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A positive Hulk Hogan thread...


Mad Dog

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I'll start it off. It still amazes me to this day when I go back and watch Bash at the Beach 1996. The fans were legit outraged at what Hogan did and he then proceeded to just stir the pot and get them even more pissed off. Also from this era, it still seems like Hogan is legit terrified of Sting and it really gave Sting this aura of being a guy you didn't want to fuck with.

 

I loved his cameo in Gremlins 2. I fucking hate that they never show it on tv. Adding to his media roles, I thought his commercial with Alf was enjoyable.

 

Loss has mentioned this before. But his match with the Genius on SNME where Poffo covers his mouth with his hands during the Hulk Up is hilarious.

 

Hogan/Andre is a bad match but has really good narrative. I like how the match is about Andre trying to pace himself and slowly wear Hogan down without punching himself out. The bodyslam is still epic 25 years later.

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He was a good wrestler for the bulk of his career. I don't think he was ever a great wrestler, though there were times when he could have great performances. Having said that there is more Hogan I like then Hogan that I think sucks. Far more. Good matches v. Funk, Orndorff, Race, Savage, Bock, Inoki, Backlund, Sarge, Warrior, Piper, Rock, Flair, and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting. I'm not a huge fan and he's not even a Luger type who had a single year where I thought he was really fucking good, but I think Hogan gets a bad rap in the ring.

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People tend to talk him as a shitty worker in his old age (and, well, the rest of his career), but I thought he put in a likeable performance against Sting at the 98 SuperBrawl. Basically did what he could to get heat and lived by the "don't do what you can't do well" rule, and I think it wouldn't been ok if that had happened at Starrcade. I've always been a Hulk fan.

 

Skipping around to the nWo segments and promos on the 96 yearbook made me realise how goddamn great he was that year.

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I wasn't a huge fan of Hogan in the 80s, even though I was just a kid and a total mark. I think even then I sensed he was too God-like, too invincible, to ever really embrace, like Superman, and I've always been a Spider Man guy, a Santana and Steamboat and Savage guy. My teenage years coincided with his self-indulgent 91-96 period that to this day I utterly detest. I loved Hollywood Hogan, but by 98/99 I was a total wrestling snob who hated the (as I saw it) "bad workers", so of course I started to hate him again. Today, as has been mentioned by others, I really enjoy most of his 80s work. I think my favorite Hogan match is the cage match with Bossman from SNME 1989. Really fun stuff.

 

I cannot deny he is one of the all-time great performers, probably the best at working a crowd I've ever seen, and at his peak a really entertaining showman who was a much better worker than he has ever been given credit for by the smart community.

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I liked Suburban Commando and No Holds Barred. I'd love to see NHB 2: Zeus's Revenge starring John Cena as Rip's son or something.

I always thought Suburban Commando was good fun too, as far as b-cheese goes. I mean, Hulk Hogan punched out a mime. What's not to like?

 

I've never seen No Holds Barred. To my shame.

 

All the Hogan nonsense/stories that come out in the sheets really entertains me.

 

I won't deny he's had periods that were terrible, but I've enjoyed a lot more Hogan matches than a lot of people might guess.

 

The WWE produced Hulk Still Rules DVD was quite entertaining.

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The Inoki match on the NJPW set is loads of fun. Both guys are so charismatic and the crowd is so invested that they get a ton of mileage out of super basic matwork. It's really just the standard Hulk matwork that he does in every match with a little bit of Inoki's mat spots thrown in building to a memorable finish. Hogan working monster against smaller guys is pretty fun. I also really enjoy his matches against Hansen, Vader (the Superbrawl one), Bossman, and Terry Funk.

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He's not given enough credit for his selling and the fact that 90% of his matches are heel control segments.

 

Who is better at getting babyface sympathy? Hogan is top 5 in that bracket.

 

Hogan is the biggest victim of "smart fans" thinking they know it all, and a lot of the criticism comes from backstage stories and so on. The only genuine knock on him is in 93 when he got the belt at WM9 and the gate went down over the next month or so. That was a mistake. But other than that, he's more often than not justified for pushing himself.

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This is supposed to be a positive Hogan thread and you're using it to take shots at "smart fans" who disagree with you. Not really the point of the thread.

 

Anyway, Hollywood Hogan was such a dramatic reinvention where I'm not sure Hogan ever got as much credit as he deserved. It's fun to watch that week to week stuff and see him hone the Hollywood gimmick until he finally gets it pitch perfect. Those interviews were -- I think -- the best of his career.

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To be honest Hogan got plenty of credit during the last few years. I've been surrounded by positive Hogan comments for years now.

 

The Hollywwod Hogan turn is amazing, and Hogan did some of the best work of his career during this time. I've said it a lot, but I'd take a good Hollywood Hogan match over a good Hulk match any day.

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I think it worked because Hogan was able to tap into real frustration. Those early promos especially have a lot of venting. While I did think a lot of the criticism against him was valid, I'm sure that it was awfully frustrating when he would work somewhere and carry a company and allow everyone else to make big money, and they didn't like him protecting himself. Sure, that's a pretty one-sided view of things, but I can see from Hogan's perspective how that would have really bothered him.

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Hulk Hogan also has some of the best facial expressions that I have ever seen. To me, it was impossible to not get emotionally invested in a Hogan match, whether he was babyface or heel. He just had that way of drawing you in.

 

His match with The Rock at Wrestlemania X-8 had me and my friends literally shouting at the television, repeatedly standing up and counting along with pinfalls...it was crazy. I felt like a little kid again. Hogan brings out my inner megamark.

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This is supposed to be a positive Hogan thread and you're using it to take shots at "smart fans" who disagree with you. Not really the point of the thread.

I'm not, I'm saying he's the guy who has taken the biggest knocks from them in the past 30 years and that those knocks are often based on his backstage politicking rather than his in-ring work, which is quite underrated but has suffered from the association. At least in the early 00s, it was de facto assumed that Hogan was a shitty worker -- from the same people who thought Shawn and Bret were the best workers who ever lived. I wasn't taking pot shots at anyone in particular but at the default negative view of Hogan that "smart fans" -- to an extent, myself included -- have had since the late 90s.

 

I was one of the people who hated Hogan even in his red and yellow days, like jdw, I was a heel fan. And there are some things I'll never forgive him for (ruining what WCW had been building in the early 90s, for example), but he's someone I've come to appreciate more and more in the past year or so. There are things he does very well -- basics -- that to an extent people take for granted.

 

However, I think El-P is right, that MOST people -- at least on boards like this one -- have come to accept that Hogan, while never being a GREAT worker, was at least good in the ring and very very good at "playing his role".

 

My biggest problem with the Hollywood run is he worked too small. A guy his size should not be stooging for Roddy Piper.

This is something I've always thought too. He went from being superman to working like the Honky Tonk Man. After 15 years of being the "indestructible force", he was almost too weak as a heel.

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I love Hogan during his peak WWF run from 84 to 93. I could be content watching nothing but that.

 

I hated him in WCW but he had a great match with Vader at Superbrawl V. My biggest problem with the Hollywood run is he worked too small. A guy his size should not be stooging for Roddy Piper.

Funny, I could write the exact opposite. I don't care for Hogan's WWF reign, at least I didn't give a shit when I was young, and although I gained appreciation for his work later, I could live without ever watching any Hogan from that era ever again.

I think the Vader match is an abortion that killed Vader.

I enjoyed Hollywood a lot and I loved Hogan's stooging, because he was so good at it. And it was a shitload of fun having Hogan being Piper's bitch at Starrcade. That was the whole point, the big jacked up guy who was really a coward and who was really afraid of Piper kicking his ass.

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If you worked a program with Hogan, you were basically set for life.

 

Also, I can't think of anyone else who got over in such a wide variety of wrestling environments. Maybe Terry Funk, but that's it. For all of his association with cartoon wrestling, it's easy to forget that he first got over huge in Verne Gagne's AWA and Antonio Inoki's New Japan. Which brings me to an interesting hypothetical. Meltzer has said that if Vince didn't have Hogan, he would have built his national expansion on the back of Kerry Von Erich, who would have self-destructed on the road. What would the wrestling landscape look like today if Verne had come to his senses and done everything he could to keep Hogan in his employ?

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I would say he was a damn good worker in the 80s. That wasn't a view that I would have held a few years ago, but I've watched a bunch of old stuff and feel that way now. I watched the entire 1982 NJPW TV season a while back, and a lot of the smartest, most heated, and most well-structured matches on it were Hogan matches. I also watched a lot of 1980s WWF house shows. While the undercards are mostly as terrible as advertised, Hogan would usually come out and save the show with fun, satisfying main events. I don't know that Savage had a better opponent except for Steamboat. The Mania carry-jobs with Andre and Warrior were fantastic too.

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