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What Does "Storytelling" Mean to You?


Kronos

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Daredevil and Wolverine were the first two comic book heroes to have dark shades of gray put into their characteristics. Daredevil was a notorious drunk, womanizer, and crippled a foe. Wolverine just killed his enemies, like during the Dark Phoenix Saga with the Hellfire Club's personal army.

Not really the first, there were plenty before them, going back from early Alan Moore all the way to the earlier works of Will Eisner and other of his ilk. But they were certainly the first "dark" characters to get incredibly popular and sell a shitload of comics, so I see your point.
Yeah, there were others, like Iron Man for example, another notorious drunk. Did Giant Man's problems predate Wolverine/Daredevil? Batman is probably one of the first, if not the first subtlety dark hero. His past haunts him, problems adjusting - stuff a psychologist could make a career over :)

 

Austin is a character like a Dr. House, Sherlock Holmes, Daredevil, or Batman. He is fundamentally good, but has some serious underlying issues as well.

The problem there is that wrestling is a pretty shallow storytelling medium, and Austin never really had to deal with his flaws. They were hardly even mentioned; he'd always Stunner some poor defenseless schmuck who didn't deserve it, and we were supposed to cheer him for that. It's a really selfish, almost sociopathic attitude when you think about it. His antisocial violence towards everyone and everything (partly a product of Russo's writing; on his shows, two guys can never be standing in the same room together without getting into a fistfight) was just kind of ignored when Austin's place in the storylines was basically that of a tradional top babyface. He was micro-booked like a psychotic heel, but macro-booked as an upstanding superman.

While I am more inclined to agree with this, there was some story in there. HHH did have him run over with a car, but I'm not 100% of the context there, as in his motivation behind the hired hit. Plus McMahon made his life miserable on more than one occasion for his actions. So yeah, there is some, but not a lot :)
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I think the issue with Hogan, Rock and Austin has always come down more to the way things got booked. Sometimes you'd book a program in which it's clear they are supposed to be cheered, other times the booking makes them look heelish but fans cheered them anyway.

 

With Hogan, the whole feud with Piper was pretty clear that Hogan was the good guy and Piper was the villian, even if Piper might have been speaking the truth about the MTV generation. More importantly, one thing fans don't like is somebody to lecture to them, even if they speak the truth. Hence, Piper's the villian, end of story.

 

On the other hand, a lot of Hogan's later feuds were more about him trying to get the big pop from the crowd. The feuds would generally start in the right direction, but then the booking saw Hogan go too much for "pop the crowd" spots that really made him look like a jerk.

 

The Slaughter feud didn't work because of Slaughter's character hitting too close to reality, but yeah, the blowoff match certainly was Hogan cheating to win. And then the bubble burst with the whole deal with Sid at Royal Rumble 92.

 

I think, in the long run, it was for the best for Austin to have no involvement with the WWE product on a regular basis because the whole thing soon came to be the fans waiting to pop for the Stunner. In his feud with McMahon, he certainly lived out the fantasies many people have about taking their frustrations out on their bosses, but it also worked because McMahon was lecturing to people about this and that and came off as a far bigger jerk than Austin. But when it only became about "when is Austin gonna hit the stunner" that's when it became a problem and it was for the best for him to be gone.

 

Rock, on the other hand, was saved from becoming too much of a pompous jerk who fans happened to cheer after Vince Russo left the WWF. They adjusted the booking so Mankind eventually told off Rock about his humiliation and Rock, the guy who was never at a loss for words and almost always got the last word in a back-and-forth banter, was left with no reply at all. He then became more sympathetic to Foley and didn't just pick on the "good guys" for the sake of it. Sure, he'd taunt the heels, but they did a better job of booking so that it looked like the heel deserved it.

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Rock, on the other hand, was saved from becoming too much of a pompous jerk who fans happened to cheer after Vince Russo left the WWF. They adjusted the booking so Mankind eventually told off Rock about his humiliation and Rock, the guy who was never at a loss for words and almost always got the last word in a back-and-forth banter, was left with no reply at all. He then became more sympathetic to Foley and didn't just pick on the "good guys" for the sake of it. Sure, he'd taunt the heels, but they did a better job of booking so that it looked like the heel deserved it.

He improved a little bit, but he was still very much a pompous jerk. All the constant abuse of anyone who ever tried to interview him being one huge example. What's with the WWE's obsession with constantly belittling and abusing the backstage interviewers? It's a rare occasion indeed when they're not treated as objects of ridicule, if not outright punching bags.

 

Who doesn't love the Marx Brothers?

Me. I watched Duck Soup once, and that was enough, I barely ever laughed at all. Their humor had a weird hostility to it, largely based on humiliating other people. The one scene I still remember is when Harpo and Chico mercilessly harassed this popcorn vendor on the street, cutting up his clothes and setting his stuff on fire and generally being vandalous criminals. Why the fuck is that supposed to be funny? The guy hadn't done anything to reserve such treatment, and the Marxes seemed like a couple of fucking psychopaths in attacking this poor bastard. I don't laugh at kids knocking over mailboxes with baseball bats, and I didn't laugh at this shit either. I have never, ever understood what's so funny about humor based on the pain and suffering of complete strangers who've done nothing (that we know of) to earn it.
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What's worse about the backstage announcers being humiliated is that someone has scripted for that humiliation to be done. Definitely a nice way to be shown appreciation for hard work and sacrifices. I sometimes cringe when reading stories about pranks Dynamite used to pull on his fellow wrestler, but I wonder how many and how much worse the pranks were on non-wrestlers.

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Or even the ECW Pulp Fiction promos, again years after the original inspiration.

Pulp Fiction came out in October 1994 and I believe the ECW promos started in late 1995. That's not *that* bad by wrestling terms

 

One that I never realized as a kid was Ricky Steamboat's WWF character in the mid 80s being loosely based on the Karate Kid

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Pulp Fiction came out in October 1994 and I believe the ECW promos started in late 1995. That's not *that* bad by wrestling terms

They were still doing them as late as the TNN era, with the same theme music and everything. I wonder why nobody else has every really tried to do this montage-style of promo? It seems like every company out there has this standard pattern where they air the promos unedited and in their entirerty. (Which is often a huge goddamn waste of time; does Triple H ever really need twenty minutes to keep sloooowly repeating the same points over and over again?) The only modern company I've seen which even slightly experimented with changing up the standard format was Wrestle Society X, but even they weren't trying anything too unusual.
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Pulp Fiction came out in October 1994 and I believe the ECW promos started in late 1995. That's not *that* bad by wrestling terms

They were still doing them as late as the TNN era, with the same theme music and everything. I wonder why nobody else has every really tried to do this montage-style of promo? It seems like every company out there has this standard pattern where they air the promos unedited and in their entirerty. (Which is often a huge goddamn waste of time; does Triple H ever really need twenty minutes to keep sloooowly repeating the same points over and over again?) The only modern company I've seen which even slightly experimented with changing up the standard format was Wrestle Society X, but even they weren't trying anything too unusual.

 

Hey I agree with you. I'm sick of these 20 minute chat sessions, especially to open the show! Don't even get me started on TNA where they could only squeeze in 10 minutes of wrestling on a show a little bit ago with only 17 seconds of wrestling in the first hour. I'd love to see the return of the ECW style promos. It was right in the style of what wrestling should be - quick, simple and to the point.
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I, for one, am fascinated with how in the space of 6 years fans could go from cheering Hogan or "Lex Express" against Yokozuna to booing the All-American, milk-drinking, vitamin-taking, Olympic hero Kurt Angle and cheering a character like Austin.

It's not hard to figure out: the fanbase changed, and the product changed with it. Perhaps there was a certain loosening of attitudes in popular culture that allowed people to accept more risque characters, but that had been going on for decades.

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Don't forget that Luger's push didn't exactly set the world on fire, either. Your point still remains, of course, it's not as though Angle was pushed as a face and they quickly turned him due to an apathetic reaction or whatever. And 1993 WWF audience is vastly different from their audience of five years later. Duggan was always over working a similar gimmick, of course, but then you have to figure nostalgia into that, too.

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