Fair enough. I suppose on his own he was OK and I remember liking WWF Tony S. but the WCW booth was always so tilting to me: Bischoff, Mongo (ugh) Larry Zybysko, Dusty Rhodes, Mike Tenay, so many clowns imo who sucked at calling matches.

fwiw my favorites of all-time are Gorilla/Brain (ldo), J.R., Joey Styles and Paul E.

looool. tilt

who was y'all's favorite debut? I always liked Lesnar's. http://youtu.be/vOlxvPtaQ7s

Zbysko was BRUTAL. He was the worst thing going on in the WCW booth during that era.

123 Kid comes to mind, as that angle where he came in and beat Razor out of nowhere was cool.

Undertaker debuting as DiBiase's mystery partner at Survivor Series stands out to me as well.

Chris Jericho's first WWE appearance (a verbal clash with Rock) and Tazz's WWE debut (Royal Rumble against Kurt Angle) both stand out for me.

That's my favorite too, but I'm biased because I was in the crowd for that one.

Another one I liked was Chris Jericho when he interrupted The Rock.

While not technically a debut, I liked the Radicalz when they turned when they turned on Mick Foley and aligned with HHH.

Tenay was pretty good when he came to WCW as the cruiserweight specialist announcer.

Otherwise, WCW announcing was usually pretty piss-poor, even with Heenan.

Thing with Heenan in WCW wasn't that he was fighting the good fight and just couldn't overcome how terrible the others were. It's that Heenan himself was basically terrible in WCW. I don't know why that was, and it took me a long time to give up and say, "Geez, I just don't like him in this company I guess," but he seriously just wasn't good. If WCW was all a person ever watched before they were bought up, they would probably have no idea why so many of us are such big fans of Bobby.

^^ I don't know about that. Heenan has stated many times that Schivone & management were just terrible, likening the transition from the NY Yankees to the Toledo Mudhens. Not much of reason to not believe him given how good he was in WWF. Granted it is also possible his performance dropped because he was just demoralized & therefore didn't give a crap anymore as can happen in a normal job. Probably a combination of the two.

Vader and his scary mastadon helmet from WCW debut. Aweeeeeesome.

Interesting to see the one man rock band found someone to out muscle.

As for the PG discussion, i think there is no reason the WWE cant be great whilst also being PG. I dont think wrestling is missing much with a ban on blading and banning unprotected head shots makes perfect sense from a health and safety perspective. Yeah, protected ones should probably come back.

But as someone said if you add blading to ****ty matches booked with zero story just just get a guy blading during a **** match with no story. The biggest problems the WWE has go way beyond being PG or not PG. I mean, we all loved the PG programming story of Punk vs Cena running up to MITB, right? We loved the PG writing of the Nexus invasion, other than D Bryan getting fired which ill preemptively admit was stupid, esp given what they did with Orton vs HHH a year earlier. We loved a lot of the HBK vs Taker stuff, we even had a lot of love for the Straight Edge Society and going further back Jericho vs HBK was awesome even with the no blading TV shot. We even all marked hard when Rock came back and mocked Cena, at least for a couple weeks. **** me, even Mark Henry is interesting right now.

All PG, all enjoyable. Most of it didnt even come close to crossing into PG13 territory.

Phill,

Punk/Cena is way over PG.

The language they're using is appalling!

WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?

They actually have cranked up the language this year.

Thing is, PG itself is evolving over time. The word "ass" being thrown into PG programming sometimes doesn't seem to totally violate that. The occasional bad language being allowed is more important to me than blood; it's just unrealistic that these grown men who want to beat the **** out of each other would never swear. It's kind of like watching Jack Bauer get confined to repeated uses of "dammit" on 24 when in real life a whole hell of a lot more bad language than that would be used.

The language and violence/occasional blood (though that would mostly be on PPVs) are the reasons I think PG-13 helps a lot. Otherwise, everyone is right that you can tell great stories within the confines of PG. It's all about developing the characters so we care.

some financial/buyrate info, don't know if it was posted already:

-The April WrestleMania 27 drew 1,059,000 buys. WrestleMania 26 drew 885,000 buys, and WrestleMania 25 produced 975,000 buys.

-The May Extreme Rules pay-per-view drew 209,000. The event drew 182,000 buys last year, and 213,000 buys in 2009.

-The May Over The Limit pay-per-view produced 140,000 buys. The event scored 197,000 buys in 2010, and it produced 228,000 buys when it was called Judgment Day in 2009.

-The June Capitol Punishment pay-per-view drew 170,000 buys. The same event drew 143,000 buys last year when it was called Fatal Four Way, and it reached 178,000 buys when it was named The Bash in 2009.

-MITB was up 20% from last year's. 2010 did 165,000 so 2011 was around 198,000.

-"That's What I Am" (aka "Orton Goes to the Papers") lost $3.3 million.

i really thought capitol punishment was going to bomb hard and easily be the lowest buyrate of the year. MITB isn't surprising - 20% increase at a non-big-4 ppv is decent, but it's not the cm punk avalanche that a lot of the iwc was hoping for. raw's ratings are pretty much where they've been all year, too.

MITB not beating ER is disappointing, but getting around the 200k mark is pretty solid. People who thought it would do outstanding buyrates were kinda dreaming, the ceiling is pretty fixed, though it would have been nice to hit 250k to hammer home the point. Either way its a minor PPV that cut a good profit mostly thanks to Punk.

OTL doing terrible should send them the message that slamming two PPVs next to each other wont sell. Pretty sure someone was saying we have 3 PPVs over the next 8 weeks that should reinforce that point.

Also im shocked the WWE keeps sticking with these ****ty little films that lose money or break even thanks to DVD sales. There isnt much crossover appeal from the WWE to Orton going to the papers. Not even sure what the movie was, something about Orton being father to an autistic kid or something.

How does "That's What I Am" LOSE 3.3m? Where the hell was all the money spent? Is Ed Harris charging that much these days? I didn't see one single ad for it not on WWE TV, and the movie doesn't look all that fancy, yikes. Wonder as to why they even bother releasing these things in 40 theaters for one weekend then putting it straight to DVD a few weeks later.

Just watched this week's Smackdown on YouTube. Really solid episode this week. Still no more matches made official for SSlam, which is a WTF, but the ep made me more excited for SummerSlam anyway.

how did your movie do?

I def agree with you about The living legend LOL, legend of what?...fans should have been chanting "bobby,bobby" instead of "larry,larry", even though I don't think Heenan would do commentary til the second hour.

Yeah, I had always assumed Zybysko had earned the "living legend" moniker, but as far as I can tell he was basically a nobody

Lol, there is a Sheamus lookalike in the crowd at SD. You see him briefly in the opening segment.

i know this is a subjective question, but any answer besides this is wrong regardless of whether or not you like jericho. i mean the build was awesome and the pop was so huge

I didnt even watch wrestling at the time and i still mark at that debut as it is so perfect.