Hello SquaredCircle! Welcome to our Weekly Discussion Thread!
What have you watched lately? Seen any great matches? Have suggestions for things to watch? Anything not getting covered in other threads that ya wanna fill people in about? Questions about promotions, wrestlers, 'the business' or more?
Feel free to post below!
(Reminder, this thread can and will contain spoilers for possibly any show. Spoiler tags are not required in here, but if the show just happened try and keep spoiler talk it to its respective discussion thread for the first day).
Dark Order? No it's The Dark Order.
Gates of Agony? Fuck is that? It's The Gates of Agony.
Undisputed Kingdom? Fuck outta here, The Undisputed Kingdom.
The little kid in me who was Hooked on Phonics™ dies every week bit by bit by weird sounding team names that could be fixed by TK doing less blow buying a dictionary.
Based on the Paul-Tyson fight happening on Netflix tonight, I hope they learn from it and WWE doesn't suffer this same buffering and freezing, I have no intention of paying for Netflix for RAW, and after seeing this tonight, If I were I'd consider not.
Edit: For what it's worth, I live where the ISP top speeds are at or less than 100mbps and we have several streaming devices going all at once most of the time.
I want to say something similar happened with Peacock. I think they tried streaming the Olympics or something and it was shit. Then they got WWE and it was still kind of shit, but they eventually figured everything out.
unpopular opinion but why is nostalgia for ecw so valued? the company did massive damage to wrestling (and the wrestlers health themselves) and heyman was a horrible boss who screwed so many people out of their livlihoods. don't get me started with ecw's embrace of the absolute worst toxic fanbase.
ECW (the post 'Eastern' years) was basically the foundation for what would become the Attitude Era, so without it pro wrestling may have taken much longer to leave the cartooney character world.
Deeper/edgier/mature storylines became more common place due to ECW's influence, both of which Bishoff and McMahon began copying, but which a lot of people wanted as an alternative to the storylines of the big guys.
Heyman was a sack of shit who was an abysmal businessman but creatively (especially for the time) the man was a damned genius. He knew how to get every last drop out of the product they had ("accentuate the positives, hide the negatives!") and put on a product nowhere near the production of WCW/ECW but was still good enough to get a tv deal (for a short time).
Heyman had a focus on shifting Eastern Championship Wrestling into an extreme niche to draw a fanbase WCW/WWF-E weren't taking advantage of, but also didn't let go of what got them there: great wrestling. As such ECW became the first US promotion (or first big name US one at least) that would book people like Rey Mysterio, Psicosis, Eddie Guerrero, etc. Which of course lead to so many people being poached by WWF/WCW.
Compounding on that, ECW was similar to ROH/PWG in how you look now-a-days and so many people in WWE/AEW came up through them, a lotta big wrestlers came up through ECW or helped them with giving them a place to form their characters (like Stone Cold, the basis of which was formed in ECW before he went to WWF as the 'ringmaster').
ECW's fanbase was as toxic as WCW's, WWE's, and AEW's. Some loud mouth jackasses, and a whole fuckload of normal people who just didn't like WWE/WCW and wanted to see harder wrestling. Now-a-days most of these same people would be fans of GCW and GCW fans are some of the most accepting, least judgemental motherfuckers I've ever seen (especially given the huge POC and LGBTQ+ wrestlers/shows they book) and when someone starts shit they usually get knocked the fuck out.
My take was going to be WCW was trying to treat it as real sport like the '80s, WWF was treating it like a comic with Superheroes and along comes ECW who were like fuck that and fuck you if you don't like what we're doing, it was just crazy different. I think the industry is better off for ECW having existed.
Although... here we are a thousand years after ECW closed, WWE did the best send off ever with One Night Stand, then ruined it with follow ups and a WWE brand using those initials. TNA decided to get in on it with Hardcore Justice and diluted it even more, I think Shane Douglas ran some shows too as reunions... quite frankly ECW has been done to death, it was cool and edgy, but it does get a little old doing this reunion every few years with older and older and older ECW originals. Rumor is they want to make it a yearly NXT special now.
For months I've been seeing cool create a wrestlers for 2k24 that people say are on Community Creations but I could never find them to download when I looked. I was getting pissed at 2K because I thought it was because I got the standard version instead of the super-ultra-fuck off edition, but it's actually because I forgot 2K24 ever came out and have been playing 2k23. Sometimes I be dum.
Normally I don't have time to watch rampage or collision, but I caught them this week. The trios match between death riders and conglomeration was PPV quality AND had storyline implications. Crazy that they would stick it on the B (C?) show.
I watched a video Cody Rhodes did with SportsBible, where he was comparing UK junk food to US junk food. There was one point where he had a Pizza Hut pizza, and he said about it, "This is America. This is all the presidents, from Washington to Obama."
I see what you did there, Cody. And I appreciate it.