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Post by Clash, Never a Meter Maid on Apr 10, 2022 15:06:31 GMT -5
- Way more enhancement matches. There’s far too many marquee matches being given away for free, and jobbers are an easy and time tested way to get fresh talents over. There should be at least a couple of big matches each week, but Raw and Smackdown trying to fit in at least five a week burns out the audience.
-Acknowledge that these are pro wrestling shows. I’m one of those rare fans who doesn’t mind the term “sports entertainment” as part of spicing up a show (costumes, entrance music, interviews, special guests) so I don’t want the term banned from broadcasts, but they should still refer to talent as wrestlers and that they’re wrestling a lot more often. Shying away from certain verbiage doesn’t make the product seem any more high-brow or attract people who normally turn up their nose at wrestling.
- More proactive babyfaces. The writers tend to have faces turn the other cheek way too often. We’re long overdue for having the heels be embarrassed more by witty good guys. Yeah, Daniel Bryan was a phenom with his sympathy heat, but he was the exception due to his legendary ROH run and he already had a big fandom coming into WWE.
- Drop the hideous CGI on TV and let the live entrance stage and Titantron serve their purposes.
- Unless the talent in question can’t talk worth a damn, allow the midcard talent more wiggle room in their promos, not just with the top talent.
- More clean finishes, obviously. They DQed a lot during some of their biggest business in the past, but that audience is gone.
- While I’m fine with year long reigns if a champion is on a hot streak and putting on great performances, making them more random could help a bit although I don’t want them to go back to hot potatoing Attitude-style.
- Hold the damn camera still.
- More show-specific storylines. Now, most of the show should be building to the larger events, but they used to have little mini plots each week back in the 1990s and 2000s more often. .
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Post by HMARK Center on Apr 10, 2022 16:28:06 GMT -5
I have to agree with needed fewer in-ring promos, or if you're going to do them have it be 1996-1998 Gene Okerlund style where it's presented as something organized and booked to happen, not some random person coming out and deciding they can only speak about their goals if they do it in front of thousands of people. Most of all, don't have them in there for 10-20 minutes at a time; brevity is the soul of wit, figure out how to say what's important then move the hell on. The most legendary promos of all time all tend to have been just a few minutes long, from Hard Times to Hogan announcing the formation of the nWo; imagine how @#$%ing awful it'd be if those had been interrupted by someone else's music or some random person going "Woah, woah, woah, lemme stop you right there!" and then carrying the segment on for another ten minutes. Not to say interruptions can never happen, but yeesh.
On that note, it's a little tough to explain what I think they should do overall, but in essence I'd go back to some of what worked in the 80s and 90s, namely that the show was presented like it was an organized sports/wrestling federation but it just so happened to be populated by a bunch of colorful, shouty, oiled up, living cartoons/coke fiends.
A lot of people look back at things like funny sketches that would happen on Prime Time and say they defined WWF in that era, but the reason those worked was that the rest of the promotion didn't get presented the same way most of the time, so those crazier moments were better able to shine. The matches were pre-announced, the majority of them went down without incident, promos were short and sweet whether they were in front of a crowd or in front of a blue screen, official announcements were handled by kayfabe executives and office types like Jack Tunney or Gorilla Monsoon, people like Okerlund and Sean Mooney looked and were presented as professional announcers and reporters, but this all served as a backdrop for the array of strange, larger than life characters who'd come out screaming something about space being the place or everybody having a price or loading spaceships with rocket fuel.
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Post by EoE: Well There's Your Problem on Dec 1, 2022 3:38:08 GMT -5
So, as we wrap up 2022 (and, as it turns out, in the interim period there's been a regime change), I wanted to bump this thread to specifically talk about the enhancement talent thing some more, if that's OK.
This tends to come up as a solution to the problem of the stars losing too much to the other stars, and we end up screaming at each other and into the void about it. I just have a few questions in relation to that:
1. How much of the show should be these kinds of matches? This fanbase craves logical unpredictability (stories and matches with multiple, equally plausible outcomes), yet enhancement matches are one of the most predictable tools at one's disposal in the entire genre. And predictability is the first step to your show becoming disposable and skippable. Why watch if you already know what's going to happen?
2. How do you sell this to crowds and TV networks? I get the belief of "WWE the brand is the draw these days", but does that mean crowds would still go to the shows next week if they suddenly switched out the roster and put in 50 nobodies? Nobody's ever going to be brave enough to try. But even within WWE, everyone still has their favourite wrestlers that they want to see at the show. Enhancement matches theoretically mean taking away half the stars from each match and replacing them with a "nobody", would that not mean that crowds and TV networks are not getting value for money?
3. How do you combat the genre-savviness of the fanbase? One phrase will kill the enhancement match concept in the grave... "Why should I care? They only beat jobbers". For any of this to be effective, the stars still have to beat the other stars at some point, and that brings us back to square one, I feel.
I probably need someone to explain to me what the failings of AEW Dark and AEW Elevation are, because those shows seem to be the model for what some of us want WWE to do with RAW and SmackDown, yet all I ever see is dialogue about how they're disposable shows and that the stronger win/loss records that come from there are not worth the paper they're not written on because they're beating up on nobodies and scrubs.
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Post by eJm on Dec 1, 2022 4:37:58 GMT -5
I don't know, a lot of these questions seem to be easily answered by "Depends on the story you want to tell". Have a match start if you want to get people into stuff later, have a promo if you want two talented performers barb with each other, have a brawl if you want to start hot and eventful, make it depend on what you want to do that week.
The bigger issue for me is the format has not changed much in 25 years. The show is still booked last minute even though it made sense to do it in 1997-98 because the owner was too busy scheming how to finally defeat Steve Austin this week and failing 99% of the time so it had to be made in the fly. A billion dollar company with global TV and streaming deals should not be figuring out how to book a main event before a show starts, it makes zero sense in 2022. Also, the invisible camera thing worked because, again, unpredictable show where chaos reigned and it's harder to do that when the chaos has been sanitized since, like, 2004 when they stopped trying to replicate the Attitude Era.
And I'll say it, USA doesn't need to be pitched on what Raw will be like now because it'll still be one of their top shows because USA only has Chucky and nothing else. They will not care as long as it draws the eyes. Fox, well, Smackdown is on Fridays to fill a spot since their main competition is whatever show CBS has for the 40+ demo and it's doing a good job in filling that spot so they won't care either as long as it doesn't break FCC regulations.
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Post by HMARK Center on Dec 1, 2022 8:13:49 GMT -5
Honestly, Dark and Elevation thrive on exactly what they're trying to be: they're shows where wrestlers who are going to be featured on the main shows soon get some spotlight on them ahead of time, they have smaller scale feuds involving lower carders, they'll showcase younger wrestlers who are getting their reps in, they'll usually have one or two more competitive matches like a really good old episode of Superstars or something, etc. Don't get me wrong: I was at both Full Gear and the Rampage taping the night before it, and Rampage was preceded by two hours of Dark, and at a certain point that can get old for the live crowd. But the biggest problem, I think, is that modern fans have been conditioned by every company around since the late 90s to not accept those matches for what they are and what they're supposed to accomplish. Then a show like Rampage will often bring in outside wrestlers or wrestlers with some name value who might not be under contract; they'll fight, they'll usually lose, but they'll put on a good showcase, but the criticism will be "but I KNEW who was going to win!", which largely misses the point.
I won't argue that Raw or SD should have tons of jobber squashes, again that would just get old when you're paying good money to be at a show, but the matches where it's clear who's going to win need to serve a purpose. Sometimes it's "look at this super strong, powerful wrestler tossing this enhancement wrestler around like it's nothing!", sometimes it's just a friendly reminder of "oh, so-and-so is here, let's not forget him/her, they'll probably be in a featured spot soon", but to me most of the time a jobber squash or whatever should revolve around imprinting on the fans what they should expect to see if the star being featured is in control of any match they're a part of - what kind of moves, what kind of mannerisms, what kind of facial expressions, the whole nine yards.
The key to that is that squashes are meant to build to subversions: you watch, I don't know, let's say Mr. Perfect hitting all his moves just right (perfectly, I suppose) against a jobber on Wrestling Challenge, but then when he has to step in the ring with Kerry Von Erich or Bret Hart suddenly he's getting cut off more often, suddenly he's getting hurt more, suddenly when he goes to gesture to the crowd he has a pained, wincing expression because he's now in a real fight, suddenly he can't hit the PerfectPlex as easily as he did on last week's syndicated squash match show, etc. You've gotten it established what this guy looks like when things are going almost 100% his way, now you see what happens when he's in the ring with someone capable of beating him and hurting him.
Again, though, I don't think audiences are as conditioned to this anymore, so if you're going to do it you should either go to the AEW route and have most of your squashes done for sort of "optional viewing" shows or you should just sprinkle them in sparingly on your main show.
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Bo Rida
Fry's dog Seymour
Pulled one over on everyone. Got away with it, this time.
Posts: 23,590
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Post by Bo Rida on Dec 1, 2022 9:22:06 GMT -5
^^ Generally speaking I think the use of jobbers should be miminal but completely agree they should be used to establish new people. I hate it when we hear a new high flyer is debuting and they spend most of their first match being beat down before a fluke win at the end. Show what they can do first!
I also think they'd make a good twist on beat the clock challenges, eg Who can beat three jobbers the fastest.
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Post by polarbearpete on Dec 1, 2022 10:28:51 GMT -5
They seem to still use jobbers on Raw and Smackdown from time to time but it’s usually only for “monster” type wrestlers or teams like Omos, Braun, the Viking Raiders.
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Post by eJm on Dec 1, 2022 10:32:33 GMT -5
^^ Generally speaking I think the use of jobbers should be miminal but completely agree they should be used to establish new people. I hate it when we hear a new high flyer is debuting and they spend most of their first match being beat down before a fluke win at the end. Show what they can do first! I also think they'd make a good twist on beat the clock challenges, eg Who can beat three jobbers the fastest. I think WWE’s jobber attitude is weird when one of their biggest homegrown stars of the last decade or so was made almost entirely off of squash matches in Ryback and, honestly, it wasn’t even his fault it all fell apart.
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Post by Jindrak Mark on Dec 1, 2022 13:15:59 GMT -5
I think Smackdown and NXT are fine but with Raw it's still the third hour problem. I rarely watch Raw live but when I do I'm always burnt out by the 120-150 minute mark even if I've enjoyed most of the stuff. It's just too long for a non-PPV wrestling show. There's no point in saying get rid of it though. It's been over a decade. It's obviously here to stay. No one in their right mind is giving up an extra $50m a year when the only extra work you have to pit in is adding 5 minutes to a few matches and booking a few extra promos.
There must be a way to utilize the extra hour better though. I've seen a one hour pre-show suggested a lot over the years but I think that would absolutely die in the ratings and people would just not bother tuning in until 9pm.
Maybe one hour every week is a scheduled open challenge/championship hour. One week it's the US title. Next week it's the Women's/Tag etc.
An NXT showcase match every week. These people are in front of the same audience in Florida every week so it's hard to tell who's actually over. Test them out on Raw and see who the main roster crowds react positively to.
An in-depth sit-down interview every week. Mankind's series with JR around 96/97 really helped get him over. Cathy Kelley/Byron Saxton have a 5-10 minute interview with a new person every week, discussing their past, their aspirations for the future, etc.
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Post by Lizuka #BLM on Dec 2, 2022 22:05:01 GMT -5
I'm kind of of two minds on the whole idea of featuring more squash matches because like I get the utility of them but it's not something I have any use whatsoever for watching and don't really understand why anyone would. If it's something like Umaga where he was just murdering dudes there's some novelty in that but that's very much the exception.
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