International Object

Joe Drilling and I cool down from Jason’s Starrcade series and discuss WWE’s distribution arms, comparisons to sports and SNL, wrestling education compared to other arts, wrestling psychology, and why Sting was not quite like the Crow.

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Podcast: Episodes | RSS | iTunes

Show notes:

• Joe Drilling Google+ & Twitter
• Actioncast

• On The Stick

• Wrestlespective Starrcade Main Event Series

• WWE Classics on Demand
• WWE Greatest Matches
• WWE Network
• Saturday Night Live
• Julliard School for gifted musicians, dancers and actors
• Eddie Sharkey
• Game Theory
• Giant Bernard
• Teddy Hart
• Scott Moir & Tessa Virtue, The Great Gig in the Sky performance 2009
• The Crow

I think I heard it in the Observer article someone copy and pasted three months ago but also totally made up behind thirty pop ups and a severe case of ennui.

WWE.com has a neat article up today, interviewing Shawn Michaels in regards to his number 1 entry into the Royal Rumble, and the advice he’d give to The Miz, the number 1 entrant into the 2012 Rumble (and the only known number entrant this year). There’s a lot to reflect on here:

“It never really looked like being No. 1 was not something you wanted to be,” Michaels said. “I recognize that you’ve got longer to go, and you’ve got to face everybody and endure to the end, but I saw that as a badge of honor.”

This gels with my theory from earlier today that no. 1 entrant-style Rumbles (where the guy goes the whole way) end up feeling like gauntlet matches more than Royal Rumbles.

Royal Rumble 1995 marked the first time ever the match’s first two competitors – HBK and The British Bulldog – were also the final two competitors in the ring, giving hope to every Superstar unlucky enough to draw a low number.

Considering the entrant list to the 95 Rumble, can you blame them for going that route? The British Bulldog was the only other guy in the match that posed any sort of threat.

“At that point in my career,” he explained, “I was so into wanting to be a ‘WWE Iron Man’– the match a couple years later notwithstanding. I can remember at that time very vividly being a fan of Ric Flair. The protégé of going long distances and working hard for a long period of time … it’s what I wanted to be.”

I don’t care what TNA tries to tell us, 30 minutes ain’t an Iron Man. The 1995 Rumble was a cheat.

“In the Rumble, everybody is your potential friend and your potential enemy,” the WWE Hall of Famer said. “You make alliances that you wouldn’t normally make, and you stab anybody in the back that you want to stab in the back.”

Much like Scott Keith, I love shoot comments that aren’t supposed to be shoot comments.

Michaels acknowledged that, at the end of the night, “only one guy can be standing there …. Pride and all of those things get thrown out the window, and you do whatever you’ve got to do to win. Miz is a sleazy enough dude – that fits him – so I think that’s gonna be his strength.”

This article is telling: The Miz, as a character, has something to prove in this Rumble after two months of a negative push (why don’t we call these “pulls”?) How long Miz lasts in this Rumble—and who defeats him—will say a lot about how much faith WWE has in the guy that won the main event of the previous Wrestlemania.

Jason Mann and Thomas Holzerman talked at length about the upcoming Royal Rumble on TH’s latest Wrestling Podcast. One point they made was that the 2010 and 11 Rumbles felt less like their predecessors, which meant they had less of a Pat Patterson feel and more of a three-act structure.

For those who don’t know, the Rumble is generally booked by Pat Patterson, who has a knack for original and creative match structure. Though I would love credits on such things, we don’t actually know who booked which rumble, who got more input, etc., so for all we know, Patterson had as much to do with the last two as any. They may have appeared better because, hey, maybe he had more good ideas those years. We don’t know.

But that detail doesn’t matter so much, because Mann and Holzerman were right: the 2010 and 11 Rumbles hold up better than previous ones, even if we don’t exactly know if that was by design or it just sort of worked out that way. I think there are a few factors, some of which they touched on in the podcast, that I’ll summarize here:

• The three-act structure was far more pronounced than in most years. There were not only solid beginnings and endings, but solid beginnings and endings to each act.

• The lack of log-jamming. There were moments where too many guys were on screen doing nothing but lazily lifting guys onto the turnbuckles, but those moments were shorter, and killed off with ablomb.

• No clear winner. 2010 gets a pass because the winner wasn’t even expected to be there (which I thought was a little lazy, because they’d done that with Cena only two years prior), but 2011 was cool because we all sort of thought it would be Alberto, but we didn’t actually have any solid reasons for thinking that.

• Multiple motivations. Sure, winning the spot at Wrestlemania has the allure, but why do wrestlers want that spot? Both years featured guys who wanted that spot for reasons that had nothing to do with winning a title: Michaels in 2010, so he could face the Undertaker again, and Punk in 2011, so he could have more power.

Some Rumbles suffered because we basically knew the winner going in: 96, 98, 99, 02, 06, and 09 are all often brought up as the worst Rumbles. Even worse are the Rumbles with a gimmick thrown in: 95 and 05, for instance, both with time changes (60 seconds and utterly random seconds). Having the obvious winner going in first (like Michaels, Benoit, and Mysterio) has the effect of making the Rumble less a chaos engine that could spout anything, and more like a gauntlet match for the chosen one.

I wrote an article last week about how I felt this year’s Rumble was shaping up to be a possible disappointment, and I stand by it. This isn’t the first Royal Rumble that’s taken away the “Main event shot at a title” at Wrestlemania (they’ve been doing that since 06), but it is the first to guarantee it. The winner of the 2012 Royal Rumble will not main event Wrestlemania XVIII. That’s got to kill motivations a little bit.

Also, Jericho might just blow the place up.

wrestlespective:

Here marks the end of Starrcade: It’s Scott Steiner v. Sid from Starrcade 2000. Jason Mann and Joe Drilling talk about both wrestlers’ penchant for unintentional wrestling comedy, how far WCW had fallen by the this point, the possibly ironic over-the-top announcing from Tony Schiavone and company, and much more.

Download this episode of Wrestlespective Radio. While you’re at it, why not subscribe and leave a nice comment in iTunes?

Fantastic episode, capping on a fantastic run. If anyone hasn’t yet given all the props to Jason Mann, remember that within the span of one year, he’s recapped the main events to every single match from Wrestlemania, Summerslam, and Starrcade, somehow making even the bad ones worth watching again.

As a footnote, if you want to compare two pairs of people talking about how ludicrous the 2000 WCW title picture was, you can also listen to Mitch and myself from the 15th episode of my podcast It’s about an hour in.

The WWE Network is coming sometime this year. It promises to be a 24/7 network channel full of content for a subscription fee. While it will be the first streaming channel from WWE, it’s not the first for-pay buffet of content. In fact, two areas of content exist today that you can pay for: WWE Classics on Demand (formerly WWE 24/7, probably based on the fact that it wasn’t), a pay-for cable on-demand channel on your TV, and WWE Greatest Matches, a pay-for area of their website that offers up a different set of curated content from the on-demand TV channel (much more, for less).

It makes sense for WWE to have an avenue for enthusiast fans to gobble up content, and it makes sense for WWE to charge for it. I’ve never understood, though, why Classics on Demand and Greatest Matches are two different things, with two different price points, ways of watching, and sets of available content. With the addition of the WWE Network this year, the line becomes even more muddled. Will Classics on Demand go away? Will both? We know barely anything about the channel itself, and absolutely nothing about how it will affect the rest of the line up. Rumors have suggested that the network will even change the face of WWE’s PPV business, allowing subscribers to watch major PPVs without paying for them (what would they be called, then? PVs?).

It all ends up looking like a mess, from the current standpoint. WWE has already made one change: WWE Greatest Matches no longer suggests an iPad/iPhone version coming. This suggests they take very seriously the line between the internet and television (since you can mirror video content from an iOS device to an Apple TV). That’s an assumption. It’s just as likely they thought they could simply export their flash-based video system to mobile devices, but since Adobe recently killed mobile flash, that put a kibosh on their plans. WWE may simply kill Greatest Matches, but if that’s their plan, why release it at all? It only came out in August, and certainly their Network plans were coming together by then.

More likely, Classics on Demand will go away, since there will be no reason to have two cable pay channels (the WWE Network channel’s mere existence shows that WWE prefers streaming to on-demand, since Classics has existed for years). But what if the Network was a thing you could subscribe to and get it all? What if a subscription to the Network was a mainline to all the content WWE produced, and you could access it on whatever device you had? You could get the video stream on TV, the Classics on Demand stuff, the Greatest Matches stuff, and more? That would be something. But I guess it would also be overkill.