2010 Pro Wrestling Thread

They should have kept the Survivor Series name. It's traditional.

It's not like they did it the first couple years where all the matches were team matches. Heck, some years, I think they only had one team match. To me, it didn't seem like that huge a deal.

Battlebowl was interesting back when you rarely had faces vs. faces and heels vs. heels. It was unique to see strange tag teams. Today, it isn't.

I could go for a WarGames concept, except, like Naitch said, you have to have blood, or the concept will be stupid. The concept also works best when you have a heel faction. Just having five random heels and five random faces isn't as good.

 

RIP Survivor Series. The only live pay per view event I ever attended. Survivor Series: Deadly Game when I was a youngster.

 

...didn't Starrcade start as a November event?

 

They could just steal another former WCW PPV: Fall Brawl.

 

Starrcade indeed started in November (1983-87) before being moved to December in 1988. They could also go with World War 3 or Slamboree or anything like that.

 

World War 3 was the 60-man battle royal, right? They already have the Rumble.

What WWE should've done is kept the Survivor Series and, instead of keeping the team concept, maybe have tournaments for one/both world titles. Or maybe my mind is just skewed because TNA is having an 8-man tournament for the No. 1 contender spot at Against All Odds on Sunday.

With that being said, here's the tournament (first-round matches, anyway):
--The Pope vs. Desmond Wolfe
--Hernandez vs. Matt Morgan (tag-team champs)
--Kurt Angle vs. Mr. Anderson (...Anderson)
--Abyss vs. Mick Foley

 

Starrcade moved because of Survivor Series.

SurSer was created by McMahon for pretty much no other reason than to screw with the NWA in the late 80s. I interviewed Flair in '04 and talked to him about going head-to-head with SS in '87. Basically, he said they put on a great card, but nobody saw it because cable companies went with WWF that night instead.

And FootballScribe, you saw Vince Russo's finest hour of booking with the way that Deadly Game tournament played out. Perfect mix of in-ring product and Russo Shocking Swerves~! (tm), a balance he's never been able to find since.

 

McMahon put the screws to the cable companies, too. Told them if they didn't carry Survivor Series, they couldn't carry Wrestlemania the next spring.
And that Wrestlemania, WM IV, had a championship tournament that went over like a 30-second fart in church. A 16-man tournament, IIRC, with 15-minute time limits. The PPV lasted something like 4 1/2 hours.

 

Anybody catch Smackdown or read spoilers this week? Morrison was wrestling R-Truth, did some sort of funky flip over R-Truth's back, and was selling an ankle injury big-time. They stopped the match and R-Truth helped him out of the ring.
Is it legit or a work? Either way, it would open up a spot in the Elimination Chamber. I believe HBK was just called to the white courtesy phone...

 

It's a work.

 

Man, Mania 4 is probably the worst of the older Wrestlemanias, which sucked for Randy Savage and probably hurt his entire career. If McMahon has a consistent weak spot, it is that he doesn't put non-big guys over strong. Yeah, Savage won that tournament, but Andre and Hogan weren't in the finals, and Savage needed Hogan to get rid of the people interfering on the Million Dollar Man's behalf in the finals.

The same thing happened when Jericho "beat" Stone Cold and The Rock in the same night to win the undisputed title; both matches had tons of interference. For historic nights and situations like that, I wish the WWE would have the common sense to have less interference in their matches.

 

Re: Jericho's win,

No one, myself included, bought into Jericho as a star on the level with Rock and Austin at that point and without the interference, IMO, it wouldn't have been believable.

As for Mania IV, I think they tried too hard. They were trying to one-up themselves from Detroit the year before and, let's face it, that wasn't happening.

The event itself wasn't terrible, it was certainly more entertaining than I and II but when you look historically at how awesome V and VI were from a story-telling perspective (I was a huge Hogan fan during those years), it kind of gets lost in the shuffled.

It's not unlike WM11 in that way. At X, you had the Michaels ladder match, the Yoko/Hart/Lugar thing, the Bret vs. Owen match, a lot of signature moments. At XII, you had the iron man match. XII is just kind of like the middle child and usually ignored.

This brings up an interesting topic. If you had to rank them, what are your top-five Manias and why?