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On 10/17/2021 at 4:26 PM, KillaKukumba said:

For me wrestling stopped being entertaining when it became so over the top.

Jim Cornette said the same exact thing on one of his podcasts. The worst thing that happened to wrestling was also one of the coolest things to happen in wrestling: Mankind taking that 20ft bump off of the top of hell in the cell against the Undertaker. At that moment, everyone had to try their best to outdo that match and it became less about in-ring technical ability, making it look as realistic as possible, and putting on a good performance as much as it became about who could do the most dangerous stunts and have the most high-spots in a match.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love Mick Foley & he's probably my favorite wrestler of the attitude era WWF just because he was a normal, unattractive, fat guy who was living the dream & he had no problem sacrificing his body to put on an amazing show; but in doing so he opened the doors for modern wrestling to be guys taking long falls, doing dangerous stunts, etc and Wrestling has never really recovered from it.

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I know WWE does not allow chair shots to the head anymore after all of the outcry about CTE/Chris Benoit. I really don't need to see people taking chair shots to the head though, that one match where The Rock gave Mankind like 15 chair shots to the head while he was handcuffed was a bit much even for me. I've taken recycling bin shots in backyard wrestling matches and even that is a bit much and those are made out of plastic.

I don't need to see a lot of high spots in a match to think that it's a good match. Powerbombs, piledrivers and all that stuff is always dangerous if you do it wrong/have someone doing it that doesn't know what they're doing. Even DDTs can be dangerous if you and the other guy aren't on the same page.

That's one reason I never call wrestling "fake". It's "predetermined", but it's never fake. The injuries that wrestlers sustain are absolutely, positively, 100% real. Like Mick Foley really did have his ear ripped off when he went through the ropes one time, his third degree burns from his Japanese death match days were real. It's all real, it's just that the outcome is predetermined.

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Wrestling might not be fake but most of the wrestlers are :)

And I say that having family members involved in the business.

When they started calling wrestling entertainment rather than sports the set ups did become more obvious. But it was the out of ring set ups that became the joke. That whole debacle with Vince loosing the business. The whole marriage thing with HHH and Stephanie. I know the fans loved the drama and the carry on and it probably earned them even more fans that they had, but for me it got so much harder to watch. I understand that many of the out of ring verbal fights created a reason for two wrestlers to hate each other, but so much of that shit just wasn't needed for me, it actually drove me away.

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Oh the storylines are 100% fictional, but the moves and stuff are often real enough to be able to hurt someone if they don't know what they're doing. I do think that HHH and Stephanie are married in real life though and it's not just kayfabe for the cameras. I started watching Smackdown right around the time that the two of them became a faction that was prominent for the storylines, so I remember HHH always winning matches and stuff which kind of pissed me off because he was a heel and wasn't that great of a character to begin with.

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My point was that I didn't care if HHH and Steph got married, I didn't care if they had domestic troubles, and I didn't care if Vince was a dick and they thought they needed to remove him from the company. That sort of shit is what they make soap operas for. I'm fine with other people tuning in for that crap but it wasn't for me. For me that shit was just a constant reminder of how set up everything was, I just wanted to see the dance in the ring.

I can sit and watch an evening of grass roots stuff, either live or on YT. They still have verbal diarrhoea. They still have big screens to show someone getting narky in the dressing rooms. They still have wrestling and moves that make people go WOW, and pretty much every move is still choreographed and practised leading up to Wrestling night. But they don't have the overhead baggage of 2 hours of footage showing several characters spending the week pretending to torment each other, or what one character did at home to his pet gerbil and why the gerbil is now suing him but will settle out of court with a ladder match.

 

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15 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

But they don't have the overhead baggage of 2 hours of footage showing several characters spending the week pretending to torment each other, or what one character did at home to his pet gerbil and why the gerbil is now suing him but will settle out of court with a ladder match.

See I haven't watched it in years. Do they really do that now?? like what percentage of the show is actual wrestling these days versus the dumb soap opera stuff?

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What do you mean now? They've been doing it since before 2000. It's all about the drama, the theatrics and the back story of why they are fighting. What airs here and what airs in other countries might be a bit different but from late 90's it's always been less about the wrestling and more a copy of Days Of Our Lives.

 

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