cabbageboy

Bear this in mind though. Shawn Michaels was a mere tag wrestler circa 1986-88 in the AWA, he didn't strike anyone at that point as being ready to main event as a singles wrestler. Hell he didn't really have any semblance of main event cred until 1995 or so in the WWF, much less in the 80s. The notion of him vs. Brody in the 80s is laughable, Brody would have destroyed him.

Oh I know the AWA was already in decline post Road Warriors roughly. Thing is, the last chance they had to at least be semi decent was the various alliances with Memphis and World Class. Once that blew up in Gagne's face, it was over for the AWA.

The angle would have worked fairly well if it had simply been Sid and they wrapped it up after a couple of weeks. Trying to make it this huge mystery for months and months with no payoff wrecked the main event scene and the promotion in general.

Did any show ever have Lawler/Hennig shown in its entirety? Even as a kid all I remember seeing on the Memphis TV show was the finish, which is pretty famous. In all honesty they had to put the belt on Lawler since Memphis was probably a better promotion than the AWA itself by 1988. Lawler as champ was probably the last gasp of decent stuff from the AWA....once he was stripped of the belt following the SuperClash III fiasco, the AWA went 100% to hell.

The use of CGI is going to hurt this film I have a feeling. Temple of Doom is probably the weakest of the initial series, since it has too much in the way of gross out stuff (the dinner scene in particular). Oddly enough it's probably the most suspenseful and thrilling and has by far the best heel in the series. Guys like Belloq and Donovan made deals with Nazis and stuff, but I can't see them ripping a man's heart out.

Regarding Lashley, I am sick of these guys like him or Angle constantly talking about wanting to go into MMA. Guys who are now used to doing scripted pro wrestling aren't going to succeed in MMA. Pro wrestling is about entertaining the viewer and not hurting someone. MMA is about hurting someone and winning a legit fight.

The Flair/Russo feud at least had its moments. I could at least buy into it more than Hogan/Bischoff stuff, since we couldn't buy into those guys hating each other when we had seen for years that Bischoff practically idolized Hogan. The single worst angle that Russo ever booked was still New Blood Rising with Nash/Steiner/Goldberg. They had Goldberg going against the booking of the match and pulling away from the powerbomb, the announcers talked about Nash and Steiner improvising a new finish, etc. I mean how can a wrestling promotion even ALLOW such an angle that admits wrestling is scripted?

Having read this thread I don't think it has a really definitive look at the Hummer angle. I'm planning on going in depth with it, starting with the initial June 1999 angle for the GAB, the various insanity, the angle being dropped, and the bizarre April 2000 "revival" of it.

In regards to MVP, when I gave it some thought I can't really recall hardly any of his ring work that impressed me outside of the Benoit feud. And I know some will say the Matt feud, but most of those matches were perfunctory matches that didn't stand out. ONS looks like a good PPV so far on paper. It's a good idea to finally blow off a bunch of feuds on a PPV with nothing but gimmick matches. That's how you use the stipulations. Take note, Russo.

This sucks. So is this going to remain the Hummer Thread or should I start it anyway on Friday? I could just post the same thoughts here I guess.

I'll just wait until Friday and start a Let's Talk about the Hummer thread. I wish we could just FF through 1998 on 24/7 and get to these horrible 1999 Nitro shows. I want to see the 3 hour breakneck insanity that was Russo's initial stuff. Can you imagine a 3 hour show of crazy crash TV angles, 3 minute matches, skits, burlesque? It was the exact opposite of what WCW had been doing if nothing else. Before it was an ultra boring 3 hours that was a snooze, but then it became a 3 hour demolition derby under Russo.

Over the past 4 years I've been baffled at the amount of love JBL gets on this forum. He's a pretty interesting character but his redneck poor man's Ted DiBiase should be kept in the midcard as a US title level heel. The praised Eddie/JBL match from Judgment Day 04 was mostly Eddie carrying him and doing a massive blade job. The only other good match I've ever seen with JBL was the I Quit vs. Cena. JBL can be enjoyable in a violent brawl, but he's mostly useless in a standard wrestling match. How many times have we seen JBL stink up a building in a main event level match? Joe is a vastly better worker than JBL when it comes to a regular match. I mean has JBL ever had as awesome a match as the Dec. 2005 match vs. Styles?

I have to admit this surprises me. I assumed last night was just an angle to turn Regal back into a wrestler rather than any sort of 60 day suspension.

Yeah I have to admit that I'm quite looking forward to ONS. A night of Extreme Rules matches can be a lot of fun if done right, though the JBL/Cena match being First Blood already leaves it open for a cheap finish. I assume now HHH gets to beat Orton at his own game, namely the Last Man Standing match. Where is this talk of the Coach being GM coming from? From tonight's show it looked like Teddy Long is going to be the new Raw GM. Or is that just a red herring? Personally I think Vicki should have been ousted before Regal as GM, since Regal's crazed angle was just beginning while the whole Vicki/Edge thing with her as GM is getting really tired.

Haha, this is great. I'm still trying to remember all of the various details so I can spin this off into a Hummer thread later in the week. When should I post it?

Oh now we're talking. I 100% agree that Taz was booked vastly better than Joe. You really believed that he wanted to kill everyone that got in his path, beat them down, etc. Where TNA needs to improve is in the area of characters. Who is this guy, what would he do in a situation, etc.

Good lord I did forget all about that. It was tough to keep track of all this stuff, but since Bret never really lost the title to Goldberg and forfeited it soon after anyway it was easy to forget.

They might as well job Orton totally out at ONS since 2 weeks isn't enough time to properly build a new challenger. But that had better be the absolute blowoff to the feud. I don't get that whole Batista/Jericho match to get to Michaels. What, is facing Michaels some sort of major reward? Jericho is the guy who actually has a belt, however trivial the IC title is at this point.

There's a difference between X-Pac and HTM though. Honky was actually using his reviled status to draw money from people to see him lose. Was his IC reign entirely too long? Of course. Something like that would have zero shot of working now with PPVs all the time. But X-Pac? People didn't pay to see him lose. It was more just a groan death of all heat in the building when he showed up. It was more that people just didn't want to see him at all after a certain point. Anyway this PPV sounds pretty decent but given the non finish of the UT/Edge match I'm not sad that I didn't see the show. Who would HHH feud with now though? I thought JBL would be a logical challenger but he jobbed to Cena. Are they really just going to rush back into Cena/HHH this soon? Or Jeff/HHH even after Hardy's suspension?

Well, I will mention this in more detail in that thread but was Bischoff even the actual driver originally or was this just a goofy joke done as a nod to the original angle? I don't recall them ever saying that Bischoff was who originally hit Nash, and in fact it makes literally zero sense if he had been the original driver.

Thing is, by April 1999 DDP was nowhere even near the world title. Hell he got his ass kicked in a TV title feud with Steiner. He did a stretcher job at SuperBrawl and was off a couple months, then came back....as a heel??? Huh? Say what you want about WWE but at least they will simply go with a guy and give him a run with the belt. Half the time these WCW title wins seemed like political favors rather than attempts to get a guy over and draw money. For instance in 1999 alone: --Fingerpoke of Doom. Nash did Hogan a political favor and gave him the belt. January. --Flair over Hogan in the weird first blood cage match. Done to get Flair and his followers to quit bitching about him never beating Hogan, and also to give in to Flair's desire to turn heel. March. --DDP wins the belt from Flair in that odd 4 way. Done as a political favor to DDP to give him a token title run, despite at that point not being over at all. April. --Nash beats DDP at Slamboree, since he's booking and all. May. --Macho beats Nash at BATB, mainly so he can job it straight to Hogan since Hogan plays politics and wants the belt back. July. --Sting gets the belt from Hogan since Hogan's face return isn't working. Sept. --I don't know what the hell happens but Goldberg beat Sting and it doesn't count, belt is held up. Oct. This is the Russo regime now. --Bret beats Benoit in a tourney final with lots of crazy stuff going on. Nov. --Bret has a career ending concussion and ends up forfeiting the title and retiring. Dec./Jan. Of all of that insanity the only real attempt to draw a dime was putting the title on Bret, but even then the way it was done made it hard to take seriously. By the way Rey still had the cruiser title for the Summer of 1999, but he was in that horrendous No Limit angle with the West Texas Rednecks and never really defended much.

I was sorta worried that Narnia would do some crazy business and end up the #1 movie of the year ahead of Iron Man, Indy, Dark Knight, etc. The first one wasn't anything special really and I guess other people feel the same way. Iron Man took away from Narnia this week and Indy will basically bury it next week.

I will agree about one thing with LAX: ditch the bimbo. They have Hector Guerrero as an actual manager now and there are enough women on the show as it is. Salinas adds quite literally nothing to their act and if anything detracts from the bad ass mentality. It would be like if the Gangstas had some chick with them.

It's sort of tough to fully explain my thoughts on Russo's WCW booking. After the previous 6 months of WCW TV shows, Russo's stuff at least seemed fast paced and interesting. It didn't draw any money, it wasn't really GOOD or anything, but it did at least command attention. And say what you want about Russo, but at least he didn't book something as utterly horrific and mindnumbing as the Hummer Angle. The Hummer Angle....now there's a fun potential topic for some truly ranting debate on here. Maybe I should start that thread once this one runs its course.