The other day I heard about a debate between Meltzer and Cornette about New Jack. Meltzer had been trying to tell Cornette that New Jack had too much go away heat and therefore was bad for SMW, and it took Cornette a long time but he finally realized that was the case.

Hey I may very well be late on this but it looks like they added both a fair amount of smackdown replays under in ring replays and ~4 years of consecutive nitros from 95-99 under vault

Yeah, the strength of the shows was definitely the main events in 1999. The undercards were dreck for the most part. People who say otherwise just have rose-coloured glasses for the Attitude Era. Look at any PPV from then and you'll see the early matches were pretty universally terrible. It really didn't start improving until Jericho, Angle and the Radicals hit the scene. And when Russo left, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

Did I read somewhere that Smoky Mountain Wrestling is on Network now?

Anyone watch the content yet? Thinking about catching some matches. Lived close by, but was too young + never had access to catch it back then.

It's been on for a month or two. I remember thinking about buying the VHS tapes they used to sell in PWI. I never did and I still haven't watched on the network. Some day. But my subscription is up on Thursday so nawwwwww.

Ive watched every episode they have just recently, it seems pretty dated a lot of it

There are only like 10 episodes and its hard to get some of the storylines

The matches are set in a high school gym or something lol

Most of the workers are actually pretty good, I enjoyed some of the cheesy promos and seeing a young Chris Jericho and Lance Storm as the Thrillseekers

The infamous "Prince Karris" makes an appearance somewhere in there (lol mummy gimmick)

The champ during this time was a guy called "the Dirty White Boy" and he did a few racist promos

Cornette does some good work and some of the Heavenly Bodies tag matches are worth checking out

The last 2 eps have some awesome New New Jack promos (also racist supporting OJ lol)

If you can find it, there's a great interview with Cornette where he talks about why the Thrillseekers drove him crazy because they refused to "give back to the fans", so the Rock N Roll Express had to handle "(female) fan relations" for everyone.

Im not finding the attitude era Raw's. I remember they were on the network. They started in '97 to '99, I believe. Don't tell me they took them off.

nm, I'm an idiot and didn't realize they had a drop down menu to pick which year you want to watch for Raw

On the June 2, 1986 edition of Primetime Wrestling, Gorilla Monsoon says on commentary during a match that he wrestled the longest match in federation history when he went one hour and 32 minutes against Bruno Sammartino. He proceeds to add this terribly unnecessary tidbit: "Actually, I got so dry in that match Lord Alfred, I was actually licking the sweat off Sammartino's body to get some saliva in my mouth. ... Sammartino thought I had come out of the closet or something!"

As if the thought of watching Bruno wrestle for 90 minutes wasn't appalling enough. Gorilla must have been on some pretty strong meds to tell a story like that.

I think I just watched a historic ECW hardcore tv episode

It was the random NWA world title reborn tournament in Aug 1994, it was awesome

This seems to be where they changed from Eastern CW to Extreme CW

The speech from the eventual tourney winner Shane "The Franchise" Douglas was spine tingling, basically announced the NWA was dead, that he doesnt pass torches, that he is a man who ignites new flames and that the ECW title is the greatest title in the world and the only one that matters

Talk about putting a promotion and title over jeez, what a promo

Also an awesome Doink the Clown appearance where basically 911 along with the announcers buried him and his gimmick completely leading to him becoming Matt "Re"Bourne.

911 beat him with one chokeslam while Joey Styles bemoaned that gimmicks dont fly in ECW and that that **** will get destroyed in ECW

Awesome that he came out as ReBourne in the final and ****ed 911 for Franchise to win the tourney

This ECW **** is getting ****ing good

ECW was gold, man. My absolute favorite promotion, ever. Beating 90's AJPW which I thought was awesome and even 2011-current NJPW which I think is outright incredible. There's a noticeable dip in quality when TNN picks them up in 2000 but that constitutes only a year or so of time and it wasn't that bad.

Its quite remarkable watching ECW in between the Wcw and Wwf stuff in order

ECW is so different, ironically it seems raw, like Paul E Dangerously's personal rage against the machine that became "sports entertainment".

It seemed to start off small in 1993 but you see the passion in the performers and the desire to be something different

They started off hinting that the other promotions sucked but by this point (late 1994) they are straight out attacking the Wwf and Wcw

Its quite a privilege to watch it for the first time in this all-companies timeline viewage that Ive been doing

The next episode after the tourney had an awesome interview with Franchise talking to the Japanese media basically chastising the WCW and WWF by name and saying wrestling is a sport, that ECW had hardcore wrestlers not gimmicks and that the other promos shows should be on tv in the morning for kids

Man he was good on the mic

He fought a Japanese dude during the episode too and on the way to the ring told the camera "Ric Flair is dead" lol

It was Paul E who basically set up and ran ECW right?

I hope he made a lot of $$$ because it was an awesome display of business acumen (maybe not biz acumen, maybe balls) to basically go against the mainstream sports entertainment product and trying to promote wrestling as a hardcore sport

It seems he capatilized on the frustration of many wrestlers and fans who hated the gimmickyness of what the big companies had become too

Or Im just falling into the trap of what Paul E wanted me to think ECW and its performers were back then, Im grunching ECW fully here, just read a few tidbits about it on this forum

I havent googled much so I dont get spoiled

When it was Eastern Championship Wrestling it was owned by Tod Gordon who hired Heyman as the booker. Gordon was still owner when they switched to Extreme, but not too long after he sold out to Heyman and took a job with WCW.

According to Wiki, Gordon was out of wrestling until 2004 after leaving ECW. Had to look because I was sure he never worked WCW. Now how Gordon lost ECW is a great story that you should check out sometime ABD. Unlikely there's any spoilers to the story as well.

I think Ill read that now since Ive just passed the part where Heyman takes over it seems

It pisses me off that Tod Gordon only has one d at the end of his first name

Which is funny because when you type it into Google, it suggests it with two T's and doesn't recognize with one T.

Woah I just marked out to heel Bob Backlund in 1994

I despised every minute of his comeback from 93 till now, man he was vanilla horrible, I craved him getting beaten up

This segment was an interview with Vince on Raw where Bob explained his previous weeks erratic behaviour (he had started to go crazy and was hurting people)

He proclaimed that no one could get out of his crossfacechicken wing hold and offered to demonstrate it, first on Mcmahon then finally a tiny magazine writer at ringside called Louie came up and he layed it on him...

... and predictably didnt let go, it looked really painful and awesome, really showing how much Backlund had snapped

This mustve been the first time Vince got physically involved in action too (as far as Ive seen so far), he was trying to pull Bob off the hapless scribe


Then everyone including Macho Man ran the ring and pulled him off eventually

I enjoyed Bobs muddled, believably deranged delivery, its a pity Im going to have to actually watch him wrestle soon

I remember that stuff. The thing that's missing is his attack on Bret after a match on Superstars of Wrestling. That started his heel turn and slapping the cfcw on everybody.

Yeah, the initial Superstars stuff gives it all the context. Backlund as a face basically saying that he needed to buckle down and challenge for the WWF Championship and find out if this comeback really had anything in it. A few weeks of promos previewing the match.

Bret beats him in a hard-fought match, then offers Backlund the babyface handshake after the match, which Backlund accepts. Then Bret offers it a second time a minute later and Backlund suddenly slaps him across the face instead and slaps on the chicken wing.

His 1994 heel run was great fun.

Yeah they did a flashback to some incident where he lost it, dont think it was brets attack but they referred to it

Thats one thing with the Wwf back then, they at least recapped events from previous shows so you can follow the storys week to week

Jesus wtf who would volunteer to take a Tazmaniac belly to back suplex, they are more like neckbreakers

Hey, that's nothing!!! These days, they recap segments, multiple times, from the same show!

Lol yah I dont watch any current product (mainly because I dont wanna spoil my old school watching by seeing how good the ringwork must have gotten since then) but enjoy reading everyones (mainly disparaging) posts about it