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Raven


Grimmas

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Good promo, great character, good mind for the business... bad in the ring. Even his pre-Raven stuff where he wasn't doing the garbage spots was the shits.

 

I can listen to him talk all day though. And I'm a big fan of his. In fact, in high school, he was probably my favorite wrestler. He's a big reason why I sought out ECW too because my first exposure to him was in WCW.

 

If he made my list it'd be at the tail end of it & it would be a sentimental pick. I just don't think the body of work is there.

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The Raven Dog & Pony show made me eat nearfalls more than 10 years after the fact when I went through ECW TV & house shows. Not to mention some really good WCW stuff against Goldberg, DDP, Benoit and the terrific Saturn match which made a dead crowd at the beginning go crazy at the end. Love the character, and the guy can be funny as hell. One of my all-time favourite wrestler.

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Going back and watching Hardcore TV on The Network, mostly for the first time, and Raven is one of the guys who just doesn't live up to the hype for me at all. It's hard to put myself in the mindset to hear those promos in the moment they were cut, so they tend to come off as very cringe-worthy to me. As far as the matches go, he's carried by his dog and pony show, mostly Stevie, and to a lesser extend, for me, by the fact that Tommy Dreamer still works. In the end, Raven just...doesn't.

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  • 5 months later...

Never saw the appeal. He couldn't even convincingly portray his Raven character IMO. I actually preferred him as Scotty Anthony/Flamingo and Johnny Polo. But credit to him, I guess, for carving out an entirely different niche for himself and getting the fans to go along with Raven. To be fair, there were some fun moments there. But I was never a fan.

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What are his Top 5 matches? I've only seen him vs. Goldberg and two vs. Benoit.

 

Not a Raven fan but if I was to recommend a couple matches i'd say Raven & Perry Saturn vs Chris Benoit & Dean Malenko from Spring Stampede '99, this CM Punk match (my personal favourite Raven match) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf_WeCDOVxY and I suppose the double dog collar match w/Stevie Richards vs The Pitbulls that some people really like.

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Also vs Rhino at Backlash 2001. I still like the Dreamer matches in ECW, but those all run together in my mind and it's hard to pick out the best ones (although my instinctive guess would be the tag with Funk and Foley, just cuz those guys make everything better). I'm told he did some fine work on Heat around 2002 or so, but never saw it myself. And I'm sure he did some good stuff when he first showed up in TNA all motivated, but I haven't seen those shows in so long that I dunno how they hold up.

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  • 7 years later...

His character probably seemed cool in the 90s but is pretty cringy in retrospect. I literally have no idea what he is good at in the ring. I think the highlight of his career might be some of the funny stuff as Johnny Polo.

What I watched for this so far and my match ratings

Raven & Stevie Richards vs Pitbulls (16/09/95) **½ 
Raven vs Tommy Dreamer (07/06/97) **¾
Diamond Dallas Page vs Raven vs Chris Benoit (15/03/98) **½
Raven vs Diamond Dallas Page (19/04/98) **½
Raven vs CM Punk (19/07/03) ***¼
Raven vs AJ Styles (27/08/03) ***


 

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