2016 Pro Wrestling Thread

I think the women's division would be a lot more credible if they didn't shy away from doing the gimmick matches they do with men. Meaning, do the ladder and extreme and cage matches.

 

Lita and Victoria did do a cage match once. Laycool did a tag tables match with Beth Phoenix and Nattie, in which they were supposed to fall off the top rope through the table together, only it didn't break.

They've had a few women's hardcore matches back in the Attitude Era, including the first one, which featured Ivory beating Tori after branding her with an iron.

But yeah, the women's gimmick matches have been few and far in between.

 

Tables matches are stupid in general, and yeah, having a women's tables match doesn't seem like a great idea from a weight / force perspective, haha. (Meaning: Since they don't weigh a ton, you probably need a hella more force than you do with a dude.) But I don't think there's a really good reason to not do most of the other gimmick matches. By not doing them, I'd argue that the WWE is subtly saying that the women can't handle what the men can do, and also, that their appearance is so important they're not willing to risk a busted open eye or anything like that.

 

The thing is the women......they can't handle it. Its not sexism its pure physics.

Sasha Banks weighs like 120 pounds, maybe. The impact of a ladder on her body is going to be so different from a 240 pound man. The average guy is 6 feet and most of them are 6foot4 or 5. The women, except Charlotte and Tamina, are 5-5 ish. My fear is a ladder match would be sized down and wind up looking like the WNBA.

There's a way to do something special for the women without making it look lesser compared to the show stealing men's MITB, I just can't come up with what it is......If someone at WWE doesn't I'm sure Sam Roberts will have an idea this week or next.

 

This reminds me of something else. Since they're women again instead of Divas, the E should start announcing their weights again in the intros.

They used to in the 70s and 80s. Why not do it again?

 

Variety broke that Smackdown is going live in July, and the brand separation is back.

 

The brand separation only works if you keep the brands, you know, separate. Otherwise, it just becomes a holy mess.

 

And moving to Tuesday, with the lead writer behind NXT moving up to Smackdown.

 

Why'd it fail the first time? That was my dark period when college didn't get TNN or UPN.

Seems like from the Paul Heyman folklore it was awesome for a while....and perhaps then the company stopped building stars that could replace the Cenas, Guerreros and others that were Smack staples and moved over.....is that right?

Are we in a place now where thers enough talen to carry two shows? They've never, ever had a deeper roster...

 

Ratings-wise, the shows were fairly close for a while. Creative-wise, it was better than Raw because Heyman focused more on an in-ring product instead of skits and promos. He also had a crop of fairly young guys, or midcard guys who hadn't been given a huge push, and focused on them, with a couple of established vets (Hogan, Undertaker), playing prominent roles. Pretty much, it was Hogan in a minor role, Undertaker, Big Show, and Angle as the top guys, with Edge, Christian, the Hardys, Jericho, Mysterio, the Guerreros, that one guy who we're not allowed to say his name, as the midcarders who were given prominent roles and young guys like Cena and Lesnar, who were able to grow into huge stars.

As someone who, at the time, had to work Mondays and missed most of Raws, but had Thursdays off, I appreciated how good the product was.

Eventually, egos got in the way, of course, and Smackdown was de-emphasized and treated as the B- show. Then they kept trying to pretend a brand split, even though guys were appearing on both shows every single week, which was annoying as hell when they'd try to pretend there was a rivalry.

 

Baron's summary is a good one, and also gels with how I remember things, and how (after the fact) people inside the company said it was run. As with most things WWE, when Raw's ratings started to dip a bit, their solution was to cannibalize Smackdown and have those stars appear more on Raw. IIRC, you had more arbitrary "trades" and random appearances to allow that to happen.

 

I liked the split a whole lot more when there was one main champion, and he, and only he, would appear on both shows. It made everything seem more important.