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Post by Smiley Smile on Jul 8, 2013 8:25:27 GMT -5
I know Brody was an asshole but he didn't deserve that. even more sickening, the guy's daughter used the "daughter of the jerkoff coward who killed Brody" thing a few years later to get heel heat. dishonorable mention to the cops who did jack shit about it. Invader himself did an angle with that, in which he was the "victim" of a horrible receipt for Brody's murder from Manny Fernandez. The Invader involved in that angle was Invader III, I believe. The entire affair was a real black eye on wrestling in Puerto Rico; Carlos Colón actually testified against Brody and has been alleged by several people close to the business and the people involved to have at least been aware of what would occur. There have also been allegations made about cover-ups during the trial; Dutch Mantell claimed to have been told he would be required to testify, only to receive his subpoena after the trial had started. There's an interesting article by him on it here. Obviously this is all anecdotal and shouldn't be taken as hard facts, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Jul 8, 2013 7:58:50 GMT -5
I seem to remember him burying WCW on commentary on a few occasions, I'm not sure if this is a case of him toeing the company line or if he genuinely felt shafted by the company. Either way, I'm not sure which company he thinks made Sting a star.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Jul 7, 2013 6:34:49 GMT -5
...South Africa has wrestling? Oh, wait...
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Post by Smiley Smile on Jun 30, 2013 11:23:42 GMT -5
Graham was in a bad way by the mid 1980s; he had mounting injuries, he was aging and had a hip replacement in 1986, so he wasn't a long-term prospect.
It's worth remembering that while he was one of the pioneers of that style of wrestling, Billy Graham was still very much an old hand who was associated with the 1970s. Hogan on the other hand was relatively fresh and could be molded into the face of the newly-expanded WWF. Simply put, he fit - his all-American superhero look and character fit in with the era in a way that nobody else could have; Savage lacked the imposing superhero look, and Warrior's character was too out-there and obscure. Basically, nobody other than Hogan could've been the figurehead of Rock & Wrestling, he defined the style and the era in a way that nobody else could have.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Jun 28, 2013 19:32:33 GMT -5
I remember a minor controversy over the bret figure since he was wearing a trenchcoat and carrying a gun, and this came out a few months after Columbine. I have one of these, he also wears pinstripe tights I think. I also have some WCW Smash 'N Slam figures, that had actions that involved squeezing their legs together to make them happen. The problem was the joints weren't particularly strong, so using the action caused one leg to come off. As frustrating that was, you can't deny the comedy value of a Kevin Nash action figure whose leg keeps coming off. As far as WWF/E Jakks figures go, there were these sets themed around particular matches or events like Inferno Match or Buried Alive, but with props and scenery to go with them as you can see in the image below. They all had miniature wrestlers bundled with them, and I seem to remember there being a Rock figure whose shirt inexplicably read "Know Your Road".
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Post by Smiley Smile on May 15, 2013 18:49:54 GMT -5
I think Nailz actually lasted in wrestling a lot longer than people realise. Having disappeared from the WWF he turned up in WCW as well as a couple of the short-lived mid '90s promotions (including the dreadful AWF) and toured with New Japan. I think rather than being blackballed he just wasn't really very good, drifted away from mainstream wrestling and quietly retired.
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Post by Smiley Smile on May 4, 2013 9:33:54 GMT -5
Fritz Von Erich. Fed his kids to the masses, pumped them up on drugs, turned a blind eye to all the other drugs, pushed the ones that wanted no part of it or weren't physically capable of it to be something they weren't and then exploited the hell out of them with even more fanfare as they started dropping. Fritz Von Erich is absolutely a good call. Mike Von Erich in particular had apparently never wanted to be a wrestler and was forced into it after David died, and was under a huge amount of pressure to succeed his brother. Add to that Fritz forcing him back in the ring (him having never wanted to be there) after contracting Toxic Shock Syndrome even though he was a complete mess at the time, physically and mentally. Like other people, I would absolutely have to go with Victor Quiñones. Some of the things I've heard about the man make my head spin. There are a lot of rather chilling sleaze stories that come from Mexico, too.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Mar 31, 2013 12:33:41 GMT -5
NJPW did a few shows that failed horribly in Russia after the Soviet Union broke up. I see IWF stuff pop up on torrents but I've never actually watched it. There was a New Japan card on December 31st 1989 in Moscow that Strong Style Spirit claims drew 15,000 people at what was then Lenin Stadium, which has a capacity of about 78,000. The matches all seemed to be quite short and a good number involved Russian wrestlers, many of whom don't seem to have much information about them on the internet. The card can be found here.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Mar 27, 2013 19:28:49 GMT -5
Kintaro Kanemura has some pretty impressive scarring.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Mar 2, 2013 9:09:21 GMT -5
For a while, WCW on Channel 5 was my only real exposure to pro wrestling so I can't help but have happy memories of watching it. In hindsight the shows were appallingly put together and the booking was nonsensical, but to a child whose only wrestling was WCW Worldwide, it was the TV highlight of the week.
WWF on Channel 4 gets a lot of criticism, but it wasn't helped by censors and Channel 4's insistence on moving the timeslot around constantly. Not ever having Sky Sports, seeing pay-per-views on free-to-air TV was a dream come true for me.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Mar 2, 2013 0:19:17 GMT -5
There ended up being quite a lot of bad blood between Tom Zenk and Rick Martel, over Martel being paid more than Zenk during their run in the WWF, and Zenk believing that Martel tried to put himself over too much.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Feb 27, 2013 10:27:53 GMT -5
The first name that sprung to mind was Takeshi Rikio, who got a GHC Heavyweight title push in NOAH at one time despite being rather dull and plodding in the ring.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Feb 23, 2013 10:10:55 GMT -5
Because we all know that Sky, a company owned by the Murdochs, is very sensitive to political correctness. Perhaps my favourite post ever on here. I'm not entirely sure why a fictional "brigade" would have any interest in cutting him out of the show.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Feb 10, 2013 9:50:18 GMT -5
At one point about ten years ago, Buddy Lee Parker opened a training school called the Super Power Plant in Georgia, which I imagine worked in a similar sort of way. It would be just as well if schools like this didn't exist, as people have said before there seemed to be an overemphasis put on "conditioning" and not much put on actually learning how to work safely. I believe they even had minimum height and weight requirements.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Jan 21, 2013 20:29:49 GMT -5
A few years ago in Dragon Gate I remember there was a character called Bakery Yagi, a baker who wore chef's whites and used baguettes as weapons. I can't find a picture or any footage on YouTube, unfortunately.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Dec 19, 2012 10:24:40 GMT -5
People have already touched on what I think the reasons for his decline are. He was a cocaine addict and it seemed to take a huge toll on him personally and physically. He'd started to become unfit and put on weight towards the end of his run with Mid-South, and when the wages he got from the WWF meant more money for coke. He apparently stopped training, his weight ballooned and he became unreliable and by 1988 he was viewed as a spent force and cut loose. I have heard that Bob Backlund was about the only guy in the dressing room that DIDN'T take drugs though. I'm not sure how it affected JYD more than anyone else. hell I'm sure he wasn't at Jake the Snake's level of drug intake, but I wasn't there I suppose it depends on whether you're a user or an addict, and how well you can "control" your habit before it starts causing problems in other aspects of life. But it's an interesting point you raise about how many had careers ruined by drugs compared to how many were using at the time.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Dec 18, 2012 16:34:42 GMT -5
People have already touched on what I think the reasons for his decline are. He was a cocaine addict and it seemed to take a huge toll on him personally and physically. He'd started to become unfit and put on weight towards the end of his run with Mid-South, and when the wages he got from the WWF meant more money for coke. He apparently stopped training, his weight ballooned and he became unreliable and by 1988 he was viewed as a spent force and cut loose.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Nov 25, 2012 14:58:19 GMT -5
There are quite a few quite unpleasant stories about him doing the rounds. The most notorious is the one about him making racist comments around Bad News Allen/Brown and almost getting a kicking for his troubles.
Someone touched on this before in this thread, but I think the legend and myth very much affects the way people in and out of the business view him..
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Post by Smiley Smile on Nov 9, 2012 0:27:04 GMT -5
Happened in reverse two times with the Beach Boys: -Shut down released 3/4/1963. Album Shut Down Vol 2. released 3/2/1964 -Surf's Up originally recorded around 12/66 and 1/67 but not released. Album Surf's Up released 11/8/1971. "Little Deuce Coupe" was also included on Surfer Girl, released a few weeks before the album Little Deuce Coupe although the album was something of a hastily thrown-together cash-in by Capitol.
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Post by Smiley Smile on Nov 6, 2012 12:36:15 GMT -5
I always thought the guy was awful, to be honest. I never saw him as anything more than a huge, generic hoss who didn't really excel at any particular thing and whose size didn't make him in the least bit interesting because there were so many other generic hosses on WWE television at the time.
The run on ECW was horrendous though. They'd taken this fairly ordinary worker and shaved him completely bald, then pushed him as a main eventer and expected fans to suddenly forget that he had been a weird comedy character and suddenly buy him as a monster heel seemingly because he didn't have hair anymore.
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