I hate garbage wrestling, so I either have skipped those episodes or like the XPW one watched with disgust. I'd rate the Winged Eagle #2 behind the 1986 NWA big gold. All are better than the WWE belts today which look horrible.
AEW had PAC vs Andrade and Danielson vs Dustin Rhodes this week. Last week they had Danielson vs Suzuki and Fish + Punk vs Sydal and the Lucha Bros vs FTR. Hard to beat the in ring that AEW is putting out. Much less New Japan having their G1 tournament wrapping up this week. Way too much great stuff out there to declare one company superior right now.
those are all great matches but i said top to bottom pure wrestling. i notice you skipped listing the pretty bad/stupid matches AEW had. ROH is 1 hour usually 3 matches all high level matches. thats what i meant. no jungle boy vs brandon cutler mess
The thing about wrestling though, it's the mess of the Jungle Boy vs Cutler that sets up Adam Cole vs Jungle Boy that makes money. Unfortunately a very small percentage of fans watch just based on match quality. If that were the case there would be no angles and everything would be promoted as a straight sport. Top to bottom I'd still take New Japan over any other promotion. (Although they have slipped a lot over the past two years with all of the interference in the Bullet Club matches.)
unrelated to companies, just in general. anyone can answer. most tv matches now are roughly 15 minutes unless they are squash matches. do you prefer the length or would you rather matches be longer or does it depend on who is in the match?
I actually miss the jobber matches were some big fat slob you've never heard of loses in less than 2 minutes. I always enjoyed those squash matches. If it is a very good match between top names I like a long match.
Agreed, there is nothing wrong with a squash match or two to give some talent exposure and build up their credibility and progress them into their storylines and feuds. Matches that are 30+ minutes should be relegated to a PPV or a special event to keep the interest and the $$$ flowing within the promotion.
I enjoy longer matches , 30 minutes or so, but for me it all depends who is in the match. theres a great roughly 30 minute hulk Hogan vs bob backlund match but I don't want to see Hogan vs ultimate warrior for almost 30 minutes. one guy needs to know how to work
It really just depends on who is in the match. I prefer long matches from people who know how to build the drama throughout the match. However, I wouldn't want to see a 20+ minute Keith Lee vs Brock Lesnar match, but I'd love to see them do an 8 minute big man match. I'd also hate to only see Omega vs Danielson or a Flair vs Steamboat go less than 20 minutes. There are exceptions. There is an awesome Randy Savage vs Dynamite Kid match from the WWF 1st PPV that goes around 5 minutes. It's an all out sprint between two of the best in the world in 1985. It would have been great at 15 minutes, but also a great 5 minutes due to time constraints. The exception the other way was WCW screwing over the Ric Flair vs Bobby Eaton best of 3 falls match from a Clash Of Champions by having 10 other matches on a 2 1/2 hour show and only giving Flair vs Eaton 17 minutes to do 3 falls. It could have been a classic, instead it was just good.
That was what the purpose of the Brandon Cutler vs Jungle Boy match on AEW was for. Cutler kept interfering in matches, so they had him in a match to get killed in 2 minutes to set up Jungle Boy vs Adam Cole. I don't miss the all squash match format of 80s TV though. While the promos were so much better than today, the TV having almost or sometimes all squashes went out the window in the 90s and I'm glad of that.
That scenario sounds perfectly fine, if the one character is interfering and torturing the other on a weekly basis the comeuppance needs to happen and then move on to the final sell point. Agreed as well about the 80's squash TV programs. I remember loving the promos but that was it when watching Maple Leaf Wrestling.
For anyone interested, here is the Savage vs Dynamite Kid match I was talking about. Savage and Steamboat also had a great sprint 5 minute match earlier in the show.
so see what your thoughts are. was any strictly a wwf or wcw person? just watched one company? i was a wwf person mainly until the outsiders stuff started and then i tried to catch a lot of both companies. did watch wcw/nwa a bit prior. i was shocked as a 19 year old in 2001 when wcw went under but not watching a lot of it from 1996-2001 , i see how bad it was by early 1999. bad booking, bad matches, overuse of the NWO, stale older stars. anyone else feel this way? thoughts on wcw by 1999?
Yeah, when the NWO started splitting into sub-NWO groups I was officially tired of the whole thing. I pretty much stopped watching at that point. In the 80s I'd watch any wrestling that was on tv. AWA, WCCW, UWF... all good to me. I watched WWF the most and loved it, but I preferred the grittier stuff like AWA. Real rasslin'. By the early 90s WWF was getting just too corny for me and all the big stars had moved to WCW so I went with them. I didn't like Shawn Michaels or The Hitman much so making them the two biggest stars in the company certainly didn't capture my interest. I wanted Savage and Hogan, not Doink the Clown and Bastian Booger. What finally got me to go back to WWF was The Nation of Domination, believe it or not. I was a big fan of The Rock. I'd start tuning in to catch his matches. Soon I was just watching WWE and not bothering with WCW. But in time I got fed up with all the storylines focusing on the McMahons so I bailed out again.
i bailed on WWF a handful of years ago as a full time viewer. its a shame NXT was pretty good and then vince removed HHH from running it and well..... i loved HBK though. probably the best in ring talent in the mid to late 90's and then when he came back in 2002 he had a ton of classics. i never was a big fan of hogan. from 1993-1997 WWF had built or started to build huge stars HBK HHH hitman undertaker the rock stone cold mankind kane by 1997 most of WCWs star were stars from WWF hogan savage piper nash hall plus old ric flair sting getting up there lex luger that was never as big as he thought DDP who was older than it seemed WCW pretty much by late 1998 was on its last leg but i didn't know it. they should have went a different way with NWO starting early 1998 not making it 100 different factions . say what we want about vince and WWF but he every now and then listens to others. he wanted DX to have more people at first as NWO grew and HHH and some others stayed pretty firm DX should stay just a handful of people, HBK, HHH, rude and chyna then the HHH, chyna, X-PAC, billy gunn and road dog version.
I started watching in 1985 and I watched everything, but preferred Crockett, Memphis and Mid South. I watched WCW until 99 and gave up on it and WWE until 01. After 01 I just watched WWE sporadicaly until around 08. Was on board with ROH from the beginning until Matt Taven won the title at MSG. Now just watch every now and then. Now just watch AEW, AAA and New Japan. Anytime I hear there is a great match I will go out of my way to watch it.
To be fair, despite a limited skill set, Hogan knew how to work. That Hogan/Warrior match at WM6 wouldn't have gone over 20 minutes if not for Hogan's ability to make it happen. Warrior was like Goldberg in that he wanted to be out there and done in less than five minutes.
Despite being a big WWF guy in the 80s and early 90s, I was very much a WCW guy during the Monday night wars. I admittedly was a fan of Hogan, so him being in WCW was a big part of it, but I didn't like the direction Vince was taking the WWF. And once the Bret/HBK SS thing happened, I literally didn't watch any WWF/WWE again until around 2009-2010. Most of the classic stuff with Austin, Rock, etc. I watched much later on years after it originally happened. I didn't watch any pro wrestling for about 10 years (1999 till 2009-2010). And ever since bailing on it again a few years ago, I have barely watched. I might check out highlights on YT or Twitter, but that's it. Even the returns of Bryan and Punk, two of my favorites, to AEW has not gotten me to watch them every week.
Well it also helped they practiced the match in a warehouse with every move rehearsed and scripted by Pat Patterson. Patterson was a genius with match layouts. He used to layout the Royal Rumble every year. That said, Hogan could put on the working boots when he wanted. Check out his matches in Japan. Completely different wrestler there. Nobody was better controlling the crowd. Just watch the end of the Warrior match, he made it all about himself. He made him losing the big deal and Warrior winning secondary just by a couple subtle actions.
I watched only WWF in the 80's. Nothing else mattered. Monday nights were Prime Time Wrestling. I was such a huge fan that I even went to WM III at the Silverdome when I was 15. When Hogan jumped to WCW I did too. Shortly before Hall and Nash jumped I no longer had cable but I kept up thru Pro Wrestling Illustrated. I am not even sure if that print that magazine anymore. Anyway, I couldn't watch but kept up with WCW via magazines. I had completely lost interest in WWF by this time and no longer kept up with it at all. Around 99 or so got cable again and started watching WCW again even though it wasn't very good. Then I attended the very last Nitro right here in Panama City. After that I guess I was forced to watch Raw. Hung in there until about 5 years ago then I stopped watching. I even stopped reading the Raw Re-caps online. Been watching AEW weekly since it started but over the last month I find myself fast-forwarding thru a lot of it. It's not that I don't enjoy it but my time is limited.
I was a WWF only fan from childhood (late 80's) up to the time I stopped watching wrestling altogether. Not because I didn't like other promotions, but because it was practically impossible to watch them in Canada. By the mid 90's we were lucky to have WWF and WCW to switch through but I preferred the WWF and stuck with them through the Monday Night Wars.
Okay, but Hogan losing that match was the bigger deal. Remember that since the birth of Hulkamania in January 1984, he had never lost via clean pinfall on television (or at house shows, IIRC), so him losing cleanly to the Warrior was a huge thing. Plus, the after the match actions signified a passing of the torch from one massive face to another. Now, the Warrior's title reign was kind of a flop (for a variety of reasons) and he was never what they hoped he'd be, but I thought Hogan's actions there were fine.
That wasn't the plan though. The plan was for the match to launch the Warrior as the guy who replaces him by beating him cleanly. Hogan smartly didn't want that (probably a combination of ego and also knowing Warrior didn't have it in him to lead the company) and did the little things in the post match that assured he was the most memorable part of the show. He could have just shook his had and handed the belt over, but he knew how to do it in a way that would make everyone rather seem him get it back. Nobody protected himself better than Hogan and very few connected with the fans like Hogan.
