Topic: Wrestling?

The pandemia will still be dangerous, but the greedy banksters are already demanding everything to be opened again. I expect the quarantine to be over in may, maybe june.

It is always a little bit of a gamble to change your employer. I guess it is pretty sure that WWE is keeping a lot of people because they don´t want other companies to pick them up. Eric Young, EC3, Hawkins and Ryder, the Colons to just name some people. With the real jobber match having a sort of revival, thier chances of appearing on TV are even becoming slimmer, and so even their value for house shows is sinking. I am pretty easy to please with house show personal, but I would feel cheated if I had to watch a real jobber match on a house show if you think how Flair, Bret Hart, the Undertaker and other high class wrestlers regularly did house shows even when they were already big.

According to PW Insider:

*McMahon just announced cutbacks and furloughs for WWE staff and the company overall, stating that these were hard decisions that reflect the current reality.

*McMahon stated there would be cutting back on pay for Board Members and Executives.

*Plans to move WWE Headquarters out of Titan Tower to the new HQ in Stamford, CT have been delayed.

*McMahon also stated they would be cutting the talent roster and overall head count of employees. Some will go on furlough. Others will be let go from their responsibilities. Employees will receive texts about where they stand going forward.
The meeting lasted less than five minutes.

The last line is the classic line, I can see vince McMahon standing on a podium, announcing: "You will be fired. Or get less money. Or not. In any way, you will receive a text. At some time."

Rusev Day in WWE has been canceled everyone........Happy Rusev Day AEW!

Vince McMagon: "But...but SLAPJACK, T-BAR and MACE are cool, edgy names! You know, like these street gangster credibility names like T-BIRD, SWEETYBONE or TUFFBOI. What do you mean, not everybody that fights a system is an anarchist street gangster?"

I find it funny how WWE always manages to Limbo through under the probably right now very low expectations of fans, but that is how they do business. It obviously works very well or else they wouldn´t do it for decades now.

Slapjack, T-Bar, and Mace sound like mooks from an early 90s white guy kung-fu movie.

Like, they're the dudes that Steven Seagal takes out on his way to fight the city's ruling crime boss at the end of the movie.

Harrier wrote:I find it funny how WWE always manages to Limbo through under the probably right now very low expectations of fans, but that is how they do business. It obviously works very well or else they wouldn´t do it for decades now.

It's not really working out for them, I'd say. Their ratings and viewers have been consistently trending downwards the past few years. It's taken some time, but they're finally burning off their goodwill with people and losing their fans.

It wouldn't surprise me if Raw was consistently under a million views each week within the year.

The question is how much of this falls on Vince's shoulders and how much falls on the rest of the creative staff and such. Mostly for my own curiosity, granted.

There actually are managers and CEOs who micromanage everything, even with much larger companies than the WWE. I saw a story about a CEO of a corporation that dwarfs WWE who was over 90 years old, still working large numbers of hours and who literally died in his office. So I think it is possible and plausibe that Vince McMahon is such a control freak who thiinks of him as the immovable center of activity and the only guy who knows whats going on.

Creatively speaking, things went massively downhill in my opinion at several poins, with only a shiny gem then and when sticking out of a sea of mediocre disruptive and/or laughable ideas.
MMA is superior: No, it´not. It´s different. If wrestling embraces that it is fake and concentrates on being entertaining and telling a story, it blows MMA out of the water in my opinion. Admitting that Lesnar and any other halfway competent MMA fighter is better in everything than a WWE superstar is moronic and shouldn´t happen.
Kayfabe is dead: In the real world, kayfabe can stay dead, but maybe wrestlers can stop to post their buddy photos when they are in a feud at least? In the ring, it should be alive and well. I was as much of a fan of the Summer of Punk as anyone, but in retrospective, it has massively damaged the reputation of the WWE. Breaking the fourth wall in comics is so rarely used because it is so hard to reverse.
Protectionism: The main enemy of storytelling. Let´s take Miz and Maryse vs Cena and Nicki Bella at WM. Miz was creative, funny and most importantly, everything he said was exaragated but in essence true. Cena was just a moronic, unable to commit guy. Maryse was confident and beautiful while Nikki Bella seemed to be desperate in her attempt to marry Cena. What is the bread and butter of the story? The heel be the better man. Miz and Maryse were towering over Cena and Nikki in this feud because Cena is simly not believable in the role as future husband. Give me a reason to cheer for the face or gtfo with the feud. There are many, many more such feuds and happenings like that. When kayfabe was still alive, that wasn´t much of a problem. But today?
Kids are stupid and do not have memory: They do. If you want to turn a kid into a fan, give them something that is actually good. "Never give up" is a positive story, so it was ok to use it. But there is also a reason you someday stop to watch the Power Rangers as a kid. Key is the Phrase: "same old, same old". And even the power ranger,s despite being very repetitive, managed ot have plot twists then and when. So stay PG, but do not think people have no memory.

Panda wrote:The question is how much of this falls on Vince's shoulders and how much falls on the rest of the creative staff and such. Mostly for my own curiosity, granted.

It's all Vince. He has to finalize everything, he rips up scripts before a show and has them rewritten WHILE THE SHOW IS HAPPENING.

The writers are, unfortunately, not writing for the fans. They're writing for Vince, because he'll throw out anything he doesn't like and change everything else on a whim. Listen to any of the interviews with anyone who's left the company in the past couple years: 99% of the company's creative issues are on Vince's shoulders.