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BrianB

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  1. I agree with this....but I'd caveat it by saying that the Bret Hart and Brian Pillman 83 weeks episodes were terrible. The Pillman episode in particular was worse than probably any STW episode.
  2. I've got to watch the last episode, and the show has some standout episodes and is still good (though a romance towards the end feels forced) but I think I prefer season 1.
  3. Good episode. I liked a lot of the fill in the blanks, particularly the Raven and Jericho stuff. Giant and Raven is a really good pairing. Your Hall and Nash solutions also hit me as better than anything else raised. Luger is absolutely the right guy to pair with Steiner to elevate Scotty, and I while I'm partial to my Bret/Benoit idea, I do think maybe Roddy is the right set up type of thing. I will pile on in the sense that as somebody growing up a young but strong fan during this time frame, I think taking the title off Goldberg (albeit even not with an actual loss) before he gotten a good run of it would've pissed off people. I also wonder if making Goldberg seem like on even more blatant Stone Cold ripoff would've played that well in an era of constantly debating fans, but hey maybe it doesn't hurt.Maybe that's the right type of heat. But typically, that first face top run is the big run for guys in the expansion era. And unlike Austin, Goldberg didn't have a top level promo. I get all the mitigation plans, but part of me feels like Keiran just hated the artistic arc of trying to book to Starrcade with Goldberg as the unstoppable monster beforehand, and worked himself and everyone else into buying the same arguments that Nash makes against Goldberg as the destroyer and WWE probably told themselves about Asuka as well,...i.e. you need the compelling of the chase, except you bought into Bret as the champ, when I think that works maybe just as well if Bret's the challenger. You use the steel plate angle to set up Bret as more clever and may cheat, and then you can use through some TV matches the idea that Bret is the superior technical wreslter and it's a wrestling match to add intrigue to the match. Plus, if Bret comes off as bitterand heelish enough, many fans will just want to see him get smashed and destroyed, which is essentially the hook to the initial Goldberg-Jericho program as well. Additionally, I think you've got to blow off the nWo angle. I get hating it because it should've died earlier in 1998 at the latest, but it's too much a slap in the face to long-term fans if it just vanishes and you keep matching up guys from the factions, largely ignoring the history--that didn't work so well for the Dangerous Alliance blowoff in 1992. I stand by Steiner being too old and too injury plagued to be the guy handpicked to beat the streak in 1998. Even in 98, he would've been 36 by Starrcade, and I believe still needing yet another back surgery and he'd eventually get the foot issue, which I don't think is unforeseeable given how gassed to gills he is and his injury history (plus are we going to ignore how mad he'd be about cutting Rick?). If you ever do another against the grain opinion put me down for shitting on Scott Steiner as a world champ/top player. His matches vs. Goldberg weren't better than the DDP match, and nobody except Paige marks try to argue that performance into contending that Goldberg should've lost to him. I don't see why Steiner gets a pass other than people liking his looks and promos which have very questionable top drawing ability, especially compared to somebody like Kurt Angle who is frequently brought up as artistically great but commercially either iffy or sabotaged on SCG radio. The idea that he's even potentially your answer to Austin or Rock on the other side strikes me as downright laughable.
  4. The Road Wild 1997 did a disappointing buyrate considering the rating for the title change, so that's a case where the highly rated go home nitro probably hurt the buyrate (tbf, the go home show had the ppv main event and had the payoff people wanted to pay for with Luger beating Hogan). The Pillman episode was even worse than the Bret episode. Looks like we should expect any highly acclaimed book about a guy who has some bad things to say about Bischoff to be full of fake news retorts.
  5. Good ideas in here. Ultimately, everything I've read ITT cements that Hogan has to hit the bricks by at least the end of the year. If you're lucky, you get some "big" matches out of him, boosting some buyrates, and get him to job again to Goldberg, and then sayonara--let that shark go mess in WWF waters. You just know that with the Russo creative direction in WWF, we'd get all kinds of Hogan bollocks and FUNB Hogan crap.
  6. I'd have used Savage more, but his knee is basically fucked after July 1998, so he's out and only going to come back as a roided up shell of himself. When he returns, he's going to be on elevating people duty, but that won't be until well into 1999. You could do an angle where Steiner beats Savage up to write him off, but that's about it.
  7. I'm prepared to let Hogan walk before the end of the year. That's #1 right off the bat. With his creative control and political bullshit, he's too much of a liability, and if he goes to the WWF maybe he submarines The Rock, Foley, or does us all a favor by submarining HHH. Hulk's ego is at it's peak, and the woodster has effectively worn out a lot of the audience with his act. I'd build to Hogan vs. Goldberg at Halloween Havoc, telling old Terry that we would do a third match at Starrcade where he could soundly defeat Goldberg and turn babyface not long after.. Then I wouldn't do it, wouldn't use him and let him jump ship to Vince. If Terry sniffs out the plan and doesn't play ball, then book him in a program vs. Scott Steiner or just let Steiner trash him constantly on TV until he quits, crying. Pushing out Hogan at this point would probably clean up a number of the locker room obedience issues too. Right now Goldberg is the most red hot guy in the company. You've got to keep feeding him challengers until he actually cools off, and only when he's actively not drawing do you even think about beating him or turning him. If he can beat Hogan again at Havoc, great, if not I'd go DDP because this year and period is about as over as DDP would ever be. Scott Steiner seems like a good opponent to build to for a Starrcade match. He's too beaten up and old to be the guy to end the streak, imo, if you're going to end it, it needs to be somebody who has really been climbing up the card...which brings us to... In terms of talent to start moving up the card, the three obvious ones are Jericho, Eddie, and Benoit. I think I've got to plan for 1999 though for them set up as main event headliners. Benoit and Bret should be put into a program, seeing as they worked shortly before this on Nitro, but I'd book it like the Austin-Bret program, where Benoit has good showings for himself, but it takes him awhile before he beats Bret. Maybe as far out as Superbrawl before Benoit wins. Benoit can beat all the worthless overpaid "big" guys along the way--the Scott Norton's, Buff Bagwell's, Stevie Ray's, and Rick Steiner's of the world--as he steadily gains credibility. Curt Hennig could be a good mini-TV program to have with Benoit as well until the Bret mountain becomes his main focus. If you want Benoit to be a heel, there's also the option of him beating the shit out of Flair starting a feud vs. the horsemen. My plan for Eddie would be to build him up as a heel, and then eventually see if I could turn him babyface as his personality continues to develop as a way to capitalize on the latino market. I'd tentatively slot him vs. Konnan, since Konnan was over around this time. And give him a program with DDP for whatever the november ppv would be (not WW3) and Starrcade where Eddie goes over. For some reason, I think a Jericho and Sting program would be fun to do in the fall, as Jericho transitions out of the cruisers, if old Sting has to take a sabbatical--doing some kind of injury angle with Jericho could be extremely fun. (I don't think Jericho would even have to beat Sting necessarily but maybe he's ahead 80/20 in the match, Sting pulls it out at the end because Jericho makes a mistake, then Jericho throws a temper tantrum and puts Sting on the shelf, which sets up a big program for Jericho on Sting's return.) I'd follow that up with Jericho vs. Piper with Jericho winning, and then Jericho should be established enough to do a solid Goldberg program in early 1999 after Goldberg has fended off Steiner. I'd also start wrapping up the NWO angle, ending it at Havoc after the NWO is teetering having also lost at Wargames right before. Hall and Nash can re-unite as a team and return as babyfaces maybe after being out of the company for 4-6 weeks following the end of the NWO angle. As for Flair, I actually like him returning and being one of the guys to end the NWO. So maybe get him to come back early, the horsemen beat the nwo at the wargames. Then Flair also beats Bischoff at Havoc, which effectively is the ppv where the nwo gets dominated and the angle ends.
  8. I think there's something to how McMahon, at least pre-Attitude Era, almost always wanted heels to backpedal, cheat, and act cowardly that didn't suit Vader's act.
  9. After rewatching the 3 consecutively, I think I might change my opinion to GAB 92, SB III, Cade 92. But it's all very, very close. In terms of work, the superbrawl 3 match hit me as the best, but there were little things I noticed about the rules and the length of the strap and things, the ref and the maybe iffy finish that kind of bothered me more rewatching them all in 1 day than did otherwise. As for GAB 92, I didn't look at the overshot stinger splash, so Sting hits his head on the steel, as a weak part of the finish. I guess I can see why people lump it in with dumb Sting. But in fairness, Vader isn't in the normal position for the move, and Sting's been in a big war, so I can buy why he'd be overzealous and not hit the move quite how he'd want to (similar to how he'd always get overexcited and miss the stinger splash onto the guard rail on the outside.) I think it was an excellent finish that put over Vader well while not diminishing Sting as a babyface.
  10. Bumping this topic given Vader's recent passing, and I'm sure many of this forum's posters revisiting these classic matches.
  11. I liked it as well. Jericho clearly wanted to put a lot out there. It's a good couter-example to how some of Conrad's other pod partners *cough* Bruce *cough* have been phoning it in.
  12. What are you talking about? One is an opinion. The other is a fact. I feel like enough people don't appreciate this fact so here it goes. Beast, if I said you lived in a city with the best burger joints in the country and that you were a fantastic and professional human being...that's an opinion claim. If I said you were born in 1960 and completed a marathon in under 2 hours, that's a fact claim. Sure, in many people's eyes, myself included, Dave's devalued his opinion relative to match ratings. To some extent that's inevitable because wrestling is getting more democraticized and with more access for people, whereas before Dave probably was in more truly elite company for viewing, and now that niche is growing and growing. But mostly, I think this is Dave hitting his later Ebert years. He's going to push stuff that previously he held back on some, despite how most close watchers could discern his preferences, and push what he enjoys a lot and he's starting to have stronger and stronger reactions. The 7 star thing is dumb and devalues the scale, imo, but he probably thinks that match was some Tree of Life type shit or whatever, and suddenly thinks it's metrics above other things he called classics. I've also got to think, I can't blame him because I've turned off watching RAW regularly that he's thinking he should use his influence to get more people to watch Japan and other indies...people can draw parallels to the 90s if they want. Personally, I don't think it's that dire. But it is dire from the perspective that Dave constantly goes back to...how the modern wwe booking largely doesn't matter--which is fine until you get lots of shows you can't keep watching...and Dave clearly hates watching most WWE right now and I can't overly blame him.
  13. I think the alleged Punk thing is a worked shoot. If he really wanted to rustle feathers and get edited, he'd read Sunny's book and talk about Shawn's sexual habits/a particular lipstick, intercourse, and mirror habit. Whereas, the Punk thing strikes me as something that will be greenlit in 4 months if some people are caught on the right day.
  14. What examples come to mind for that? To me, he's seemed less interested, going thru the motions, and bored on Bruce's show vs. his other shows. I haven't watched the network show lately. I'd have to imagine between that, the bischoff pod, his regular business, and just enjoying himself doing watchalongs with Tony, that it's hard to gear up for STWW unless he's already into the topic.
  15. I think it all comes from a place of disappointment, that the top wrestling reporter (or whatever) is essentially Scott Keith. I think he's Ebert. As he gets older, he inflates ratings for things he likes. Dave's match ratings don't really have anything to do with him as a reporter, except to the extent some people conflate his ratings with facts, which they aren't.
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