aborted by Torn Quad, Mark I) and completely taking over entire episodes of Raw. I'm thinking specifically of that time Shawn Michaels got killed in the parking lot and HHH spends an entire show intimidating everyone he comes into contact with in an attempt to find out who did the attack, only to reveal, to the shock of no one, that *he* was the one behind it.
Since then, he's not been a problem. And none of this effects his in-ring ability, which, as Joe said, is top-notch.
I don't see how this can be debated, frankly. One of the reasons he walked out in 2002 was because he was expecting to go over Lesnar on a pay-per-view and was STUNNED to find that wasn't in the plans. Now, it's not so much a case of "backstage power" as Hogan having no need to come back unless it's completely on his terms.
I found Snitsky to be mildly entertaining for awhile in the same way that Ed Wood's movies are entertaining. It's a joke that ran its course awhile ago, however.
Cena went from being a promising rookie to legitimately sucking to being legitimately good--probably somewhere in his feud with Edge was when he went from being a charismatic guy who needed to be carried to being a guy who could bring the goods on his own.
Not that I've paid attention to ECW in months but it's hard to argue that's what's happening to CM Punk.
Vince's fault because God forbid he acknowledge the idea that a rival promotion's wrestler stack up against the WWE Product (tm). Despite the fact that he *owns* said rival company and burying his own guys does nobody any good.
I find implants to be utterly repulsive, personally. And Stacy Keibler was probably the hottest chick on WWE television in the past 7 years and--coincidentally or not--also came with the smallest mammary appendages.
I think Trish was really the only one who could pull off the unnaturally-large-boob look. But that's just me.
You can add "TNA is going out of business any day now" and that hasn't happened, despite being predicted every week non-stop for four years.
More strawmen...there's a difference between disliking HHH's politicking and ego-stroking (which hasn't been an issue in a long time) and believing that he should be unemployed.
"Anybody more than 300 pounds sucks." I never am comfortable with absolutes.
Of all the problems TNA has I think the 6-sided ring is a total non-issue. It has no effect on the actual matches whatsoever.
I wasn't aware of Joe ever turning Vince down. Danielson did, but if Joe did, I haven't heard about it.
Can't comment.
Vince Russo is *far* more despised by the IWC than the current crop of WWE Creative--if only because he's more familiar and recognizable--and this sounds exactly like something he'd say.
Personally I think most current writers' problems is too much imagination. Like I said above, simple stories work best. I'd rather see two guys fight over a title than see ridiculous feuds concocted around Japanese shampoo endorsements or Kane raping Lita and Lita being a heel for fighting back.
Hey, I am no longer fat or zit-infested.
Sandman sucks now, but he was good for what he was in his prime...which was 10+ years ago.
Which is the lamer finisher, the Pounce or the BURROW BLAST? I mean, Monty is at least a former NFL linebacker...Badger I always envisioned as being a cruiserweight.
The only time I ever felt that way was in the wake of the Vicki Guerrero storyline, and it did have a long-lasting effect on how much I pay attention to the company. Still, "never again" almost never happens. And it definitely doesn't happen as a result of one moment.
Probably. But there's a line between talking it up as if you were there and throwing up your hands and saying, "Before my time, can't comment."
I see very, very few people giving Michaels any sort of pass on being a jackass. Now, Chris "I abandoned my kids to run off with Nancy Sullivan" Benoit, on the other hand...
Wrestling is a scummy business, and just about everybody not named Bobby Eaton has some sort of nasty attribute or background that we're better off not knowing about. I try not to get caught up in that sort of thing--they're entertainers, let them entertain me and let them and the people they know deal with their personal lives.
Michaels' problems get talked about because they had a direct effect on the quality of entertainment presented--refusing to do jobs, his squabbles and backstage brawls with Bret Hart, and so on. Warrior's problems during his wrestling days...same thing: they affected the on-screen product.
American Idol is better than Raw because it has more viewers and is higher-rated each week.
See #12.
Flair, yes, this applies. Very few on the IWC are big fans of HBK and the Undertaker seeming to go over everybody they face. Michaels being a bigger problem than the Undertaker, it seems to me.
JUSTICE SUCKS!
(No, not really...I liked Dark Justice, better, though. The one with the Rod of Justice, not Bendis' first crappy update.)
File-sharing sites are much more convenient...so I hear. *cough*
Oversaturation is the main problem with PPVs. It's not that they're offensively bad as much as they're not mindblowingly good enough to justify watching one every week (which is what it comes down to if you add up every UFC, TNA, and WWE PPV).
The Old ECW was a niche promotion whose heyday coincided with probably the worst period--from both a business and quality standpoint--in the history of pro wrestling. And that promotion actually *did* make a profit when Tod Gordon was running the business side of things. Once Gordon got forced out and Paul E. took over the business side, that was it.
Plus, while ECW certainly didn't invent a lot of the things it's known for, many of its qualities were pretty much swiped by the Big Two as part of the Monday Night Wars. That goes for its wrestlers (too many to name) and its overall style (backstage segments, "shoot" interviews, blood and tables, letting wrestlers "do their own thing," and so on).
The Current ECW, backed by the WWE Hype & Marketing Machine and given a timeslot far better than anything the Old ECW ever had, is currently slagging along with ratings in the mid-1's and, if you believe the latest Observer, is not expected to last beyond the current Sci-Fi contract and will instead be used as a vehicle to get Bobby Lashley over.
Only the terminally naive (which, if you go back and look at our previous arguments when the show first started, apparently included me) would have expected a revival of the "true ECW," but we might have expected more than the TNA-quality product we've been getting.
