The TV and Streaming Thread: Series 5

[Zoraptor]

Vince McMahon has been a case study in "no, it's the kids that are wrong!" for at least the last decade. The most telling factor is how much happier literally everyone seems when they're, uh, performing elsewhere in the sports entertainment universe shall we say. Despite being over managed you can hardly say that it's well run either and not just because they insist on a load of stupid branding catchphrases.

Be interesting to see if WWE is really up for sale. At some point the balance between keeping a very vanilla product line to not offend potential buyers and losing market share will shift.

[Keyrock]

Yeah, Vince has been operating on the "I know what the fans want better than the fans know what they want" philosophy for a long time and he could get away with it because the WWE has been essentially the only game in town for two decades. They don't even bother with the biennial charade where the McMahons come out to the ring and tell the fans they are listening and changes are coming, because they have pulled that stunt so many times and there were never any changes that they can't even pretend to care any more. They have such lucrative TV deals and got such an obscene amount of blood money from MBS to do Saudi shows that it's going to take a long time for the stagnation of WWE's product to start hurting them in the pocketbook. Then of course, there is the rumor of a sale. Who knows if it is true and if it would be a positive or negative.

Luckily, there is now a legit alternative for the first time in over 20 years.

[Hurlshort]

I've had my moments when I've been into wrestling, but usually it was because I was watching with friends. Now I tend to enjoy all the documentaries and the odd reality show that dives into the behind the scenes, but I have trouble keeping up with any of the athletes and their storylines.

[Amentep]

14 hours ago, Keyrock said:

AEW has their bad moments, nobody bats 1.000, but their good moments far outnumber their bad moments. More importantly, it's a company that's genuinely trying to make their fans happy, and you can't fake that. Speaking of embarrassingly bad, WWE is really rough right now. Smackdown at least has Roman Reigns, who is killing it since hooking up with Paul Heyman, Raw is just a dumpster fire, borderline unwatchable. I mean, WWE has been declining in terms of the quality of the product for well over a decade now, but they really fell off a few years ago, rivaling the really rough years of 1995 and 1996, when WWE (WWF at the time) was just garbage. The optimist in me is hoping that AEW's rise will be the wake up call WWE needs and they get their **** together and put on great, exciting shows again, much like WCW kicking their ass for 83 straight weeks forced WWF to adapt and brought about the Attitude Era, which had a ton of garbage that people forget about via rose tinted glasses, but also had so much greatness. The difference is that in 96 WWF was legitimately in danger of going out of business, these days they are making ludicrous amounts of money no matter how trash the product is, plus Vince McMahon is like 75 or 76; even brilliant promoters eventually fall out of touch.

Ring of Honor still exists, not as great as they were in the mid 2000s, but still a solid product. TNA still exists, somehow, rebranded as Impact Wrestling. It's a a fairly good product, but it's hard to get rid of the TNA stink. New Japan Pro Wrestling was super hot for several years, but the pandemic really hurt them. The pandemic hit at the absolute worst time for AEW, it could have absolutely killed the company just as they were getting off the ground, yet they arguably got through it the best of all the companies. I mean the pandemic isn't over, but we do have live crowds again. AEW is the only American company even remotely on WWE's level in terms of production value and ability to fill 6000, 7000, 10000 seat arenas.

I wasn't sure about IMPACT - haven't heard much about them lately.  Certainly they and Ring of Honor haven't been an prominent as they once were.  I guess technically there's still whatever is left of the NWA going along as well (Nick Aldis is champ)? 

Vince seems to be dumping talent in the hopes that AEW picks all the guys up and breaks their budget.  Which they've done before, but unlike in WCW where there were people at the larger company (after Turner got shafted by TimeWarner) who wanted to kill wrestling, budget isn't a short term issue for AEW so I think its a tactical blunder.  Then again, I think taking WWE public was a bad, bad idea for the long term future of WWE.

The only wrestling I have access to regularly is Smackdown, and everytime I flip over its an ad for a pay-per-view or people shouting at each other on the mics.  Very little actual wrestling.  The clips I've seen of AEW seems like they try to wrestle, but several of their top people are wrestling in ways I don't terribly enjoy.  But it seems a few are doing sort of fun classical style wrestling, so a mixed bag from the little I've seen.

Still competition is good, if the WWE ever decides it needs to compete.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Finished up s2 of TOS last night.

Man, Starfleet are a bunch of ****. One guy turns a planet into Nazis, another becomes a collaborator to a 20th century Roman empire, and another wants to monopolize longevity. I guess they had better vetting by the time Picard became a captain.

[Keyrock]

3 hours ago, Amentep said:

I wasn't sure about IMPACT - haven't heard much about them lately.  Certainly they and Ring of Honor haven't been an prominent as they once were.  I guess technically there's still whatever is left of the NWA going along as well (Nick Aldis is champ)? 

Vince seems to be dumping talent in the hopes that AEW picks all the guys up and breaks their budget.  Which they've done before, but unlike in WCW where there were people at the larger company (after Turner got shafted by TimeWarner) who wanted to kill wrestling, budget isn't a short term issue for AEW so I think its a tactical blunder.  Then again, I think taking WWE public was a bad, bad idea for the long term future of WWE.

The only wrestling I have access to regularly is Smackdown, and everytime I flip over its an ad for a pay-per-view or people shouting at each other on the mics.  Very little actual wrestling.  The clips I've seen of AEW seems like they try to wrestle, but several of their top people are wrestling in ways I don't terribly enjoy.  But it seems a few are doing sort of fun classical style wrestling, so a mixed bag from the little I've seen.

Still competition is good, if the WWE ever decides it needs to compete.

AEW sort of resembles WCW in a way. WWE has a homogenized product. Occasionally they will bring someone in who wrestled somewhere else for a long time and they bring a bit of their old style to the WWE, but over time they get molded into the WWE style, and anyone who started their career with WWE always uses that style. There's nothing wrong with WWE's style, but everyone just kinda wrestles the same. WCW, particularly in 96 and 97, was like a variety show. You'd have an old school emotional southern style tag match, a hard hitting brawl between two hosses, a highly technical catch as catch can classic, a lucha libre match, some Japanese strong style, you never knew what you might see. AEW is like that where they have people from all over the world working wildly different styles and instead of molding the people into their show, ala WWE, they mold their show around the people. I can't tell you which approach is better, they both have their pros and cons, but I can tell you which approach I enjoy watching more and it's the variety show.

One area where I think AEW is VASTLY superior to WWE is in promos. For the longest time, WWE has scripted all their promos. A few people here an there had Vince's trust enough to where they could alter their promos and even occasionally shoot from the hip, but 95% of the time people just memorize the lines they are given and repeat them verbatim; they are all even taught to speak with the same cadence and emphasize certain words. It makes all their promos seem very artificial, like someone reading lines off a prompter, which in essence is what is happening. I hate scripted promos with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. AEW doesn't have writers for promos, the wrestlers themselves come up with the promos, sink or swim, like in the good ol' territories days. People in AEW sound a lot more genuine because they are speaking their own words. Some come up with the promos in advance and memorize them, some can just shoot from the hip, but in either case it's their own words and not a script written for them.

@KP the meanie zucchiniTOS was working a a pretty lean budget, so they would just sort of reuse whatever props and costumes they had lying around the studio from whatever show or movie was recently shot. That's how you wound up with hilariously weird stuff like a planet full of Nazis. 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

7 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

TOS was working a a pretty lean budget, so they would just sort of reuse whatever props and costumes they had lying around the studio from whatever show or movie was recently shot. That's how you wound up with hilariously weird stuff like a planet full of Nazis. 

I can definitely see that lmao. But I think it's weird that Starfleet officers aside from the crew are more likely to be villains or just incompetent/dumb. Like, maybe yall should have vetted these guys a little better before dropping them off on a planet with no oversight for years. 

[Keyrock]

35 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

I can definitely see that lmao. But I think it's weird that Starfleet officers aside from the crew are more likely to be villains or just incompetent/dumb. Like, maybe yall should have vetted these guys a little better before dropping them off on a planet with no oversight for years. 

I'm sure there's an entire subreddit dedicated to the "Starfleet are actually the villains" theory. 

Edited September 7, 2021 by Keyrock

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

40 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

I'm sure there's an entire subreddit dedicated to the "Starfleet are actually the villains" theory. 

Half of that would be Romulan or Cardassian stans though.

[Keyrock]

6 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

Half of that would be Romulan or Cardassian stans though.

I'm a Ferengi stan, where does that put me? 

[ShadySands]

3 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

I'm a Ferengi stan, where does that put me? 

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

16 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

I'm a Ferengi stan, where does that put me? 

As a Memory Beta wiki editor.

[Amentep]

2 hours ago, Keyrock said:

AEW sort of resembles WCW in a way. WWE has a homogenized product. Occasionally they will bring someone in who wrestled somewhere else for a long time and they bring a bit of their old style to the WWE, but over time they get molded into the WWE style, and anyone who started their career with WWE always uses that style. There's nothing wrong with WWE's style, but everyone just kinda wrestles the same. WCW, particularly in 96 and 97, was like a variety show. You'd have an old school emotional southern style tag match, a hard hitting brawl between two hosses, a highly technical catch as catch can classic, a lucha libre match, some Japanese strong style, you never knew what you might see. AEW is like that where they have people from all over the world working wildly different styles and instead of molding the people into their show, ala WWE, they mold their show around the people. I can't tell you which approach is better, they both have their pros and cons, but I can tell you which approach I enjoy watching more and it's the variety show.

One area where I think AEW is VASTLY superior to WWE is in promos. For the longest time, WWE has scripted all their promos. A few people here an there had Vince's trust enough to where they could alter their promos and even occasionally shoot from the hip, but 95% of the time people just memorize the lines they are given and repeat them verbatim; they are all even taught to speak with the same cadence and emphasize certain words. It makes all their promos seem very artificial, like someone reading lines off a prompter, which in essence is what is happening. I hate scripted promos with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. AEW doesn't have writers for promos, the wrestlers themselves come up with the promos, sink or swim, like in the good ol' territories days. People in AEW sound a lot more genuine because they are speaking their own words. Some come up with the promos in advance and memorize them, some can just shoot from the hip, but in either case it's their own words and not a script written for them.

@KP the meanie zucchiniTOS was working a a pretty lean budget, so they would just sort of reuse whatever props and costumes they had lying around the studio from whatever show or movie was recently shot. That's how you wound up with hilariously weird stuff like a planet full of Nazis. 

I miss the territories.  That said, WCW* had their moments (although, they also had the whole NWO era).  Speaking of WCW, really sad to hear of Shannon "Daffney Unger" Spruill's passing.  I had been to a couple of live streams she did and at the time she was doing okay, but struggling with depression and possibly CTE.  It sounds like things only got worse for her.  But she was one of the few bright spots in WCW there at the end (where she was mostly a manager/valet; sadly I only saw some of her TNA run where she really came into her own as a wrestler).

I think the overly scripted nature of WWE is one of the biggest drains on their shows when I've tried to watch.  Seeing two people monologuing at one another is just boring (and makes everyone sound the same).  Plus they other things that make the show seem like a badly written television drama (comedy?) where people explain things for the viewer in dialogue between one another.  Yuck to 'sports entertainment'.  Vastly prefer the old days promo where the wrestlers (or the manager) came out and gave some fire and personality to the proceedings.

*Yes I know WCW essentially grew out of my territory, but Georgia Championship Wrestling was better.  

[Keyrock]

21 minutes ago, Amentep said:

*Yes I know WCW essentially grew out of my territory, but Georgia Championship Wrestling was better.  

I was in Connecticut at the time, so obviously we got WWF, but whenever I could find a way to get some southern territories stuff that was such a treat. Mid-South (later UWF during Bill Watts' ill-fated attempt to go National) was my jam. That wrestling is sadly mostly gone, the business always changes and never goes back, it's the way of things. Once is a blue moon you'll get Cody Rhodes in AEW doing an old school emotional, often bloody, Championship Wrestling from Florida style match, ala his late father. That's about the last bastion of those glory days we have today.

On the bright side, I love me some lucha libre and I get to see plenty of that. The thing about lucha is that when it's bad it's really really bad, you have people standing around just waiting to catch somebody and it looks so ****ing phony. However, when it's good lucha is spectacular. The good news is that AEW has a couple of the absolute best luchadors on Planet Earth in the Lucha Bros (Fenix and Penta). Those guys are so ludicrously good. Penta has so much charisma it's unfair, and I don't even speak Spanish. Fenix, I'm convinced, isn't human; my man defies the laws of physics on a regular basis, I can't even begin to describe some of the things he does, it doesn't make any sense.

[Amentep]

Mid-South was good.  Crockett's Mid-Atlantic and Fritz Von Erich's World Class Championship Wrestling.  Mid-America (Jarrett) and Contenental (Gulas) were good too when Lawler was in them.  Florida was a big influence on GCW, since the NWA got some of the Florida group to run opposition on Ann Gunkel when the ownership dispute over ABC Booking happened (where the partners of Ann's late husband, Ray, decided to cut her out and reformed the business without her, so she ran opposition under the All-South Wrestling Alliance; the NWA sided against Ann and got Florida to help), so we ended up getting a good bit of Dusty.  In fact in the 80s you could watch the American Dream slap opponents in the ring and then slap car hoods for a local dealership during the commercials!

In the late 80s and early 90s as the territories were winding down, we were lucky to have a local program culled by Joe Pedicino (who organized some wrestling matches as well) from the various territories other than WCW and WWE mostly.  Was a great time to see how the other territories did it, even if a lot of them weren't having their best days with the nationalization going on.

I'm not sure I get lucha libre; I've seen it, it can be exciting but it can also be extremely stagey (Mil Mascaras no-sells...again...for 50 years).  That said I love the crazy 60s movies with someone like El Santo fighting aliens and monsters and stuff.  Would love to see more of that subtitled and released (my Spanish is weak).

[Keyrock]

13 minutes ago, Amentep said:

I'm not sure I get lucha libre; I've seen it, it can be exciting but it can also be extremely stagey (Mil Mascaras no-sells...again...for 50 years).  That said I love the crazy 60s movies with someone like El Santo fighting aliens and monsters and stuff.  Would love to see more of that subtitled and released (my Spanish is weak).

There's nothing more badass than a masked luchador in a suit.

Even Texano (the guy without the mask) looks pretty great, but Drago (center), holy ****, that's like some final boss in Tekken type ****.

[majestic]

4 hours ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

As a Memory Beta wiki editor.

Joke of the century, good sir, you win at the internet. Bigly.

[ShadySands]

Urge to re-watch Nacho Libre intensifies

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

17 minutes ago, majestic said:

Joke of the century, good sir, you win at the internet. Bigly.

OH MY GOD 

[majestic]

11 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

OH MY GOD 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

25 minutes ago, majestic said:

 

[InsaneCommander]

On 9/7/2021 at 1:16 PM, Keyrock said:

I'm sure there's an entire subreddit dedicated to the "Starfleet are actually the villains" theory. 

 

[Raithe]

For the Luchadors...

 

[Amentep]

The Middleman was a fun show.

[Amentep]