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Post by Feyrhausen on May 6, 2022 16:29:39 GMT -5
It's something you have to do at some point. This time they waited way too long imo. If they would've just kept having NXT as a developmental brand like it's supposed to be instead of making it super indy workrate league then they wouldn't be in the mess they are in currently where almost all of their main eventers are 35 or older and most cases well into their 40's and have all been on TV for at least a decade with no one developed or ready enough to replace them. Pre dating even that. They wasted an entire generation of wrestlers from 2005 to 2015 or so. Chris Masters, MVP, Carlito, Kennedy, Dibiase, Rhodes. An entire generation of future main eventers that WWE wasted. Sure some had problems but WWE didnt even try to fix things. Just sacrificed them to the alter of Cena, Orton, Batista, and H. And I am sure there are many more I am not familiar with as from 2011 to 2016 I was pretty much tuned out.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2022 16:32:31 GMT -5
Honestly, they won't find that star. They've been trying to smash Roman over for nearly a decade and he can't sniff any of those guys. They also don't really want anyone to get "that" over, no one is bigger than the brand now. It's my honest belief that John Cena was the last mega over superface they're ever going to have, at least as long as Vince is around. Possibly but Roman is also a lot more over from an overall popularity standpoint with the general public and media than people online give him credit for but I agree with the overall sentiment that no one will be more popular than the brand going forward.
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Nr1Humanoid
Hank Scorpio
Is the #3 humanoid at best.
Posts: 5,534
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Post by Nr1Humanoid on May 6, 2022 17:24:41 GMT -5
Vince McMahon is a weird little man and he has our pity.
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nisidhe
Hank Scorpio
O Superman....O judge....O Mom and Dad....
Posts: 5,738
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Post by nisidhe on May 7, 2022 17:48:13 GMT -5
I think the last few years of WWE's decision-making have done significant damage to its resiliency now that their "vision" of working with younger talent has become clearer.
Their increasing genericization of talent regardless of source will make them a no-go for many wrestlers who've made names and gimmicks for themselves elsewhere, _especially_ if their achievements aren't acknowledged. The ongoing burial, creative suppression and overall mistreatment of the experienced talent does not go unnoticed, especially by fans. If the talent sees the fans turning away from them, the fear increases that those same fans will not follow them to their next promotion when they leave the company - and that impact on the talent's overall legacy is kind of important to more of them now than it has probably ever been to those talents who've sat at or near the top of the heap. I get WWE's strategy here - "our talents are the best, because WE made them!" - but deep down Vince knows the value of the Dungeon system and that he can't replicate it in three months (or more) in the PC.
Within three years or so, WWE will once again come shopping for the best that the wrestling business has to offer. Will there be any significant interest? There are rumblings of current talent willing to take a shot at the WWE system but they know what will likely be their fate. Therein lies the existential crisis of the professional wrestler: do I continue the hustle of the indie life or do I take the bigger money(?) and the possibility of greater exposure through WWE (albeit with a much smaller moveset and limited creative freedom)? There are alternatives out there - real alternatives - to WWE and the money gap is shrinking, especially for those WWE would like to hoard for themselves but can't or won't use to their potential. As more and more wrestlers take those alternatives and the money grows for the business as a whole, WWE may face a vortex of undertrained and less-talented rookies and a great dearth of veteran talents capable of or willing to guide them. And, in the "WWE uber alles" era, those veterans remaining may not be willing to give up their spots just yet. That's a recipe for poor matches, bad booking and nonsensical storylines - with nobody willing (for cheap) to come in from outside to fix any of it.
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lucas_lee
Hank Scorpio
Heel turn is finished, now stripping away my personality
Posts: 6,789
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Post by lucas_lee on May 7, 2022 20:09:05 GMT -5
The last youth movement they did was horrible too (New Generation) from a storyline and gimmick perspective. In-ring it was fine, but thats usually not the biggest issues with WWE products. Vince s idea of what the kids like also almost sank them with the NG era, with watered down rap gimmicks, a grunge style rocker, and various other weird oddities. It did them no favors and I think NxT 2.0 is gonna usher in the New Generation 2.0
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Post by HMARK Center on May 7, 2022 20:38:40 GMT -5
Gonna repeat what I said about this whole thing when it first came up: if the whole story was just "WWE is looking to hire people with pre-existing athletic backgrounds and train them from the ground up, and they have a complete system to make that workable", that'd be fine. The territories were partly built on promoters going to gyms and college games and finding athletic guys who weren't going to make the pros and giving them a chance, for example.
The issue is...they don't have a system that makes that workable. Their track record in training people to be solid workers, let alone become stars, is shockingly bad for a company with WWE's reach and resources.
I made a comparison with Japanese dojo systems. I preface this with saying I realize that Japan's got a very different work/corporate culture than the US, in some ways far worse and in some ways far better. But where they make their dojo system work is that they typically do target young athletes who come from non-pro wrestling backgrounds: Hiroshi Tanahashi and Kazuchika Okada are two of NJPW's biggest stars of the last fifteen years, and in their youths they were a baseball player and a track star, respectively.
The difference is that once you're in the dojo, you get trained well. You work out like mad, you drill the fundamentals like crazy, and in just about any halfway decent dojo you at least come out capable of working a solid foundational match and never come off as lost in the ring or unaware of what your limits and capabilities are. At the same time, at a decent dojo you get a sort of apprenticeship: you live at the dojo, you get fed there, you do chores there, and then you spend live shows both learning from the vets who are there and helping out with things like putting up and taking down the ring or serving as warm bodies for angles involving the stars (ala indie wrestlers getting hired to take bumps as security guards). Once you've proven you're ready, something that can take quite awhile, you then get to have an excursion out to a promotion or two somewhere else around the world, so you can learn different styles and how different audiences work, as well as fine tune yourself a gimmick for when you return home.
If WWE could demonstrate that they were capable of putting together a "ground-up" system like that, then a youth movement would make total sense. Fact is, the simply haven't done that, at least not with any consistency. With their seeming inability or lack of desire to put in the full effort to train better, you're basically stuck having to go with older wrestlers, lest your show be a parade of green wrestlers who are being tossed into the deep end without proper preparation.
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