blueminister

Historical relativist wrestling takes are the worst and Dave dishing them out like crack cocaine on a playground almost undoes the entirety of his good works. Orange Cassidy tries to pop crowds, he's basically the same thing as 80s Jim Cornette.

I feel like the record has been muddled by the Pillman doc. People seem to be conflating a dislike with Bischoff with the idea that the "release" couldn't have been a work (of course it was a work, otherwise Pillman wouldn't have been ordered to come back to WCW before Uncensored) or that Bischoff got worked on Pillman's way out (no, he wouldn't waive the 90-day clause because Pillman had just been in a major car wreck.) I've found Bischoff to be evasive on Pillman in the past but nothing he claims in the documentary seems all that inconsistent with the historical record. Pillman's a tough case where people that you expect to know better get caught up in the narrative.

Fantastic stuff.

Swole Trainee Flair is all over the Ed Asner/Verne Gagne movie.

You tone-policed and then started swearing at me. He accused me of making the argument political when I pointed out the proposition that, say, pushing an expanded Women's Division made more sense to reaching a female audience than promoting the right kind of male wrestler (which he imagines to be something like HBK) and then repeated the accusation when I didn't rise to the bait, all the time pretending that he didn't want to make the argument political. He repeatedly made ad hominem attacks and refused to engage with the body of my posts. He declared that a mistake of fact about WWWF roster rankings 50 years ago invalidated anything I had to say about today's market. He doesn't engage when I or any one else demonstrate the many ways that WWE has tried to reach out to minorities, you don't engage when I point out that Cody Rhodes is doing a major angle with Shaq (or affect baffled incomprehension when I point out a flaw in your logic.) You don't have anything to teach me about class or good-faith debate. edit: This isn't a "woe is me" thing, I mainly lurk Tsuruta threads and don't have any intention of posting regularly or maintaining any sort of status here, but when you consider why people prefer other platforms for their wrestling discussion you should probably consider stuff like this.

How can MVP be a "lifesaver" to Lashley if the deck is stacked against POCs? I didn't think it was an obscure point or anything. Thanks for the civility lesson, by the way.

Not surprising. I could have probably just saved time trying to be polite by posting a picture of Roman Reigns but I'm sure you have some sort of reason why Samoans aren't "real" POC.

I was wrong about Pedro, but you're not fooling anyone trying to derail with ad hominems. Feel free to theatrically declare that you're no longer engaging with me instead of just answering my points.

Better to post sense sporadically than nonsense consistently. If I were you I'd change the subject too.

You keep affecting this "numbers wonk" posture when you're making arguments about content, and it's tiring. No one is disputing the WWE is bad at pushing new stars, but it's an equal opportunity proposition. They've tried pushing plenty of hispanic/black/women wrestlers, given them TV time, let them headline shows, etc. If they didn't get over? Well, join the club, the brand's the draw, pal. If they do get over? (New Day) You just pretend that it didn't happen because they don't fit your outdated and shifting definitions of "top guy." The "HBK is the last good-looking male wrestler pushed on top" thing I'm not even touching.

tbh I'm not interested in getting hung up on the Pedro point or arguments on what it means to be a "top guy" because even if I'm wrong about Pedro's relative place on the pecking order, it doesn't amount to much in terms of his or my argument. I already said that I don't pretend to be a WWWF history wonk and territory/modern promotional economies are apples and oranges; I don't think it's realistic in the modern context to expect a run analogous to Pedro's for multiple reasons. Your issues with two of the many examples I cited basically amount to variations of "if they didn't meet some arbitrary level of success that exists only in my head, it doesn't count" theme. I find this unconvincing bordering on silly. Vince McMahon has made a career out of pushing people that the audience hasn't responded to for one reason on another, it doesn't mean that the pushes never happened. Also, it must have been difficult for MVP to save Bobby Lashley (by which I infer you mean elevate in terms of place on the card by his involvement) given that wrestling does nothing to appeal to PoCs. I don't care enough about AEW to speak on it and it's only been in existence for 1 1/2 of the 20 years joeg cited, so there you go. I am aware Cody Rhodes is currently hyping a headlining tag match against two African-Americans, one a celebrity with massive crossover potential.

Your point wasn't "WWE is bad at booking," it was "[t]he wrestling business has done very little in the last 20 years to appeal to young people, women or people of color." Take the L already.

My impression is that until the Backlund run the top guy was Sammartino and Pedro was a top guy that they successfully capitalized on with the Puerto Rican audience. Mil Mascaras was an attraction like Andre. I don't pretend to be a WWWF history wonk so I could be wrong, and it's immaterial anyway because you're dealing with completely different promotional economies in the territorial era. You don't want to argue because you simply fail to process information that disagrees with your inane thesis that WWE has done nothing in terms of minority outreach, a talking point smarks wrote to sound clever and socially conscious ten years ago that has long since passed its sell-by date. Mustafa Ali, the New Day, Bobby Lashley, the Women's Revolution, Jinder Mahal, Royal Rumble victories by multiple non-whites. Alberto Del Rio given several shots on top. Heck, Roman Reigns. This is off the top of my head, and I'm sure somebody who actually watches WWE could come up with more. In stark economic terms, it's at least arguable that they've done way too much to try and appeal to minorities and women.

This post is all over the place, but: Pedro was never the "top guy". Mascaras was never the "top guy" (except in magazines and probably lucha promotions I never followed.) Only a handful of wrestlers in history have received a push comparable to JYD. What you're demanding is mega-pushes but what you're citing is strategic promotional and booking practices, pandering if you want to be cynical about it. This is very much beside the point of whether or not WWE has made efforts to diversify their roster and appeal to a more diversified potential fanbase, which they unquestionably have. WWE's problem is that -- for the time being -- they can rely on old super-consumer geeks as a crutch to keep from acknowledging painful questions about their production and creative practices. I.E., they can appeal to whatever untapped demo they like, but you'd have to be some sort of masochistic obsessive to watch their garbage TV. People of Mexican, Phillipino, Samoan and Japanese descent/nationality have won the Royal Rumble in the last ten years. That's almost half. And now women get their own Royal Rumble, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago! It's all very equitable and no one cares.

No, I think your reasoning is arbitrary and seems designed to move the goalposts impossibly high. I have an especially hard time following your "pushing the right kind of male as the top wrestler = appealing to women / unprecedented expansion of the women's division = not appealing to women" logic, at least from what seems to be a progressive political perspective. And nothing less than a JYD push for Lashley would seem to qualify as a meaningful effort by the WWE to appeal to black audiences.