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Post by Jacy Jayne Atomic Dog AMV on Mar 19, 2023 21:13:28 GMT -5
Tossing aside all variables like individual company styles just to make this easier on my brain, yes. Oh my god yes. The average 90s American TV match is like a ring full of dudes loaded up on codeine fighting in a swimming pool.
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Post by Mozenrath on Mar 19, 2023 21:25:32 GMT -5
Tossing aside all variables like individual company styles just to make this easier on my brain, yes. Oh my god yes. The average 90s American TV match is like a ring full of dudes loaded up on codeine fighting in a swimming pool. It's funny in that I've seen people complain at times about today's wrestlers not looking like wrestlers, and I'm sure in their mind they're comparing Janela to the Road Warriors or the like, but so many dudes in the '90s looked like chubby dads. Like, a surprising number of dudes wrestled in t-shirts and sweat pants. If they had wrist tape and boots, you were lucky. If you line up Konnusuke Takeshita and Road Dogg, one of them looks like a wrestler, and it's not the dude in cornrows.
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Post by Jacy Jayne Atomic Dog AMV on Mar 19, 2023 21:38:54 GMT -5
Something that also makes this a difficult question to answer in terms of the US is how long WWE spent clinging on to the sheer plod of the WWE Style well after it was time for it to get deaded in retrospect. Like if I had to work out one of the biggest unspoken reasons that I became PROPERTY OF TNA WRESTLING (real shirt) in 2005, it'd probably be how f***ing slow WWE was in comparison.
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Post by Cyno on Mar 19, 2023 22:08:37 GMT -5
Something that also makes this a difficult question to answer in terms of the US is how long WWE spent clinging on to the sheer plod of the WWE Style well after it was time for it to get deaded in retrospect. Like if I had to work out one of the biggest unspoken reasons that I became PROPERTY OF TNA WRESTLING (real shirt) in 2005, it'd probably be how f***ing slow WWE was in comparison. Yeah, like, I watched a Smackdown for the first time in nearly a year around when Brodie Lee died because I wanted to see what kind of tributes he'd get from the likes of Big E (who the Huber family is very close to) and co. And while the wrestling was fine, it felt like I was watching people wrestle in molasses compared to what I was regularly watching at the time (AEW, Impact, even New Japan). I really never noticed at how slow a pace WWE-style matches tended to be worked at until I took a long-ass break from it. Especially since the last time I took a break from WWE before that was in the early-mid 00's, where taking a WWE break meant taking a wrestling break. I wasn't really engaged with the IWC so while I was aware international and indie promotions existed, I didn't really know about them or have the means to watch them. I heard a few of my friends mention TNA sometimes but I saw "TNA" and thought it stood for "Tits N Ass" and dismissed it out of hand like a softcore fetish promotion or something. 💀
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Post by Dr. Bolty, Disaster Enby on Mar 19, 2023 22:23:46 GMT -5
Something that also makes this a difficult question to answer in terms of the US is how long WWE spent clinging on to the sheer plod of the WWE Style well after it was time for it to get deaded in retrospect. Like if I had to work out one of the biggest unspoken reasons that I became PROPERTY OF TNA WRESTLING (real shirt) in 2005, it'd probably be how f***ing slow WWE was in comparison. Yeah, like, I watched a Smackdown for the first time in nearly a year around when Brodie Lee died because I wanted to see what kind of tributes he'd get from the likes of Big E (who the Huber family is very close to) and co. And while the wrestling was fine, it felt like I was watching people wrestle in molasses compared to what I was regularly watching at the time (AEW, Impact, even New Japan). I really never noticed at how slow a pace WWE-style matches tended to be worked at until I took a long-ass break from it. Especially since the last time I took a break from WWE before that was in the early-mid 00's, where taking a WWE break meant taking a wrestling break. I wasn't really engaged with the IWC so while I was aware international and indie promotions existed, I didn't really know about them or have the means to watch them. I heard a few of my friends mention TNA sometimes but I saw "TNA" and thought it stood for "Tits N Ass" and dismissed it out of hand like a softcore fetish promotion or something. 💀 I have a sort of counterpart experience (re: the culture shock of speed differences) in that I specifically chose TJPW as my second promotion to follow at the moment because I wanted a slower and simpler wrestling style to complement what I'm watching in AEW. Helps that TJPW is good at integrating gimmicks into the ringwork, a lack of which was often my bigger issue with the WWE style.
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Post by "Evil Brood" Jackson Vanik on Mar 19, 2023 22:38:44 GMT -5
At least in the United States - absolutely. And even if you want a more story based approach, I'd say that's still the case more often than not. There's a lot more thought behind these matches and the stories they're trying to tell. Look at Page/Omega or some of Roman's bigger matches. Even matches like Cassidy/Lethal tell great stories within the matches. I've gone back and watched a lot of weekly American TV across the different major companies (WWF/TNA/WCW) and it's just such a glut of nothing happening matches that have no reason behind them and there's no story to the matches.
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Post by Fake Jesus on Mar 20, 2023 2:10:12 GMT -5
On average yeah. But very few wrestlers today approach the psychology and skill of the top, greatest workers of that period. A lot of main event wrestling feels like a random cartoon now. Weirdly WWE has been on a march back to a more 80s NWA style with the Roman Reigns title run
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Post by Bo Rida on Mar 20, 2023 5:18:03 GMT -5
Something I think skews these discussions is how hard it must be to stand out these days.
One reason I like TJPW is because they have a relatively small roster of around 25 that allows them to have distinct characters, move-sets, strenghs and weaknesses. As a result you can basically put them in any combination and get an interesting dynamic.
Go to the aew roster listed alphabetically on Wikipedia and counting 25 wrestlers won't even get you past the letter B. Similar with other companies. How does a new wrestler stand out amongst that many? It's rare you can rely on a single move like wrestlers of the past or coast on the reputation of a few matches.
Counter intuitively you have to be capable of more but do less. I don't think it's a coincidence some of the most over wrestlers like Mox, Hook, Orange Cassidy and Eddie have a very distinct style that they stick to.
It's something Minoru Suzuki has talked about, you need weaknesses, better to be excellent at one thing than good at everything.
Technically someone like Jay Lethal is better than many that came before, his matches have phycology but I think many find him boring because he does a bit of everything but none of it stands out.
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Post by pinja on Mar 20, 2023 8:15:29 GMT -5
Today's wrestling is much more accustomed to tv, to having an endless flow of content. The great matches from the past are still great. But watching matches between two midcarders without any storyline or build was boring, while today's crop of athletic wrestlers can make that work much better. It's just that the returns of seeing people do cool stuff diminished long ago for me.
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Post by "Cane Dewey" Johnson on Mar 20, 2023 16:41:56 GMT -5
<cut for space> Having kind of gotten back into wrestling recently, watching PPVs from both WWE and AEW, there are only a handful of talents who stand out, who are over, while everyone else recedes into the background either as a time-occupier or a placeholder or a warm body to fill up a match. Out of intrest who were those people that stood out? I'll focus on AEW because WWE has had lots of talent I've heard about, or knew the name of, without having seen them, while AEW was mostly an entirely new roster minus some former WWE guys and big names like Omega and the Bucks. This was about a year ago, maybe 2 years ago, when I started checking out AEW semi-frequently. First guy who was *the* guy who stood out to me was MJF. As soon as I saw him, I thought, that's gotta be the guy to lead AEW into the future. Still think this now, but I can see why people might be tired of his try-hard heel act. Next guy was Ricky Starks. Maybe he tries a bit too hard to be like the Rock, but he can do cocky heel or hungry babyface well enough, but he's just got to focus on being himself. I mostly don't care about tag team wrestling, but at the time, Santana and Ortiz stood out. They were fast and the moves looked tight, and they felt like a legitimate team and not two random guys put together. On the women's side, Britt Baker stood out. I love the idea of a wrestler who is also a dentist, but not in a jokey Isaac Yankem, DDS way. I've seen portions of that Lights Out match she had with Thunder Rosa, and I thought she came across like a star. Maybe controversially, Jade Cargill. I like her look, and I think there's a place in wrestling for Goldberg-esque matches. Has her title reign gone on too long? Probably. But I could see TK wanting to build the women's roster with Cargill as one of the draws. She has final boss vibes if AEW wants to push a smaller wrestler into the ME title scene. More recently, the Acclaimed. When I first saw them, they came across like a better, more polished version of the New Age Outlaws, but flipped: the talker is the bigger guy who gets the hot tags while the worker is the smaller guy to gain the sympathy. They stand out as AEW originals, but my lack of interest in tag team wrestling does take a bit of shine off the two guys.
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Post by Mochi Lone Wolf on Mar 20, 2023 17:17:39 GMT -5
In terms of athleticism? In terms of story and psychology? It depends on what you’re watching.
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Post by SkullTrauma on Mar 20, 2023 20:56:45 GMT -5
bleh
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Post by The Thread Barbi on Mar 20, 2023 21:17:19 GMT -5
A re-watch of Bret Hart vs 123 Kid for the WWF Championship on RAW holds my attention far more than modern wrestling.
I think we're in the social media era where much more athletic wrestlers (and their producers) are putting together "moments" for the TikTok clips or YouTube views rather than meat and potatoes storytelling.
Not a knock on the wrestlers putting their asses on the line for our entertainment, but it's just how it is nowadays - at least to me.
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Mar 21, 2023 0:21:44 GMT -5
Not even factoring in how WWE's PC has changed things exponentially from the OVW and FCW days, or how AEW has multiple schools and coaches to help train up and comers in the current day to be better overall at wrestling... let's even look at the lower bar indies.
In the early 2010's, my local indies were f***ing terrible, a bunch of dudes trained by guys who only taught basics and they were lucky to learn those, only carried by nostalgia guys coming in from WWE and ECW on cards. A ton of guys who just weren't properly fitted to do this otherwise, sloppy gimmicky matches, and a FEW good workers splashed in, that blew the others out of the water, for reference, one of them is current Ring of Honor/AEW wrestler Tony Deppen, who was doing springboard 450's in front of crowds of like 35 people... I was one of those 35 people lol.
Inevitably, stuff like CHIKARA helped grow the circuit to the point that those types faded out, and more actual trained wrestlers from legitimate places like The WrestleFactory and places near it from the Jersey and New York Areas started to put out better, more competently trained wrestlers, essentially, doing it for the right reasons
Last year an actual Indie called Stand Alone Wrestling came to my town and it was full of actual good wrestlers who were properly trained by the likes of the C4 school and such, some guys who worked AEW DARK's or GCW shows, etc. It was actual quality matches, for a town that really loves wrestling and deserves to see some good wrestling for what they come out and pop for.
The wrestling from top to bottom and training people from the rag tag fed to the top of the ladder, has improved, and I don't think this is even a question imo
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Post by Bo Rida on Mar 21, 2023 6:18:08 GMT -5
A re-watch of Bret Hart vs 123 Kid for the WWF Championship on RAW holds my attention far more than modern wrestling. I think we're in the social media era where much more athletic wrestlers (and their producers) are putting together "moments" for the TikTok clips or YouTube views rather than meat and potatoes storytelling. Not a knock on the wrestlers putting their asses on the line for our entertainment, but it's just how it is nowadays - at least to me. I'd put Bret above nearly everyone too but there's a reason many of us remember that match three decades later, it was so much better than other matches on TV at that time. It's not like we were getting that quality every week. It's why I think it's better to look at the average quality than cherry picking the best and worst examples, although of course there's value in that too. That said I largely agree with the social media point, epecially the obsession with isolated Wrestlemania moments rather than coherent stories in the later years of Vince's reign. It goes back to what I said earlier, it's so hard for a wrestler to stand out these days.
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Post by sportatorium on Mar 21, 2023 20:11:52 GMT -5
The 80's and 90's had the following as protected finishers:
A legdrop The DDT Swinging Neckbreaker Sleeper Hold Fisherman's Suplex A power slam...
...and the list can go on. Many of these aren't even used in ring anymore and if they are, they are just minor parts of matches that don't mean much. Whether we think the match quality was better or worse, it couldn't be more different. You could have a formulaic Hogan/Bossman match that would feature Bossman beating him up before Hogan's comeback and a big 300 pound dude would throw himself all over the ring to get everything over. At the time it seemed incredible, but probably looks tame compared to a midcard TV match now.
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Post by Glitch on Mar 23, 2023 3:29:49 GMT -5
Yes. in the same way action in movies have changed over the years. Things improve as we move on. It's the same reason it's more entertaining to watch John Wick throw hands than to watch John Wayne do his hilarious haymakers.
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Post by HMARK Center on Mar 23, 2023 9:28:20 GMT -5
Yeah, like, I watched a Smackdown for the first time in nearly a year around when Brodie Lee died because I wanted to see what kind of tributes he'd get from the likes of Big E (who the Huber family is very close to) and co. And while the wrestling was fine, it felt like I was watching people wrestle in molasses compared to what I was regularly watching at the time (AEW, Impact, even New Japan). I really never noticed at how slow a pace WWE-style matches tended to be worked at until I took a long-ass break from it. Especially since the last time I took a break from WWE before that was in the early-mid 00's, where taking a WWE break meant taking a wrestling break. I wasn't really engaged with the IWC so while I was aware international and indie promotions existed, I didn't really know about them or have the means to watch them. I heard a few of my friends mention TNA sometimes but I saw "TNA" and thought it stood for "Tits N Ass" and dismissed it out of hand like a softcore fetish promotion or something. 💀 I have a sort of counterpart experience (re: the culture shock of speed differences) in that I specifically chose TJPW as my second promotion to follow at the moment because I wanted a slower and simpler wrestling style to complement what I'm watching in AEW. Helps that TJPW is good at integrating gimmicks into the ringwork, a lack of which was often my bigger issue with the WWE style. Yeah, I think it's very important to ask people which wrestling they're talking about when we ask for comparisons between "then and now"; there are so many widely available, different kinds of wrestling today, different styles and ring psychology and roster sizes and touring/TV schedules, that it's hard to say what the answer is on the whole. Obviously there was a lot of variety in the old days, too, but the amount of wrestling most people could actually access in the 70s-90s was a lot more limited unless you were in a small tape trading circuit. For me, at least with the wrestling I like to watch (primarily NJPW, Stardom, AEW/ROH, and I'm trying to get a bit more into NOAH and TJPW), I think we've been in a golden era for a good while - most of the promotions I watch put in the work to tell stories with their matches, integrate gimmicks well into those matches, etc. They see the ring as the place where the stories get told, primarily, even if there's still a place for angles and promos and whatnot, and the physical storytelling of matches like Tanahashi/Naito and Omega/Okada at Wrestle Kingdom 11 are on a level that few can touch, combined with insane athleticism. But we also have to acknowledge that we're in a different era than the old days: audiences are now trained to expect weekly shows to be multi-hour extravaganzas rather than an hour of squashes, we expect to see the biggest stars featured on a weekly basis, and thus our tolerance for the kinds of matches that often populated older wrestling shows, where you might get one 10 minute match between midcarders and were expected to buy a ticket or a pay per view to see the biggest names, is nil. Sure, that tolerance plummeted as early as the late 90s, but back then we simply had fewer options to watch and, quite frankly, there are reasons why the Monday Night War era flamed out fairly quickly, and some of it was "huh, a lot of this isn't very good, is it?" That said, yeah, I've said before that my bigger qualms today are towards WWE; for all the talk I've heard for years that my favorite promotions were "spotfest" shows (people were saying this about ROH back in 2004, for god's sake, when Joe vs. Punk was taking the world by storm by telling a story around whether CM Punk could keep Samoa Joe in a headlock), to me it's WWE that's most often engaging in spotfests - not the high-flying "hit a twisting plancha then run up and hit a destroyer" move spamming kind, but a "hit these spots no matter whether they make sense or not" way, given that too often their matches are built around a repetitive formula that ultimately make what happens in the ring feel kind of immaterial to the story being told. They seem a bit better about that now (older WWE never would've given people something like the matches Gunther will have, especially when he and someone like Sheamus can just club the shit out of one another), but the idea that "spotfests" are just "matches with lots of moves in them" just utterly ignores heaps of storytelling in, say, a match like Omega vs. Ospreay from earlier this year. I do like the summary someone made before: older wrestling often tried to be more of a simulated sport, while still using lots of unrealistic stuff in doing so (e.g. Irish whips, not selling armbars are insanely dangerous), while a lot of modern wrestling is more going for narrative driven, TV/movie kind of storytelling and still using lots of unrealistic stuff in doing so (e.g. Canadian destroyers and the like). A lot of it will come down to what you simply prefer; like, personally, I like having some protected finishers in a company, but I'm totally fine with a lot of finishers being more like signature moves that might not be "one-shot kills". Other people really want everyone to have a protected finisher. Can't tell them they're wrong, just that there are different ways to approach it while still utilizing strong psychology and storytelling.
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Post by Bo Rida on Mar 23, 2023 14:20:25 GMT -5
Even though I said today's I have to add that I don't think it's entirely fair to only use 80s/90s American national TV wrestling as the benchmark. There were pockets of things way ahead of their time. Trouble is much of it is lost. Original Tiger mask, 90s Joshi, the good bits of 70s world of sport, sheephearder brawls etc.
I guarantee if Yuta and Claudio recreated this match from 1957 they'd have the crowd going crazy.
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