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Yet if the rumored Turner deal comes to fruition, they would instantly be the #2 promotion in the US just based on that. 

Granted everything could end up worse than the most awful Russo TNA/2000 WCW mashup possible, but AEW is more or less getting handed the greatest opportunity any non WWE company has had since Billionare Ted decided he wanted to put a rasslin show on Monday nights.

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Perhaps, but his reply of "off planning the next beheading" when asked why the Saudi ruling class weren't sitting on couches on the front row like last time was a pretty good "snarky 80s newsletter Dave" moment.  He was clearly enjoying the opportunity to not have to walk on eggshells around the Offend-arazzi during the show. 

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23 hours ago, Microstatistics said:

I get that, even in shoots, fighters enjoy when their fight is praised as exciting or fun. But something about Will Ospreay essentially thanking Meltzer for a 5.75 star rating feels odd. 

Ugh. Gross.

Wrestling specifically for an audience of notepads and scorekeepers - who are intently watching with the deliberate purpose of assigning a grade to your performance - is the dirt fucking worst.

I enjoy elements of AEW and Impact, but shit like this makes me irrationally angry at modern pro wrestling.

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5 hours ago, SomethingSavage said:

Ugh. Gross.

Wrestling specifically for an audience of notepads and scorekeepers - who are intently watching with the deliberate purpose of assigning a grade to your performance - is the dirt fucking worst.

I enjoy elements of AEW and Impact, but shit like this makes me irrationally angry at modern pro wrestling.

Amen brutha! When I read that Michael Elgin said something to effect of "Impact has not had a 5 star match in years and I'm going to change that." I was so annoyed. It is the exact opposite way to think. I don't care about Elgin or Impact but this line of logic is very alienating to me. 

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12 hours ago, Superstar Sleeze said:

Amen brutha! When I read that Michael Elgin said something to effect of "Impact has not had a 5 star match in years and I'm going to change that." I was so annoyed. It is the exact opposite way to think. I don't care about Elgin or Impact but this line of logic is very alienating to me. 

I think the particular problem is that the line of logic isn't "I'm going to have a great match!" it's "I'm going to have a great match based on the prescribed set of standards set by one guy." 

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1 hour ago, Migs said:

I think the particular problem is that the line of logic isn't "I'm going to have a great match!" it's "I'm going to have a great match based on the prescribed set of standards set by one guy." 

Well that's one issue but if Elgin is saying that on TV it's even worse because he should be talking about going out to win not to have an impressive artistic performance. That's Dolph Ziggler-itus

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I see no issue with Ospreay thanking Meltz for a high rating. It's like a band sharing a good reviews of their album on Facebook or something, really. Let's not pretend Ospreay works in front of these japanese audiences thinking about how much snowflakes he's gonna get... 

Elgin on the other hand, is an idiot, and the way he works absolutely displays that mentality. Not to say he doesn't deliver to some extent (mechanically I mean, because he's able to do so many things), as showed by his big iMPACT matches, although he was *always* the lesser workers in those matches for this very reason, as he displays the charisma and intent of a vacuum cleaner most of the time, save a a few sequences. 

But really, modern pro-wrestling at its peak, is fucking awesome. People focusing on snowflakes are missing the point looking at very minor outside details. It's not like guys in the 80's passing "dirt sheets" in the locker room weren't happy when they would get good reviews, let's not kid ourselves... But again, that's a detail in the grand scheme of things. 

(still, Mike Oles was kinda the prophet of what is happening today to some extent. I know 99% of people reading this won't have any idea what or who I'm talking about, I'm a veteran geek of pro-wrestling forums, that's all...)

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21 hours ago, SomethingSavage said:

Wrestling specifically for an audience of notepads and scorekeepers - who are intently watching with the deliberate purpose of assigning a grade to your performance - is the dirt fucking worst.

I enjoy elements of AEW and Impact, but shit like this makes me irrationally angry at modern pro wrestling.

This is one of my biggest issues with modern pro-wrestling & one of the things that worries me about AEW. Especially since Dave Meltzer & I seem to be near polar opposites on what good professional wrestling is. 

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1 hour ago, Coffey said:

This is one of my biggest issues with modern pro-wrestling & one of the things that worries me about AEW. Especially since Dave Meltzer & I seem to be near polar opposites on what good professional wrestling is. 

Actually, what I like about AEW is that they don't seem to have guys purely shooting for that stuff. Other than Sabian-Guevara, nothing on Double or Nothing felt like truly generic indy MOVEZ~! matches. There might be some filler of that type on the TV show, but that won't be the big matches.

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On 6/10/2019 at 1:12 PM, El-P said:

I see no issue with Ospreay thanking Meltz for a high rating. It's like a band sharing a good reviews of their album on Facebook or something, really. Let's not pretend Ospreay works in front of these japanese audiences thinking about how much snowflakes he's gonna get... 

Agreed, as long as it is out of character. When wrestlers in promos talk about having a great match and not winning, that drives me crazy. 

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2 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

Dave refused to give Naito/Ibushi at Dominion a star rating. I guess he finally reached his breaking point.

He said on the radio show with Bryan that he thought it was a good match other than the horrifying head/neck bump spot, but he didn't want to give the match a rating and encourage anyone to copy it and/or do something worse. 

Also it happening around the anniversary of Misawa's death hit a nerve with him how Japanese promotions are starting to forget the lessons 90s All Japan taught.

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18 hours ago, sek69 said:

He said on the radio show with Bryan that he thought it was a good match other than the horrifying head/neck bump spot, but he didn't want to give the match a rating and encourage anyone to copy it and/or do something worse. 

Also it happening around the anniversary of Misawa's death hit a nerve with him how Japanese promotions are starting to forget the lessons 90s All Japan taught.

What was with the five star rating that he gave Ospreay vs Scurll? It had the same exact bump - crocked nech bump on an apron. Dumb that. 

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It was an awesome match. It was also ridiculous they let it go on after that godawful botch and neck twist on the apron, and the head-drops after this point were as morbid as anything Mick Foley ever did, and from that perspective, it was pretty awful. That being said, they know what they are doing. Misawa died, so they know. There's something self-destructive about Ibushi anyway, that should not be commended as far as worker's safety goes. It made, however, the whole thing quite compelling to watch. Doesn't mean it was smart, not even "enjoyable", but compelling ? Sure. Now, would I want to see more of this ? No way. 

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I wrote into Dave asking him to consider not giving it rating as I'm sure others had to have as well, but he still basically did give it one. And one suspect's what kept it from being five stars was that the apron german was botched, not for the fact that at several other points in the match they were basically trying to hurt each other. Not really surprised since Okada-Shibata is his favorite match of all time, but only Bryan really took a hard stand there and said flat-out you cannot call it a good match.
 
Another funny in-the-bubble moment this week is when he referred to the Avengers as "superstars"
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  • 4 weeks later...

You guys know how Dave likes to claim that no one during wrestling's heyday thought it was real and cites as evidence a poll conducted in the 80s by the Charlotte Observer that found that only 1 percent of the audience thought it was real? Well, I went into the Charlotte Observer archives, and the real story is quite a bit different. First off, the poll was conducted in 1990. More importantly, while only 1 percent of respondents thought wrestling was "very real," 21 percent thought it was "somewhat real." 72 percent said it was "not at all real" while 6 percent had no answer. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus four points, so that means that even as late as 1990, roughly a quarter of the population of the wrestling hotbed of North Carolina had yet to be smartened up. That's obviously nowhere close to a majority, but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of ticket sales came from that sliver of the population. To me, that's pretty clear evidence despite all the protestations to the contrary that wrestling's appeal has historically been rooted in the perception of realism.

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3 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

You guys know how Dave likes to claim that no one during wrestling's heyday thought it was real and cites as evidence a poll conducted in the 80s by the Charlotte Observer that found that only 1 percent of the audience thought it was real? Well, I went into the Charlotte Observer archives, and the real story is quite a bit different. First off, the poll was conducted in 1990. More importantly, while only 1 percent of respondents thought wrestling was "very real," 21 percent thought it was "somewhat real." 72 percent said it was "not at all real" while 6 percent had no answer. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus four points, so that means that even as late as 1990, roughly a quarter of the population of the wrestling hotbed of North Carolina had yet to be smartened up. That's obviously nowhere close to a majority, but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of ticket sales came from that sliver of the population. To me, that's pretty clear evidence despite all the protestations to the contrary that wrestling's appeal has historically been rooted in the perception of realism.

 

I can't figure out the difference between very real and somewhat real. 

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6 minutes ago, Steve T said:

I can't figure out the difference between very real and somewhat real. 

My guess is somewhat real means, "Yeah, we know it's fake, but that match was real because Ric Flair still has a scar."

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I know there were people that came out of the shows here in the 80s absolutely confused about what they saw...believed it wasn't real, but then it felt and looked like it was. Especially true with the big brawls. It was a testament to the workers that they could make things blurry for a lot of folks that came to see them live. 

 

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The layperson knows wrestling is fake. They don't know how it is done. Often I'll watch with my wife and there will be a big spot and she thinks one of the wrestlers is seriously hurt. She just watches, she doesn't dig in beyond that. I imagine for most fans there's a gray area like that. Especially pre-internet.

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