rolling (non-millenials) grabbing the brass ring 2015

Wrestlemania main event gonna be kane v heath slater at this point

there is a clear difference between eva marie's heat and sheamus's. eva marie wasn't even supposed to be a heel! sheamus is irritating and bland and unpleasant on purpose and also still a good wrestler and performer in general. people just don't like actually not liking a character. everyone wants to see him lose the belt, they just have the wrong guy taking it off him.

rollins recovery apparently ahead of schedule (yay)

https://twitter.com/WWESheamus/status/669965088959373312

a heel move as vile as sasha banks making izzy cry imo

next up him, barrett, and rusev should walk down the aisle very slowly and side by side while reigns is trying to make his entrance

i wish there was some website that told me whether it's worth it to watch raw before reading recaps/spoilers. i'm always worried i'll miss the 1 episode that doesn't suck.

time to watch royal rumble 97! it's getting good

should I watch raw

no

Shit didn't realise they'd uploaded all this old shit to the network. A full 18 months of nwa world championship wrestling from 85-87, a few new eps of wccw, plus little tasters of mid-south, awa and smoky mountain. I've never seen any of this stuff, looking forward to diving into it.

and now a few episodes of Stampede and Global Wrestling (was that the promotion's name? I get confused very fast when all those southern territories start merging and disappearing in the early 90s). The new episodes all seem to be focusing on the earliest days of major WWE stars -

Mid-South - Ted DiBiase, JYD, a very young Shawn Michaels
Smoky Mountain - Chris Jericho
AWA - Shawn Michaels
USWA/GFW/wahtever - Steve Austin
WCCW - Sting, Warrior
Stampede - Bret Hart, Dynamite Kid
The NWA/Crockett 85-87 stuff is obviously pretty heavily focused on Dusty and the Four Horsemen.

Just random episodes atm, except for the NWA WCW stuff which seems to be a pretty complete run of shows. I hope to god that this focus is just a promotional tactic to get eyes onto this stuff and they're gonna keep uploading and fleshing out each territory so that you can start watching and following the feuds and stories.

I know that some wrestling fans came to the Network hoping that we would see this kind of material get made available, but seeing all of the icons appearing for all of these territories in the "Vault" section really drove home to me for the first time what an incredible resource the Network might end up being.

We know already that they've got Mid-Atlantic and Florida stuff in the archives, not to mention all of their own pre-1985 stuff. If they could get complete (or near complete) runs of all of this stuff up over the next few years it'd be fuckin amazing.

I mean already the fact that you can start off with the Great American Bash 1985 as a little primer to where things were in the territory before jumping right in and following the tv from November 1985 right through to September 1987, stopping off to watch Starrcade and Great American Bash as you get to them - this is fucking magic! So much better than watching the events in isolation.

I watched one of the first episodes of Mid-South last night, very cool format - it featured Cowboy Bill Watts presenting a recap of one particular recent feud involving Butch Reed, Junkyard Dog and Magnum T.A., showing highlights of multiple matches and a couple of title changes - I like this format! Music is all overdubbed though, which looks/sounds weird as hell. The intro music to the show is so gooood though, I'd never heard it before.

Watched a bit of the first Stampede Wrestling episode earlier, would call it interesting rather than massively entertaining so far, but I'm looking forward to seeing the Hart bros as a tag team / a young Dynamite Kid

i highly recommend watching through 96/97. it's wild watching WWF emerging from rock bottom and seeing all the pieces being put in place, esp if you've never seen it before. shawn's about to lose his smile and i CAN'T WAIT

i decided to watch a random raw from that period, thinking it would be good nostalgic fun, but then it started with crush vs ahmed johnson and suddenly doing absolutely anything else felt like it would have been a better use of my time

they really are building to survivor series, this is so bad. desperation stables! everything went to shit so you definitely don't use this opportunity to push anyone, just place everyone in meaningless stables that do nothing for anyone

the league of nations is so bad, the reigns squad (Don't Blame It On The Reigns) is so bad. what does teaming dean and the usos with roman do for any of them? unless you're building to a traditional elimination match and you can discard everything right after

xp it's actually hilarious how long it took for the NOD to become majority black

they literally had to add some random fruit of islam dudes before crush and pg-13 weren't taking up the majority of the screen

they really are building to survivor series, this is so bad. desperation stables!

Survivor Series was two weeks ago, which makes the rush to create stables now seem a little odd.

roman: makes horrible 70 year old man joke
crowd: is somewhat receptive
roman: HEART POUNDING
roman: REPEAT JOKE FIFTY TIMES
ROMAN: IT'S ALL HAPPENING

this is the worst show on television

Survivor Series was two weeks ago, which makes the rush to create stables now seem a little odd.

just in time for Stables Ladders and Chairs!

Wait, that's not the name... STABLES LADDERS CHAIRS AND STAIRS!

looool the network is missing this random raw that aired on thursday for some reason (THURSDAY RAW THURSDAY) so i have to watch it on shitty ass dailymotion?? i guess airing on thursday is too much for their complex algorithm, even though other oddly scheduled episodes are there

just so happens to be the one where rocky maivia wins the IC title and shawn michaels loses his smile

anyone know if i missed anything by not watching TLC last night? i dunno if i can even be bothered catching up with it on the Network. Might watch the tag match I suppose, I like all those guys

oh and Ambrose / OWens ofc

but yeah is it worth sitting and watching the whole show?

Watch the gif of Kalisto and Jey Uso. Nothing else was worth a toss.

ah man really? :(

p. sad how over the years they've been making their own content superfluous. happened first with the C-shows, then with Smackdown, then Raw and now with most of the PPVs. so stupid, it ought to be the easiest thing in the world to put together compelling matches for these shows with the talent they've got

The tag match is that gif and Xavier Woods on commentary so is worth watching. Otherwise, mostly sad and perfunctory.

onwards and upwards tho! NXT Ldn is gonna be a good show I'm sure. Feel like quite a lot is riding on Samoa Joe bringing his A-game and going in unforgivingly stiff on Balor, Bayley vs Nia Jax might be quite a fun Sting/Vader match but it'll be interesting to see how compelling Bayley can make things when she isn't working with one of the other big four

http://i64.tinypic.com/15xo2v4.png

Tlc & raw both enjoyable. Raw has vince for the first time in over a year.

http://s22.postimg.org/tuzcqwovl/somoa.png

knew they wouldn't let him keep the name for long

gable gable jordan gable gable gable jordan jordan gable jordan

takeover london was predictably excellent. bayley has now turned out two excellent matches, one with eva marie and nia jax, which is making my wrestler of the year honor hard to decide (her or sasha).

err i meant to say she's turned out two excellent matches that i underestimated (being eva and nia). obviously she's turned out like 101984 amazing matches in 2015.

Both those matches were as good as they possibly could have been, mostly thanks to Bayley.

Joe vs Balor felt like it was lacking an extra gear. It was stiff and heated, but not heated in the sense of being a grudge match with a guy who turned on his best friend and was choking him out on TV every week just to be a dick.

omfg i have just discovered Breaking Ground tonight IT IS THE BEST why did no one mention this on here?!!!!

just finishing up with the 3rd episode and at the moment Tyler Breeze and Jason Jordan are getting into it in the gorilla position (Jordan wants to know why Breeze is wearing amateur wrestling boots if he never wrestled at an amateur level, Breeze wants to know why all the fans are chanting for Gable and not Jordan lol) and Adam Pearce is dancing along to theme tune. other observations so far:
- Robbie Brookside seems like a cool guy, I would like to be trained by him I think
- Apollo Crews really is as nice as he comes across on screen
- Baron Corbin is an ASSHAT and I'm considerably more interested in him than I was before I'd seen this show
- the winner of the most recent series of Tough Enough was a guy called Josh and he might just be the absolute worst promo guy I've ever seen in my entire life - case in point, the promo he cuts here from 40 seconds onwards omg you guys just get this guy out there on tv ASAP, build it and they will come

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHLMNqRBGW8

man between them ZZ, Sabby and Josh have gotta be the biggest bunch of clowns out there, it's hilarious seeing Asuka and Biff Busick sitting next to these chumps in group meetings as if they're all on the same level.

William Regal starting out apparently quite zen and then getting immediately furious at tryout guys completely failing to do what he tells them, never once demonstrating or varying his instructions, just getting louder and louder, increasingly sarcastic and aggressive, and he's right, bcuz some of these guys are IDIOTS, shit this is just great, great television.

I do NOT like the office suit guy whose name I didn't recognize who gave a little speech to the cameras about how passionately devoted he was to all of the talent that passed through the NXT system before coldly firing poor Devin Taylor without batting a fucking eyelash, I bet if you worked at NXT you'd fuckin hate that guy

i can't watch it without getting the feeling that it's total divas for the NXT crowd and nothing i'm watching is accurate and it's all probably gonna get in the ways of storylines/literal careers (in devin's case, for example)

ah well sure, it's just a reality TV show, everyone's working all the time. doesn't bother me at all, it's still making quite a few of the guys (especially Corbin) way more interesting to me

made it to the 'debate' between lawler and paul e dangerously and am absolutely blown away that paul was 31 years old in 1997

he was 25 during the dangerous alliance!

did he come out of the womb looking like a 45 year old or what

and sounding 45, more importantly

I finally decided to sign up for NJPW World so I can see WK 10 (and other NJPW shows) without having to track down iffy streams. Same goes for all the archived shows.

I find myself rooting for Tanahashi to beat Okada one more time, although it almost certainly won't happen.

Oh when is the new WK?

also considering getting njpw world again (after forgetting to cancel my free trial last time) but it's a bit of a confusing hassle without a fully translated mirror

made it to the 'debate' between lawler and paul e dangerously and am absolutely blown away that paul was 31 years old in 1997

he was 25 during the dangerous alliance!

did he come out of the womb looking like a 45 year old or what

― qualx, Thursday, December 31, 2015 6:33 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's crazy, he turned 50 a few months ago and it was hard to believe it had taken that long

There are some interesting promos on the recent-ish Heyman DVD from I guess AWA where he hasn't yet developed his cartoon pro-wrestling promo voice and sounds like a different person altogether; my recollection was that his voice had the exact same tone and style as Sting, which was really jarring

A related weird old-seeming-wrestler thing which I am fairly sure is true is that John Cena is now older than Arn Anderson was when he retired

well arn anderson was a professional dad and cena dresses like a 12 year old

watching old wrestling brings up the old time vortex brain processing problem that i'm not sure other people have, where it's really difficult to properly process the ages of people who were younger than where you are now, decades ago. rocky maivia was 24(!) in 1997, but i have trouble watching him and seeing a person 3 years younger than me. and when i can actually see it i just start to feel bad.

Oh when is the new WK?

Right now!

trying to watch this right now with Kevin Kelly and Matt Striker together on commentary, it's like some kind of special torture designed to punish anyone too pussy to just watch it in Japanese

god almighty these opening four-team jr. tag matches are unbearable. i don't get how the Young Bucks have the following that they do if they're always like this. i suppose it's kind of admirable that they've been able to carve out a niche as this self-aware post-modern thing but everything they do takes you out of the match completely.

I watched with English commentary, partly because Yoshie Tatsu was there to provide translations (in theory), but he didn't say much the whole night. Kevin Kelly was surprisingly good, and Striker was unbearable as usual. During Styles-Nakamura he kept asking Tatsu stuff like "how do you feel watching AJ Styles in the ring after what he did to you?" and it was clear that Tatsu really wasn't comfortable talking about it or at least didn't want to have it become a running thread in their commentary of the match. But Striker never could take a hint -- he always overdoes things.

No spoilers but I can't see any NJPW fan being disappointed with the show. It was definitely near or at the level of last year's WK.

should we have a 2016 thread?