It rubs the lotion on it’s skin….
GOODBYE HORSES!
I was trying out different things & this was easy to play, so I thought “why not?”
It seems like all you need to make something sound like it’s from the 80’s is reverb.
The, uh, wimmins divide
I said i was gonna write something about Vince & Co. shitting on the “Divas”, so here we go…
Did any of you catch Maria’s Youshoot? She says exactly what the problem with the “divas” division is. Vince doesn’t give a shit about them because they don’t sell merch.
If you look back to the attitude era, you had Goldust with Luna, Chyna as a part of DX (and later, Eddie), Sable or Jacqueline with Marc Mero, Terri with just about every mid-carder, Lita with Essa Rios (and later, The Hardys), Trish with Test & Albert, Molly with Crash & Bob Holly…
Almost all of the female roster were part of some kind of group, so merch sales for the group would’ve been the main priority. Being “managers” helped them to get known while they trained as well, so by the time a feud reached the point of manager v manager, they knew what they were doing.
Being part of a group meant that whatever heat the group had, the individuals had.
A lot of them also came in with proper training from old-school guys, like Chyna (Killer Kowalski), Lita (Dory Funk, Jr.) Molly Holly (Malenko)…
Today they largely lack proper training, but what’s more important is that they lack any reason for us to care about them.
Beth & Natalya are a team right now & they both look like they know what to do in the ring. They also have the most character development by way of being heels & Beth’s semi-monster push she got when Kong took maternity leave.
What’s Kelly Kelly’s motivation?
Anyone?
Why should she be champion?
What about Eve? A.J.? Aksana? Alicia? Eden? Eve? Kaitlyn? Layla? Rosa? Tamina? (if you answered “who?” to the majority of these, you’re not alone)
It’s simple things here. How many times did you see Keith Stone & the Bella sisters in some skit backstage this year? That time could’ve been better spent actually developing characters (not necessarily at the cost of dropping product placement either, Miz’s rant against the Subway guy kinda makes sense in hindsight).
The divas get an allotted amount of time on each episode of Raw, i’m not sure if it’s 10 minutes or what these days, but it’s safe to say they don’t get even 25% of the show. “Thank fuck for that!” I hear you cry, but why shouldn’t they be given the same opportunities as the rest of the mid-carders? Or, to re-word it, shouldn’t they be trained to the same level as everyone else that comes out of Florida? That’d go a long way to stopping people like me from switching off (or going into ignore mode) every time they have a match.
At the heart of it, it seems like the WWE staff go into ignore mode as well.
Vince said recently that the “diva” division is a disappointment, do you know how awful that must’ve made the girls in the locker room feel? Imagine Vince saying publicly “Kofi & Evan have really let me down”, because it’s the same thing. The tag division is non existent, yet Kofi & Evan go out & make the best of a bad situation every time. The division is them, so the belts would just disappear again if if Kofi & Evan were to get no reaction from the crowd.
The “divas” are told “You have a 4 minute battle royal tonight & the last 90 seconds will be just Beth & Kelly, so go out there & put on a show!” Remember when they did the same with the Hardcore championship? Nobody gave a shit. Same thing here, that’s why you only know that Gail Kim walked out of the match because of her tweets.
TNA gives the “knockouts” more time & while the Velvet Sky situation kinda makes sense, it’s still constrained by TNA’s shitty booking. She’s been out making the best of her abilities on every show & been thrown into almost every storyline going for the last year, but all the “knockouts” need to do to get over at this point is slap Karen Angle.
Maria suggested a “divas” line of Bratz dolls to Vince & co. as something that would make sense & sell well to the market it’s aimed at (rather than trying to sell “divas” action figures to the same young boys that buy Orton/Cena ones), but they didn’t even say “We’ll think about it”.
At the end of the day, while i can’t speak for every single person watching, i’m sure the majority of us would pay more attention to “diva” & “knockout” matches if:
They consisted of more than a head-scissors, Irish whip & roll-up/schoolboy pin.
The promos didn’t consist of them screaming at each other in the 9th octave.
The storylines made some sort of sense.
We still live in an time where Johnny Ace can walk around telling girls that fake tits will help them get over, so it’ll be a quite a while before Vince stops shitting on the “divas” in public (& Orton in their bags).
2 years!
Craig & I did another anniversary special a few weeks ago & it’s been online since then. I held off posting here because I was having bother making a video version (needed because soundcloud & podomatic don’t have infinite space).
I guess it’ll count as a Halloween special as well, so you get two for the price of one & whatnot.
anyway, enjoy:
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An open letter to the “internet wrestling community”
I don’t want to get nostalgic, but do you remember when you thought wrestling was at it’s high point?
It might have been In the 80’s, with guys like Hogan & Macho Man in the WWF, or the birth of the Four Horseman in the NWA.
It might have been the 90’s, with the NWO in WCW, WWF’s Attitude era & ECW’s mix of brutality & technicality.
It might have been the 00’s, with new names like Cena coming into the spotlight, the birth of TNA, ROH…
It isn’t right now, is it?
If you think everything is fantastic in professional wrestling right now, you need to really look at what TNA is doing with the Knockouts (both on & off screen), what WWE is doing with “The Divas” & read up on Orton’s bag-shitting escapades.
You also need to look at The Pope & Devon being thrown together as a tag team for no other reason than “hey, we have two black guys”. Mexican America portraying a stereotype because TNA doesn’t really know how to make heels & faces other than by resorting to the lazy stereotype bullshit. It wasn’t long ago that The Jarretts walked down the ramp wearing sombreros & ponchos while grasping a pair of maracas (Karen) & a fake AAA title (Jeff). Beer Money seem to be given semi-racist dialogue on a regular basis, but those guys are faces because they portray blue collar guys (more booking based on weak stereotypes).
“WWE doesn’t have racist storylines though, that problem is just Russo & Bischoff’s predjudism leaking into TNA’s writing”
So Sheamus was getting ready for a feud with Mark Henry & they started calling him “The Great White”. As much as this is going to break you little heart, he’s not a fucking shark. “The Great White Hope”? I could understand that. “The Great White Dope”? Maybe if he was acting like a buffoon. The Great White what then? His gimmick is that he’s white? He’s been pale since the day he walked into Titan Towers, so it’s not like they needed to point it out to us. The Great White (guy) vs Mark Henry, the heel. Is it that much of a stretch of the imagination to think that maybe, just maybe, WWE want us to think if Mark Henry as “The Evil Black Guy”?
Alberto Del Rio is a heel due being portrayed as a greedy Mexican on a regular basis & it is WWE’s booking by stereotype that’s led to him being cheered every time he as much as touches Cena (well, that & Cena’s over-saturation).
Once we block all that stuff out & concentrate on the matches themselves, how often do you enjoy them? Leave a comment & tell me the last match you watched & thought “wow, that was amazing”.
What we seem to be doing is putting up with things, then going online to defend what we’ve just watched against other people defending what they watched. You’ve seen “Hey, Kelly Kelly is really coming along, i’m glad she’s not stuck in TNA with those blow up dolls” followed by “You know what, Velvet Sky deserves this push & at least she can learn from actual wrestlers while in TNA” & then “Fuck you, WWE is way better than TNA, at least their wrestlers aren’t on food stamps…”
WWE, TNA, ROH, JCW, NWA Hollywood, Chikara, DGUSA… It doesn’t matter what product you’re watching, all that matters is that what you’re watching is good.
If I like TNA & you like WWE, do you think that means I can’t appreciate something like Taker vs HHH from this year’s ‘Mania? Do you think you can’t possibly like AJ Styles or Samoa Joe because you’re part of the “WWE UNIVERSE”? You can be a fan of one promotion & still be into things that another is doing, hell, you can even be a fan of multiple promotions.
You can also call shit when you see it, and lately, we’ve all seen a lot.
We’re expected to pay monthly (sometimes twice a month) for PPVs from each promotion & spend 3 hours of our life that we’ll never get back watching them, on top of the 4+ hours of weekly programming we need to watch in order to keep up with the storylines. Are we buying the PPVs because the card looks amazing? From here it looks like we’re doing it out of loyalty to the promotion, regardless of how good/bad it sounds on paper. We all seem to have forgotten that the promotions work for us, we pay them. Bischoff can talk about 10%’s & the “IWC”, but him, Dixie, Vince & his shareholders… they all have to answer to the revenue stream.
It’s not me vs you, you vs another reader, WWE vs TNA, ROH or any other promotion.
It’s WWE, TNA, ROH, ETC. vs OUR MONEY & OUR TIME.
EDIT: Now on insidepulse.com!
TNA is… 29th of September
I’m not gonna recap the show, but I want to talk about what’s happening in the run up to BFG, so…
For the past, i dunno, maybe 6 months (?) we’ve been hearing about Bound For Glory’s Hogan v Sting match & TNA booked things in such a way that it looks like BFG is the only PPV that means anything to them. The X-Division PPV was simultaneously announced & shat all over by having AJ job as part of the Glory Series, storylines have been dropped & back to back heel-face turns have been happening just to show how big a guy like Hogan is.
Is he though?
When Hulk arrived at TNA he promised a ratings boost while forcing us to watch the Nasty Boys, Bubbuh the Love Sponge & a lot of other shit that TNA really didn’t need, especially when they were going to try & start another Monday night war.
It’s been over a year now and PPV buys are below 10,000, Impact’s ratings are 1.6’s & they don’t seem to have any more “brand recognition” than they did in 09.
Has he helped out guys backstage?
I have no doubt that he’s shared his knowledge of the business with the executives, Dixie, Jeff & maybe even guys like Angle (who seems to be a big part of TNA’s locker room, whatever you think of him).
In terms of what he’s brought to the roster, well he didn’t share much of anything with guys like AJ & Joe. Those two should be the Hogans, Flairs, Stings, Austins… of this generation. AJ isn’t a guy working his way up through the ranks right now, he’s a guy that PPVs should be sold around.
AJ has jobbed on almost every impact i’ve sat through over the last few months & Joe was given a gimmick where he gets DQ’d on a regular basis.
What about Immortal then? Maybe Hogan actually took those guys under his wing?
Jeff Jarrett is a guy who managed to fail upwards & found himself in a position not unlike Hogan in the 90’s: one where he could book himself into whatever angle he wanted (no pun intended).
Steiner? Steiner is the same Steiner we watched shoot on Flair more than a decade ago.
Bully Ray? They took one of the greatest tag teams of the late 90’s-early 00’s, split them up & handed them both shitty gimmicks. They’ve booked him so poorly that his promo a month or so ago consisted of him saying “i don’t like bullies”.
Matt Hardy? He’s in WWE’s rehab program right now, that should be all you need to know.
Jeff Hardy? Victory Road.
Abyss? Man, Hulk really fucked Abyss over. How can you book “The monster who knows only pain” like fucking Eugene. The Legend’s Ring storyline killed Abyss.
Flair? Flair has dramatically decreased in value during his time in TNA (a real shame, given that he really needs cash right now).
Mr. Anderson? Anderson has been thrown in & out of storylines because of other people getting injured or overdosing on drugs. He may not be on par with guys like AJ & Joe, but he still doesn’t deserve to get fucked around on a whim.
Gunner? He’s the one guy that’s gotten an honest (as undeserved as it might be) push out of all this.
People say TNA doesn’t make stars, but when they try to with guys like Gunner, Crimson, Sorensen & whoever else, it’s more like they just don’t know how to.
They say “Crimson has a large undefeated streak, that’ll get him over, right?” because it worked for Goldberg, but Goldberg was a marketing package, not just a poorly read line by Tazz.
This week on Impact: Hogan says he’s retiring.
Next week in Impact: Sting reveals Hogan isn’t retiring.
2 weeks from now, on Impact: Hogan & Sting sign the contract, then Hogan beats up sting.
The 80’s, 90’s, 00’s & now the 10’s have all featured Hulkamania in one way or another, so when that woman in the crowd started crying & phoned her friend when Hogan said “this is it, brother” you could actually see his value. Hogan could’ve done some great things in TNA, but it was poorly booked from the get go. Imagine him in a Foley type commissioner role where he’s never in the ring & never laying a hand on the wrestlers. He would’ve got respect from us for actually appearing to help guys & not making himself the centre of attention. He would’ve got respect from the locker room for making guys look good on camera.
I hope they do something like that with Flair once Hogan’s contract expires, he’s going to die in the ring if they don’t.
martyrshow | Banned In Germany 