I wasn't even aware they were continuing these series, but A&E apparently has an entire WWE Sunday night lineup of shows.

Austin vs Bischoff burping contest at Bad Blood 2003...

Some cool notes from the Undertaker A&E bio...

- Taker is so much taller than the rest of his family, but Mothertaker doesn't give us any incite on that.

- Taker got Taken for a few thousand by Buzz Sawyer for "training" him.

- Taker originally got booked by Fritz Von Erich for the first time because he looked like his son David, who had recently died.

- Cornette originally recommended him to WCW to replace Sid, who had broken a rib. Teddy Long was his manager.

- Danny Spivey went into business for himself against the Road Warriors on his way out of WCW.

- Ole Anderson is responsible for Taker getting away from WCW because he wouldn't give him a raise. BUT Vince didn't want him and almost cancelled the meeting. Bruce convinced him to keep the meeting.

- They spend a good chunk of time on his pre-WWF stuff. His first 6-7 years in WWF kinda get the shaft though. They go pretty quickly from Taker appears at SS '90 to Kane.

- Mothertaker tried to get in the ring to help her son against Sid once.

- BSK got their name from Yokozuna always playing dominoes (bones).

- There's very little new or groundbreaking stuff in the last 45 minutes or so.

-

Goldberg bio was better than expected...which wasn't hard, considering there were no expectations. Most interesting part was the Bret Hart incident.

Don't think I'll be able to sit through a Bellas bio next week. No more Brie Mode for me, thank you.

I really liked the Untold episode on Goldberg. Series is on the network.

Will have to check out the new A&E bios, I enjoyed the previous ones from last year.

First half of Undertaker was good, but I was looking forward to learning more about his early WWE career, but they just jumped directly from his debut to the Kane era.

Goldberg not too bad either. I knew he was green, but I didn't realize he'd only been in the Power Plant for like 2 months before making his TV debut, and from 0 wrestling experience to world title was only 2 years.

Disappointed they didn't go into the Oldberg-Taker masterpiece

Jose Lothario shows up on seemingly most episodes of 1982 WCCW on the Network.

He was every bit as uninteresting as a wrestler as he was when he had that run as Shawn Michaels's manager in 1996. And he was BRUTALLY uninteresting as a corner man for Shawn Michaels.

I'm understanding of WCCW using him, because he was a regional favorite in Texas who apparently helped draw Mexican fans. I don't know enough to know whether his presence at 1996 Royal Rumble actually helped sell that show in San Antonio. But he sure as hell didn't need to continue beyond that to just weigh Shawn Michaels down.

The Angle doc on A&E was great and had very little to do with his WWE in ring career.

Best missile dropkick ever performed was Koko B Ware nailing the Big Boss Man with one at SummerSlam 88

With a name like “Wrestling Star Wars Super Bowl,” I don’t know how WCCW’s big event didn’t take off.

They held this event in Texas Stadium. But not under any pretense they could ever even remotely fill it. They plopped the ring down in the end zone rather than at midfield, and then they freely showed camera angles of completely empty sections of seats. Even the hard camera side looks…I don’t know, 50% full? Tons of empty seats. You can hear the crowd, the total number of people out there was probably perfectly respectable for a territory, but the setting makes the crowd look sparse as ****.

Surely it wasn’t cheap to rent Texas Stadium, so I have no idea what went into this decision.

A&E stuff has been great. New Rivals show seems to have some recycled material, but still entertaining.

Ted DiBiase was so ridiculously good as a white-meat babyface. Not really surprising, but just jarring after a life of only knowing him as a heel outside the ill-fated WCW managerial face turn at the end.

Of course, unless he had an interest in becoming chiseled, he was going to have a definite ceiling in WWF as a face, so it’s for the best that he got pushed as a heel from day one there.

Robert Goulet singing Oh Canada is the best Wrestlemania anthem performance of all time imo

I'm inclined to go with Aretha Franklin, but Goulet was definitely good.

6-26-82 Mid-South is an excellent episode of TV.

Most face turns and heel turns are not done gradually enough.

In Mid-South 1982, Ted DiBiase initiated a heel turn when, in an act of desperation, he loaded his glove and knocked out his kayfabe best friend JYD to win the North American Title, in a match where he would have to leave the territory if he didn't win the title. He just quickly pulled the cheap shot, scored the pin, and ducked out of the ring quickly without a word.

This seemed ripe for the type of nuanced longer-term heel turn where a good person does a bad thing, it causes him to lose favor with the fans, and eventually leads to a long-term breakdown of his moral code. That is how it would look if a real person of some decency lost their way over time. However, DiBiase came out the next week and once again cheated to beat some nobody who hadn't been on the program up to that point.

They clearly overplayed their hand by booking it that way, and played into the silly kayfabe-breaking method of "this wrestler is now a 'bad guy,' and therefore he's just suddenly going to cheat all the time when that was not his way before." That type of turn really only makes sense when someone heel-turns to join an evil manager and is suddenly acting at their behest.

Another strong A&E doc for Edge this week. It's just unfortunate they've ****ed up his comeback so bad by flipping him so many times I no longer give a **** about his on screen character.

Damn, WWE had a Girls Gone Wild PPV in 2003? I had no idea. OSW just did a review. As expected, it was a shitshow and WWE tried to distance themselves from it the second it ended.

Ha, had no idea of that either. Sounds like it could be a funny OSW though, I'll have to check it out.

The YT version is a short highly edited review. I think if you go on their Patreon page you can access the longer, unedited version.

The whole thing is on the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/girls-go...m-spring-break

It sucks.

All the exposure I've had to WWE (and wrestling in general for the past few years have been the threads here - watched the last 2 Smackdowns and 1 Raw now and resubbed to WWE Network to watch Clash at the Castle in the hope that it'll pick up now that Vince is gone.

Been encouraged since it seems the general consensus here at 2+2 is that it's improved so hoping they're going to Make Wrestling Great Again.

Not caught up on the storylines besides what I've managed to pick up from the past 3 Raw/Smackdowns but glad to see Alexa Bliss is still around, and any PPV that starts off with her has my stamp of approval.