Any WWE fans in the audience? (Part 1)

The Game Room
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I’m going to go with splitting the titles. Why else haven’t they gotten rid of the two belts and moved to a single belt?

But we have;

Faces

Cena - incredibly stale, but Vince’s workhorse. I’d say he gets one of them, if not the whole biscuit.

Sheamus - Wandering a-midcard. Could use the boost. He’s effectively the #3 face in the company right now, but you’d hardly know it for Vince’s infamous creative failures.

Reigns - too green, too new. Not his time yet.

Heels

Orton - also incredibly stale. I wouldn’t put it past them to put one of the belts on him and have DBD chase it when he returns, which would be a total repeat of 2013’s overplayed feud. Maybe if Trips and Nips stayed out of it and let Orton run his own show, but still… Nah!

Wyatt - also very new. Played well with Cena though. I can see them hot-shotting one of the titles on him and then having DBD chase it.

ADR - on his way out the door (contract ending soon). No chance.

Cesaro - Another ‘too new’ person. Only way I can see it working would be a hotshot angle where he gets one of the belts and then turns on Heyman to become the face the crowd wants him to be. Neither the heel bit nor Heyman is working for him right now.
If I was booking it, I’d book a double turn. Sheamus goes heel, Cesaro goes face. Cesaro and Wyatt grab the titles (totally fresh champs). Both would be the usual, fairly short ‘test the waters’ title reigns.

Cesaro can feud with Sheamus or Orton before dropping it to one of them, who can then feud with Cena. In which case I’d prefer it be Sheamus, with Orton feuding with Reigns over the summer.

At Battleground in late July, DBD earns his right to face Wyatt at Summerslam in August, where he wins back the title to end the show. In the mean time, Wyatt can screw over challenger after challenger with the help of Harper and Rowan.

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It was announced last night that a traditional MITB match has been added to the PPV. Rollins is already entered, so expect Ambrose to somehow get added, along with the usual suspects (RVD, BNB, Ziggler) and hopefully Dallas and Rusev.

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You know, they’ve been showing the two belts suspended over the ring for weeks. I suspect two separate wrestlers come down with each belt and the title gets split again. It honestly makes no sense to keep the unified title as two belts unless you intend to split it at some point again.

I consider the golden ages of wrestling to be: Pre-WWF Territory days (I was in the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling region and loved going to their shows, seeing wrestling live is what made me a fan), post-Hogan WWF (incl WCW post-NWO) up through 2002. So basically the Hogan era I really disliked, and then I consider the product to have become unwatchable in 2002.

I started watching again “full time” (meaning I regularly catch a weekly show) about 3 months ago. I have to admit with the WWE Network I’ve watched some of the big PPV matches I missed and some of them make me wish I hadn’t taken such a long hiatus (Michaels vs Undertaker at WM25 for example is amazing, even John Cena vs CM Punk at MitB 2011 was also very good.) I’m not sure if maybe the product in general was good from 2003-2013, but that is the period I didn’t watch.

Anyway, current wrestlers/gimmicks I like:

-Rusev - He’s quite athletic for a 300 pound guy and I love the old school, 1980s or even 1970s style nationalist furor gimmick.

-Bray Wyatt/Wyatt Family - They have the feel of an “old school” heel stable, and all three of them can actually wrestle in the ring.

-Bad News Barrett - He sells really well but relies a bit too much on repetitive moves in the ring, but I like his “presence” and his mic work. Funny and obnoxious at the same time.

-Daniel Bryan - I really like his charisma and in ring stuff, the actual lines he’s been saying aren’t so good and I don’t think Daniel is a very good “actor”, but he’s fun to watch in the ring. His wife is even worse and probably should never speak in public.

-Seth Rollins - I only started to like him after the heel turn. I hate to say it but I did not like the Shield. Story wise and promo wise they were just boring, and I felt that while there was some wrestling talent/promo talent within the shield a stable like that is very limiting to a wrestler’s character development if you’re trying to turn all three into stars. A stable of genuine stars can work if it’s formed after they are already established (sort of like the various iterations of the Four Horsemen, or even D-X or NWO), but otherwise it destroys the individuality of the group.

-Dean Ambrose - Again, I’ve only started liking him after Seth Rollins heel turn in the past couple of weeks, as they’ve shown him doing stuff by himself.

Dislikes:

The quality of the wrestling is not good and the storytelling isn’t either (and they go hand in hand.) I don’t actually think it’s a lack of talent, but just some problems in how WWE wants its matches to look these days.

My big complaint is this is professional wrestling, not fake MMA why does every single wrestler have a “strike” finisher? It was fine when it was just Shawn with his super kick, but now it’s Big Show, BNB, Roman Reigns, Sheamus etc. Way too many strike finishers in what is supposed to be a wrestling match.

Additionally, what happened to telling a story in the ring? A match that actually progresses in a certain direction, has ups and downs, and where the wrestlers use wrestling moves to actually tell the story? I’ve said I like Seth/Ambrose, and that’s because I see that they have some talent. But I think part of the reason I disliked the Shield is their matches had no flow whatsoever, they’d get beat up a little bit then do a high spot (which looks fancy, but jumping out of the ring and landing on someone involves primarily talent on the receiving guy to make sure he is in position, it’s not skilled work otherwise) and a series of finishers from the individual wrestlers and then they win.

This is honestly how almost all face vs heel matches go. The face doesn’t utilize many moves and just squashes the heel with a few big finisher-style shenanigans. No story is built, no struggle is going on etc. I’m not saying this is all matches, but it’s certainly most of them.

I don’t think the WWE really knows how to properly use heels any longer. Heels are supposed to get heat by either being monster heels (like Kane used to be, or Undertaker) meaning they destroy everyone or they are dirty heels (ex Flair). Instead the one heel still billed as a “monster” on the top of the card is Kane, and he just gets beat up by DB or John Cena every time they brush near him. The original Kane beat up everyone, including SCSA and the Rock. He got up from multiple finishers (in an era when no one, other than occasionally the Taker got up from a single finisher), and shrugged off chair shots like they were nothing. That’s how you create/maintain a monster heel, not by having him get his ass whipped every night.

Not to mention, what happened to heels actually occasionally getting over on the faces? That’s how you build heat for the big matches. How interesting is it really for John Cena and Bray to square off in a last man standing match when Cena has gotten the better of Bray on virtually every episode of Raw and at WM30? The cage match where Bray beat John notwithstanding, but it was done in a way that made Cena look far more powerful than Bray.

Does no one at WWE remember when Austin would get his ass whipped by the corporation, his belt taken unfairly etc, and then brawl back to win at the big PPVs? That was given power because Austin had been unfairly beaten down several times leading up to it. If Austin had never been touched and just killed everyone constantly, what’s the suspense/pay off to a PPV?

The only heel they are truly using effectively is Rusev, but he’s still very low/early mid card and will be for awhile. It’s only vaguely clear who is a face/heel between Sheamus/BNB/Cesaro (mid card guys who have been fighting each other), as they all get cheers and boos. I think part of the reason BNB gets a good bit of cheers despite being presented as a heel is he actually gets mic time, another problem WWE has is almost none of the mid card has mic time or even gets to work a storyline. WWE used to have stories for the entire card, now it’s really just the top card that has any kind of story.

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I get the feeling that they’re keeping the two belts for practical/sentimental reasons more than any long-term agenda (mainly because they don’t seem to HAVE a long-term agenda) right now;

  1. The current WWE belt is only about a year old and they don’t want to commission a new design so soon
  2. Triple H is an NWA fanboy and doesn’t want to retire the gold belt
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But today’s audience is not the same as it was in the 80s or 90s. People were absolutely ripping into the WWE for not giving the strap to Bryan before they did.

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So, for anyone who watched this week’s Raw, what do you think of Cody Rhodes’ new gimmick, “Stardust”? I’m personally a bit apprehensive about it, but he seemed to be having fun with the role and I want to see where they go with it, especially since Goldust himself hasn’t been very “bizarre” lately.

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I’m not sure the Stardust gimmick has legs… Mick Foley could change angles every week and pull it off because he was Mick Foley. Golddust got over because he stepped completely out of Dusty Rhodes’s shadow. Cody is essentially copying what Dustin did, so there’s nothing new and earth-shattering about it.

Then consider the face team formula: typically, one face works most of the match, getting beat up by the heels until he hot-tags the partner who comes in to save the day. If Cody gets relegated to the fall guy role, his metamorphosis won’t seem like it’s all that. If he becomes the invincible rescuer, it won’t seem genuine because he was always the fall guy before.

Still, WWE needs more tag teams, and Cody + Golddust is better than either as a single career. They will probably be feuding with the Wyatts, especially if Bray’s boys win the titles next PPV.

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Back when they were The Brotherhood (a GREAT tag team name and gimmick IMO) Goldy was always the one who took the hits and then Cody would come save the day, I can’t imagine them switching that role.

I also agree that the WWE needs more tag teams. Even if they are faction type teams (Shield, Evolution, Wyatts) they should have more teams. I like the tag team format the best and I think that it a title that’s slowly going away. Keep The Brotherhood as is, Keep the Usos if you need to…hell even bring up The Ascension (a team I’ve never cared for) just to keep it alive.

Edit: That being said I laughed my ever-loving ass off when Stardust appeared and it was Cody. I don’t think the gimmick will last, but hot damn did I love it for the one match

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I’ve always heard that for whatever reason Vince doesn’t like tag teams or tag team matches very much. Now he’s always understood they are part of wrestling, but I think as he faces much less competition these days he maybe hasn’t felt the need to keep the tag team division as robust as it once was.

I can definitely see them fixing this if they utilize Rowan and Harper as a tag team and keep bushing the Usos, Goldust/Stardust, Rybaxle etc.

One complaint I also have is the booking in current WWE has too many nonsense rules matches. Don’t book a “no-disqualification” tag team match. It destroys the concept of a tag team match and just turns it into a Texas Tornado match or a brawl. Which is fine, but if that’s what you want book it that way. Without DQs then it’s nonsense to book it as a tag team match.

The final match between Evolution and Shield, which was a Survivor Series style elimination tag match suffered from this in that basically all three wrestlers were fighting each other the entire time. I’m not saying I dislike that, but that’s basically the format for the Evolution vs. Shield match at Extreme Rules, and didn’t need repeated for Payback. I think WWE needs to remember there is a balance between out of ring and in ring, and really good drama can be created inside the ring. An ostensibly tag match where you never know who is the legal man because all six wrestlers have been fighting the entire time all over the stadium is confusing and not actually all that interesting to me. I was a much bigger fan of the match at Extreme Rules because it at least made sense, we knew it wasn’t in the six man tag team format so we knew basically you’d need a large number of wrestlers away from the ring to see a pinfall because otherwise they’d interfere to stop it.

The John Cena vs Bray Wyatt cage match at Extreme Rules was also hurt by bad match rules. It was a traditional cage match in which you could win via escaping the cage, but you could also win via pinfall or submission. Okay…why? Don’t give them pinfall/submission and then show John Cena land multiple finishers on Bray and then struggle to fight through the rest of the Wyatt family to escape, because that’s retarded. All Cena had to do was pin Bray, and the cage would have stopped the Wyatt family from getting in to break up the pinfall. Wrestling is supposed to make internal sense or you might as well not do it.

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There’s some great matches from 2002-2013. Anything with HBK is going to steal the show, as always. Watch him vs Kurt Angle or the one where he wrestled HHH and Benoit.

The late 90s was when they stopped telling stories in the ring. That’s why I hated the Attitude Era. The New Generation had people like Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart tearing down the house in the ring. The AE changed it so they would give a 30 minute promo and then a 5 minute match.

The New Generation was bad about having stories for the undercard too. Raw would open with a non-title tag team match, then a decent midcard match, then the current champ wrestling a local jobber. That was how I remember most 1 hour Raw episodes.

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I think this is a repeat of arguments I had on Internet wrestling discussion groups back in the AE, which I loved. I have to disagree, most of the top talent in the AE were very good at telling a story in the ring. SCSA, Mick, Rock, HHH, Undertaker, Kane.

Probably the worst major stars I can think of would be the New Age Outlaws who both couldn’t really wrestle but were big because of their participation in the outlandish D-X promos. But to me the AE includes Bret and Shawn, Bret after he left for WCW basically was no longer a major force in wrestling because WCW didn’t use him properly, but his feud with Austin produced great matches and I view those as the earliest AE matches. Shawn was involved in the first year or so of the AE before he had to go into (temporary) retirement due to his back injuries.

I do think if you give Austin’s matches a fair reviewing (and I’ve watched a few on the WWE Network), Austin did very well in the ring when he converted to his brawling style. I’ll admit to having a preference for guys that do more skilled wrestling work (like Shawn or Bret–or like Austin did pre-neck injury or in WCW) but Austin wasn’t just a repetitive brawler, he was actually stringing together things in a way that made sense and told a story–something Hogan basically has never done.

To me the worst “stars” were all in WCW, Goldberg had no business being in a wrestling ring. I think he injured like 10 guys during his “streak” and later ended Bret’s career because he couldn’t deliver a simple kick without hurting someone. Nash in WCW was a pure promo guy that honestly had very bad matches (I liked Nash as a big man as Diesel but I think he either got lazy in the ring or wasn’t in the shape he was in WWE in WCW.) Hogan was a joke in the ring for WCW, Luger was awful. The only top card wrestlers who I felt still put on a good match in WCW were Macho Man and Sting, but they utilized Sting too sparingly on TV for a long time for reasons I’ve never fully understood–Sting needed to be wrestling matches not hanging out in rafters (maybe he was nursing an injury, I can’t remember.)

Anyway, I just have always felt AE had very good in ring work, because all of its stars were basically hungry young guys that knew how to wrestle. WCW was relying too much on old talent that had gotten lazy in the ring and guys like Goldberg that had never been good. WCW did have a ton (more than WWE) talent in the mid and low cards,but WCW didn’t care about its undercard at all.

The one real knock I can see against the AE is sometimes on a 3 hour raw you’d lose 60-70 minutes to nonsense segments, back room promos etc. But when they actually were in the ring (and especially at PPVs), I felt AE delivered a good product.

Yeah, I would agree with this. Vince Russo became head writer in 1997 and I think one of his hallmarks was making the entire card important. One of the biggest things I think you can say about the AE is all the belts mattered a great deal. The European Championship, IC Title, World Title, etc were all very important. Currently I feel that no title is important in WWE, sadly including the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.

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If you have the WWE Network, check out this week’s NXT for the debut of “The Vaudvillains”. Aiden English and Simon Gotsh (sp?).

Friggin’ hilarious. Obviously no way the gimmick gets over on the big stage, but damn, NXT works great for that. William Regal selling it from the announcer table was great.

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Simon Gotch (named after Frank Gotch, who was world champion as a legitimate wrestler back in the 1910s) has been around in the indies for awhile as “Ryan Drago”, and he’s pretty much kept the same old-timey grappler gimmick that he had then. I’ve been waiting for his NXT debut for awhile now.

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So is NXT worth getting? I’ve been holding off on getting the WWE network, because I can usually page through YouTube for the matches of yesteryear, but not having to pay $50+ for PPVs is appealing.

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I love it.

I have connections problems here and there, but NXT is great to watch, I LOVE “Countdown”, and being able to call up old bouts is great.

Unlimited PPVs is spectacular as well since I would never buy one anyway

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Honestly, if you watch only one wrestling show each week, that show should be NXT. The length keeps it tight and focused (few recaps; backstage stuff kept to a minimum). No sophomoric angles of the “vomit on Vicki” variety. Women are given full-length matches, and the ones who succeed are the ones who can wrestle–not just the ones who can look pretty while slapping and pulling hair. The crowd is usually great, though sometimes they get a bit too smarky for their own good (and they’re often getting tired by the time they get to the last show of a taping). And the in-ring product is generally excellent. You know how good Payback was? Well, three days before, NXT had its own “special event”, Takeover. It was so good that WWE brass put the pressure on the main roster guys to go all out, because they were afraid the developmental guys were going to outshine them. Also, you missed probably one of the funniest segments in all of wrestling history last week, when Bo Dallas tried to return as Mr. NXT.

Best of all, maybe: NXT is HHH’s baby, so it’s maybe giving us a little peek of what the main roster will be like once Vince & Dunn get out of the picture…

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NXT is the developmental territory, not the name of the WWE Network, but…

YES, the Network is worth it. I never paid for a single PPV before this. I had only ever watched 3 of them at a former neighbor’s house. Now I have access to all of them, and can watch every new one.

As above, NXT is tight. No stupid backstage bits, no crappy ‘Vince’ comedy shoved down your throats. The women actually get a chance to wrestle real matches. The Natalya - Charlotte match was really good, and you NEVER get to see that sort of thing on RAW. And as I said, the Vaudvillains was freaking hilarious. (ring entrance filmed in black and while with kind of slow strobe to make it like some old timey film effect.) Gotch reminds me a lot of Eddie Guererro.

And yeah, Bo Dallas is hilarious as well.

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OK, sounds like a deal. The womens’ rasslin’ on TNA is a lot better than WWE because their matches actually last over one minute. I would love to see women like Sheri Martel in the ring. Paige comes close, but she needs to turn heel. :slight_smile: I thought AJ was excellent. I love the way she licked her teeth while doing promos.

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I started watching wrestling in the early 60s. We got Capitol Wrestling shows in Washington DC. That was Vince McMahon Sr.'s original wrestling promotion that later morphed into the WWWF, then the WWF, and now WWE.

I don’t remember the name of a single wrestler from those shows. I didn’t see much for a while until we move to Philadelphia and WWWF showed up on UHF. The champion at that time was Pedro Morales, soon defeated by the old stalwart Stan Stasiak with the ‘Heart Punch’. Stasiak was just an interim champ for Bruno Sammartino’s return. Chief Jay Strongbow, Tony Guerria, were regular ‘good guys’, and one of my favorites was ‘The Unpredictable’ Johnny Rodz (he was totally predictable, he lost every match ever shown on TV). One of the ‘bad guy’ regulars was Baron Sicluna a totally uninteresting character. Occasionally appearing were classic stars like Haystacks Calhoun and Gorilla Monsoon, and Andre the Giant was just hitting the big time after signing up with WWWF. The greatest part of those days were the managers, Freddie Blassie, Lou Albano and the Grand Wizard of Wrestling. The wrestlers usually weren’t great on the microphone in those days so the managers would do all the talking. This was the greatest era of wrestling for me.

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