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On 12/14/2019 at 4:42 AM, Requiem said:

I think more needs to be said because I have no clue what you’re saying...

Lol! He's talking about a rather new promotion, All Elite Wrestling. It's mostly based around a faction called "The Elite". There's a strong emphasis on high-risk, fast-paced in ring work, with lots of dives and crazy moves. It's also a lot less scripted than a WWE show, so the wrestlers actually talk like real people for the most part haha. You can find a good amount of clips on Youtube, if you're interested.

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I used to love the WWF when I was a kid, and I still listen to Jim Cornette's podcasts every now and then. I stopped watching wrestling around 2004 though, I lost a lot of interest in the WWF after the attitude era (DX, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Undertaker's Ministry/The Brood, etc). Wrestling has for the most part, at least the WWE, gone "TVPG" now so it doesn't have the same amount of compelling content that it did when I was 13-18. I don't know any of the current superstars, can't get into them, and don't even have TV anyway-- so when I get a bug up my ass to watch wrestling, I watch old matches from the attitude era that I may not have seen.

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I was a tight arse, when WWF stopped being shown here on free to air TV I gave up following it. Mostly because our paid services in the early 90's were overpriced and shit, but also because I just found other things to do. They did start putting RAW on here after midnight once a week about a decade ago, and another hour long greatest hits show followed, but neither of them lasted very long. I don't hate it now I just don't pay for a sports service that streams it to me, I do occasionally watch some of it on YT but it's not often. I also prefer the older matches, but that's mainly because I know the wrestlers, about the most modern wrestlers I know are John Cena and HHH and I have no idea if they are still wrestling.

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Yeah I'm the same way: When HHH or Shawn Michaels, Undertaker wrestle I sometimes have an interest in it but most of the time I just pull up the matches on YT. Besides, most of the guys I know have retired anyway (Undertaker is retired now iirc). I stopped watching it right as John Cena started to get over so I missed that whole thing pretty much.

My favorite wrestler of all time is Mick Foley. Dude had more entertaining matches for a guy who was not in prime physical shape then you figured that he'd have.

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I think the last thing I watched was a Royal Rumble from the early 90's :)

I remember names like Hogan, Mr Wonderful, Andre etc. I also remember names from what might have been the next generation like Mike Foley, Undertake, Kane etc. But I also remember names like John Cena, Goldberg, Sting and Ray Misterio but have no idea where they fit into a time line.

I used to love the Bushwackers and Jimmy Superfly.

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A lot of wrestlers look like rednecks because being a wrestler is one of the only real career options for a redneck outside of construction. I think the Bushwackers were supposed to be from New Zealand or something but I never understood why they walked funny, I just remember them being really popular with younger kids for the silly stuff they did.

There was another stupid tag team in WCW when I was a kid: the ding-dongs. The ding-dongs gimmick was that they were covered with bells and would come out to the ring, ringing a cowbell and one of them would ring a cowbell all during the match. It was one of the most stupid gimmicks of all time and was a creation of a guy who actually knew very little about wrestling and what made it popular: Jim Herd, who I think was the Turner Broadcast System executive who was in charge of WCW at the time. He used to come up with all sorts of stupid gimmicks that he thought would work (Like the hunchbacks, who you couldn't pin because their humps prevented their shoulders from touching the mat). Most of these dumb Jim Herd gimmicks stayed around for a very short time before they were disposed of, as it was the boss wanting to have creative input on the show and people would do it just to humor them, rating would go down, and then he'd try something else.

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Why did Jake The Snake like snakes? Why did a guy named Hacksaw carry a lump of wood that wouldn't usually be cut with a hacksaw? Analysing why any wrestler did anything is simple, it was done for theatrics and to get the crowd excited. It's the same reason The Rock wanted people to smell something, or Steve Austin came out drinking beer, the crowd absolutely loved it and WWF was a business that required it's fans to be entertained. By the time they became WWE that money making machine was set and there wasn't a decision made in the company that wasn't money related.

We didn't get a lot of WCW here in OZ, well at least not on free to air tv, and by the time the franchises, or whatever they were calling themselves moved to RAW, and Nitro and the WWF went to WWE I'd pretty much stopped watching it and was only catching a few episodes here and there. I had no hope of keeping up with the stories or the rivalries and often I'd go so long between seeing an ep that good side and bad side changed. I do remember once channel surfing and seeing camera men standing on the corners of the ring (for that close up shot) and the wrestlers were fighting for the Television Championship, not sure if that was WCW or some other version but it was a long way from what I grew up watching.

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To be fair, I didn't watch WCW that often, as the only Wrestling that I got as a kid was usually SmackDown on UPN (at the time) because we didn't have cable or satellite, so when I would get to watch Raw, it was usually because someone at school taped it and then let me borrow the tape (they would do the same thing with Pay Per View events). I actually missed a lot of the attitude era and pretty much the whole Stone Cold Steve Austin vs McMahon saga. I saw stuff like King of the Ring 98 where Mankind got thrown off of the top of the Hell in a Cell structure, but I didn't really start watching wrestling on TV until like 99-00 when it came on broadcast TV in my area. I saw a lot of the great Rock promos and matches, but I only kept watching it until about 2005 and that's when I lost a lot of interest because the superstars who just starting to get over with the fans then didn't have the same appeal to me as guys like Chris Jericho, The Rock, Mick Foley, etc.

I do remember going to see dark matches in Estero, FL when Kurt Angle and Jericho were just starting to get over. That was a lot of fun. I saw Big Show, Esse Rios, Edge & Christian, The Dudley Boyz, The One Billy Gunn, Jericho, and Angle. There were some other ones too but I can't remember off of the top of my head who they were. I never went to a Raw or SmackDown taping though, nor did I ever go to a PPV event.

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On free to air here we only ever got an hour of highlights from the shows, most times we wouldn't even see a full match because by the time they showed the build up, the verbal fight, the background and the commentators it only left a few minutes for each fight. I think our packages on free to air came with 5 blocks of commercial breaks making it a 42min show and in that 42 minutes they had to fit enough in to keep the fans interested and hopefully leave them hanging enough to purchase pay TV packs. Pay TV for all really didn't come into Australia until the mid 90's and it was so expensive not many people bothered (about 12% in the 90s, rising to 24% of the population subscribed in about 2010) so the shows we got on free to air were only meant as teasers to entice people to pay TV.

It's surprising really because we have a huge amateur and semi pro wrestling circuit in this country, covid has fucked it over a bit for obvious reasons, but pre-covid we had so much local wrestling that we could see it nearly every weekend. Many of our wrestlers have been scouted by the pro circuit in the US and coached by the likes of Brett Hart. I don't know how many, if any have actually turned up on the WWE circuit but I know two guys here that still have contact with Brett and he's come down here to help their competition.

As far as Chris Jericho goes I've never seen him wrestle but I've heard him sing and I've seen him run his bullshit in the press against Sebastian Bach and based on that I think he should go back to wrestling.

 

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Chris Jericho needs to retire from wrestling. Some guys can still do it when they get older, he just looks really sloppy and unmotivated now as I recently saw a match that he did and it was the shits. As far as his singing goes, I had the self-titled Fozzy CD when I was a kid, but I never got into them after that one as it was all covers of other artists and he didn't really have the best singing voice as far as metal goes.

I would like to go see a smaller wrestling promotion again at some point in time, like not the WWE or AEW, but just some local guys who put on shows in armories or VFW halls or wherever. I'd like to have been able to see Brett Hart in his prime but that ship has sailed. I was never into Shawn Michaels or anything, so the 1996 Wrestlemania where Brett dropped the strap to Shawn Michaels was kind of disappointing to me.

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Fozzy is not a band I have followed so I am willing to accept that I could be missing out on something fantastic. I remember hearing Do You Want To Start A War but that's as far as I got with his singing. I also figured as a singer he'd retired from the ring.

I could probably get myself free tickets to our local wrestling, I've got a family member that's heavily involved, including being short listed for the US circuit. I watch YT videos of some of the matches and the pantomime is all there but there is still something missing. It's probably a little bit more interesting to me because of the connection but at the same time it's not something I bother to keep updated with these days.

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I was watching the original Hell in a Cell match with Undertaker and Shawn Michaels the other day. Not nearly as good as the one that Mankind & Undertaker did in 98, but good nonetheless. I really don't think that any wrestling match can top watching Mick Foley fly 20 ft off the cage, through a table, get chokeslammed through the top of the cage and hit in the face with a chair on the way down, be chokeslammed onto thumbtacks, etc.

This morning before I went to work, I was watching a highlight video of Kofi Kingston (a newer WWE superstar that came around after I had already ceased watching) and part of me wants to get into Wrestling again, but the "TVPG" nature of WWE now kind of ruins it for that for me. Vince McMahon's big slogan now is "We put smiles on people's faces" and the WWE has become a very family-friendly product, which it was not when I was growing up and watching it. I remember D-Generation X, Debra showing the "puppies" on TV, all that stuff and somewhere along the line, Vince decided that he didn't want to do that anymore.

Another Wrestling scene I was into as a kid was ECW, which was like the hardcore version of the Attitude Era WWF. Lots of dudes breaking light tubes over each other, throwing one another off balconies, etc.

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For me wrestling stopped being entertaining when it became so over the top. There was always an over the top element to it, but when every move, in every match started becoming high risk and over the top, then every wrestler seemed to want to out do the other in the showman stakes, I just got sick of it. For me it became more show than substance and it just wasn't as interesting. I give them credit for taking the hits they do and training (with or without drugs) to be the sort of entertainers they are but there is only so times one can do shit like turning over ambulances and getting hit by cars before it gets boring for me.

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