Jingus

Pretty standard Troop Tribute show, which has developed a formula by now. Mostly babyfaces going over clean, a welcome lack of backstage vignettes, divas catfighting, Santa Claus, and one really great workrate match. Whoops, guess they forgot that last part this year. And MAN do they love them some video packages. I don't mind the ones which were actually about the soldiers, but it got tiresome hearing the WWE suck its own cock in a mock-humble manner about how great they are for Supporting Teh Troops. I've seen some people online still mark hard for Mark Henry. Why?

I know how you feel, I was wondering the exact same thing while reading this. AJ and Tomko are the champs, right? ...or did the lose the belts? ...and if so, to whom? ...what happened to that feud they had going with the Steiners, anyway?

I'm debating over whether or not to even bother watching. I know you get longer matches than normal on these shows, but the card looks kinda yucky. Plus, there's always a whole bunch of self-congratulatory video packages about how the WWE is the best thing to hit the third world since the Red Cross. Yeah, it's impressive that you're holding a show in a warzone, but you don't have to keep reminding us about it over and over. The fact that the ring is set up in the middle of a desert with an audience entirely dressed in uniform should be enough to clue us in.

Which is a nice reminder how little the general public cares about that fake rasslin.

Mike shoulda choked a bitch with teh Tazzmission, yo. I miss CanadianChick and Tritec.

Yeah, he beat RVD the second time, not Cena. Still he's got the best record against Cena in title matches of anyone in the company.

I kinda agree with Meltzer's take (a big headline on the top of his website which screamed "THAT SHOW WAS WRETCHED"). -I caught a few of the Christmas party segments, and man did they blow. Every time someone walked in, everyone yelled at once, you couldn't hear what the hell anyone was saying. -Why is it that a wrestling show which includes thumbtack bumps and close-up shots of women's asses seem to somehow believe that their audience thinks Santa Claus is real? Kinda seems that way, with all the faces being excited about Santa and only the heels saying he doesn't exist. -For that matter, what is with wrestling's seemingly obsessive need to portray most of its performers as either being psychotic, retarded, or both? I know it's just a comedy gimmick, but does anyone think that a man Eric Young's age would really still believe in Santa? -re: the women's nine-way crappy hardcore match. I'm an active fan of the "Knockouts division" (horrible name, almost as bad as Divas) and I love more than half the wrestlers in this match, and it was still garbage. Too short, too many random toys and pieces of junk covering the ring where nobody could even safely take a bump, too many people in the ring at the same time. At least there was one positive thing, how it kept building the Kim/Kong feud pretty nicely. Also, Christy clutching at the stuffed animal and screaming as Kong grabbed her was kinda cute, she perfectly got across the "why does this keep happening to me?!" recurring nightmare her character was feeling.

My offensive and reactionary statements in this thread still haunt me to this day, and left deep scars across the soul of the internet. It's a wonder I wasn't banned.

They'll change their minds pretty fucking quick once someone explains to them the meaning of the word "tariffs" and how expensive it will be to to export any goods and import all their vital supplies.

Frank Jabba Mask? Finnish Jericho Mark?

Yeah, that was ODB. She was part of OVW for a while, until TNA signed her. The more I watch her, the more I'm surprised WWE didn't offer her a developmental deal. Now I never say things like this but ODB is creepy lookin....one of my female friends likes wrestling and insists that's a man with tits. She is really a woman, trust me. It's just that, after years of heavily Saying Prayers And Taking Vitamins, that's what it makes a woman look and sound like. The aforementioned tits are implanted, too. Check out the casting special for the original Tough Enough to see what she used to look like. I just ran across this picture: Heh.

Oh yeah, just pay attention, D&D are that damn bad. Worse than the Highlanders, worse than Crymetyme, worse than the Majors, worse than Duggan & Crazy, noticably spot-blowingly horrible. They've got the same kind of negative instincts and anti-ring-generalism that Kennedy has, except they're even worse and there's two of 'em. Add in a ridiculously fucking stupid gimmick, a useless valet, and the fact that the company actually jobbed Londrick's title to these non-working clowns, and you've got a perfect storm of suck.

This happens every single time a wrestling autobiography comes out, someone else who was there disputes parts of it. In the end, so what? It's two guys' different recollections of shit that happened 13 years ago.

Huh? She's hot in a Spoiled Trophy Wife sorta way, but why's that supposed to appeal to me specifically? I PREDICT that Bryan Alvarez will do 52 more podcasts about how much TNA sucks.

Also, to all the people voting for Highlanders as Worst Team: have you not seen a Deuce and Domino match this year? They manage to fuck up the most basic shit every single week. I saw one of them blow a goddamn armdrag a couple months ago. By comparison, the sheepfuckers only have middling ring skills, and have been continually fucked over by the dumb gimmick and inconsistent booking.

I see what cabbage is trying to say. I think the general fanbase respects Edge more than Orton. Compare: -Edge has been around longer, has done all those crazy ladder and TLC and hardcore matches, cuts a good promo, stole Lita and made both Kane and Matt Hardy his bitch, was the first guy to beat Cena for the belt and the only guy to ever do it twice, did the opportunist MITB title switch twice, pinned Batista a buncha times, lost his last title without ever getting beat for it, cost Undertaker the belt twice and got away with it, and seduced Smackdown's GM. -Orton talks in a monotone, does a bunch of headlocks, hasn't killed any legends in quite a while, loses most of his matches, was almost handed the belt by Vince after he repeatedly failed to beat the previous champ, has feuds which seem to only get blown off when his kayfabe clearly superior opponents get bored and decide to go fight someone else, got laid out by superkicks every week for a month straight, and occasionally stomps someone in the head. Edge, besides being a much more "cool" heel, has been portrayed as being much more aggressive, intelligent, personally loathesome, and generally more threatening to his opponents.

They did that on some of the Lost commentaries, they'd stop the show to go into detail about how they did certain scenes and special effects and whatnot. Oh, and fuck whoever invented all those crazy features on the imaginary 7-disc version, because it makes me want something like that sooo damned bad.

I understand where LuckLo is coming from now that he explained that he's worked in the television industry, it makes his opinion much more understandable. Other people in entertainment are often shocked by how loose and unorganized most wrestling shows tend to be, to the point of not believing it at all. TV and media people tend to be the very first ones to insist that Mankind must have been wearing some kind of padding under his outfit when he fell off the Cell, and it's often a chore trying to explain to them just how much improvisation and go-with-the-flow type of nonplanning tend to categorize a lot of wrestling matches. Not ALL of 'em, lord knows there are hundreds of guys on the independent (mostly northeastern) circuit who call every single move in the locker room and can't work on the fly if their lives depended on it, but there's still a big difference between the wrestlers calling the whole match and the writers doing it. My point is, would anyone here claim that WWE or TNA now is better than WCW in 1996 or WWF in 2000? Probably not. Yet the shows are much more heavily scripted now than they were then. So, to me, it's pretty obvious that the point-by-point scripting simply is not effective in making wrestling shows any better, and it might in fact make them worse. That's the money quote right there. I have similar feelings, based on the infamous time when the camera caught Tenay and West reading their lines off paper and not even watching the action. If any company ever told me to announce like THAT, I'd tell 'em to go fuck themselves. If you want a mindless repeater, get a news anchor or an MTV VJ, leave the actual wrestling announcers alone.

Most of this stuff is just quibbling, so I'm only going to address the important points: Once again, TNA is the only wrestling company in the history of the world that writes out on paper beforehand telling the wrestlers the "changes in the flow" in every match. Nobody has ever done that before, and personally I think it has a lot to do with TNA's matches being all so cookie-cutter now. Wrestlers don't like being nitpicked in that kind of detail by untrained writers, they mostly prefer to just go out there and work. Having that instinctual feel for when to change the flow in the match is part of being a good worker, and it relies so much on reading the feelings of the live crowd and reacting from how the match is progressing that there's no really good way to write it all down ahead of time and predict with any accuracy how well it's going to work out, especially since, once again, the majority of the writing staff have never been wrestlers themselves. No. I worked as a television commentator for five years, we did weekly live shows out of which we produced a weekly television show. The booker made the match lineup, told the guys the finishes and what he generally wanted from the match (which, often times on the indy undercard, is just "go this long and have a good match", and on the indies often times those instructions aren't exactly followed to the letter) and that was it. The cameramen never knw what was going to happen. Why would they? The only way that would work is if they knew move-by-move exactly what would happen in every match, and obviously that's impossible. Me at the announce desk didn't know what was going to happen, partly because I preferred it that way (it's easier to get real emotion in announcing when you don't even know who's gonna win), and partly because it just wasn't all that organized. Granted, it was a very low-budget TV show that was shot on prosumer equipment and aired on the Shop At Home channel, but even when I went to more prestigious and better-run shows like NWA Wildside they never had more than a couple of pages worth of lineup and notes, and the cameramen certainly never knew what was coming next. It says, right at the top of the second page, "XPLOSION MATCH".

It was some random mutt that snapped, attacked the bomb-sniffing dog, and apparently couldn't be stopped. What were they supposed to do, just let it maul the security dog that they spent lots of time and money on training? It's funny that Blackwater just can't seem to do anything right, but this is an incident of zero importance. I guess they could've tried to taze it...

If they follow the script closely, it stifles individual creativity and completely eliminates the vital rapport between the performer and the live audience. In wrestling, you can never be completely sure how the crowd is going to react to any particular thing, and if they shit all over it, you have to improvise something else. But if they don't follow the lines closely, then what's the point of having them written out in the first place? Why not just give them an outline and a time limit and let them go at it? That's the fault of the dumbass management handing a live microphone to someone with a grudge, and Joe for going over time, he's been doing this long enough that he should know exactly how long to talk. That is over-scripting for anything less complicated than an important and complicated PPV main event. Once again, it gives no thought whatsoever to the naturally spontaneous nature of a wrestling match. If the script keeps telling them to go with Plan A which is supposed to make the crowd cheer the babyface or boo the heel or whatever, and it ain't working, the preplanned nature of the show leaves them no room to try something different. Also, words can't express how funny the phrase "blows comeback" is. First of all, it's such a staggeringly obvious double entendre I wouldn't be surprised if Russo wrote it that way on purpose while giggling the whole time. Secondly, they made that term up. Nowhere, not in the WWE or any other locker room in the world, will you see or hear the phrase "blows comeback". In wrestling jargon, the term "blow" means that you're failing to do something, like "Kennedy blows a spot in every single match, he never stops fucking up" or "the WWE really blew the Invasion angle, they could've made so much money but instead the ratings went down". Furthermore, they're not using "comeback" right either. Comeback means that the babyface is coming back from a beating and is now on offense against the heel. But over and over again in this script, they use the term "comeback" for someone who gets in the ring for the first time and attacks their opponents, which is just wrong. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the TNA wrestlers repeatedly use "blows comeback" as a regular punchline behind the writers' backs. The WWE script that I saw months ago looked a lot more like that. Of course they made note of run-ins and other activities which would clearly need to be predetermined, but it didn't get so specific as to tell the wrestlers when to beat someone up and when to get beaten up. On indy shows? Practically nothing. There's a piece of paper taped on the wall with the lineup, and usually the time you're supposed to go, which referee you've got, and who goes over. Then you talk to the booker personally and he tells you the finish. Hell, that's not just indy shows, that's how TNA did it just three years ago. Back in Nashville, they had a big dry erase board with the full lineup, and you talked to the management people to find out the details of what they wanted you to do. Often, the details were just "Red vs. AJ, buncha highspots, AJ goes over, 10 minutes". This level of micromanagement on paper is a new phenomenon. WWF and WCW didn't do this back in the Monday Night Wars, the shows were often changed on the fly and sometimes were still being written even after they had gone on the air. That could be true. But then again, the non-gauntlet match is for their syndicated Explosion show (read: Velocity), which they've historically not given a shit about. It probably means that they only really care about Impact and look at the Explosion match as nothing but a time-filler.

I never really paid close enough attention to notice it until I started listening to Alvarez's show, but Kennedy really does blow a surprising amount of spots and moves. Little shit like when Jeff was coming down for the legdrop, and Kennedy randomly spasmed, turned sideways, and sat halfway up all before the move connected. He tends to puss out on a lot of offense, either kinda moving out of the way or putting his hands up for damn near everything. All the stuff Bryan and Vinnie talk about are the kinds of insider mistakes which most fans don't notice, but drive the wrestlers crazy.

Yes, obviously they need some idea of what they're talking about. But to script it out word for word, for every single promo, is just stupid. It completely kills any spontaneity and turns promos from speaking from your heart, which is what they should be about, into just reciting lines. This isn't just my opinion. (Although considering I spent five years as a wrestling announcer, talking for hours every week (without ever having a script), I'd like to think my opinion carries at least a little weight.) Go read Mick Foley's books, where he bitches at length about the creative team fucking his promos up whenever they make him go by a script. And where he talks about the best promos not being memorized lines, but being created by the wrestlers themselves and based out of genuine emotion. And in case you don't trust Mick Friggin' Foley's opinion, go read Dusty, Flair, and Terry Funk's books, where they say the exact same things. It is unheard of for matches to be scripted out to that extent. WWE doesn't even do that, as one of their scripts which was leaked a couple years back showed. There isn't a single independent company in the country which does that. I can guarantee you Mexican and Japanese companies don't do it. TNA is the only place around where the writers script the matches on paper. And guess what? They've also got overall the worst, most emotionless, by-the-numbers workrate in the entire fucking world. Think that's a coincedence? No. TNA's camera crew fuck shit up and miss important stuff all the time. If that's the point of the script, clearly it isn't working. I've talked about this script with at least half a dozen various wrestlers since it leaked, and all of them were amazed at TNA's ridiculous level of preplanning. (This is aside from just how banal and shitty the show itself is, even on paper.) Seriously, we pretty much just make fun of how dumb it is. TNA hasn't had the best reputation among most workers, and shit like this makes them look like even more of a joke.

I don't think wildpegasus would come back anyway. He's vanished from all the other boards he posted on, nobody's heard from him in a while.