So i'm a huge wrestling fan and am looking forward to Wrestlemania 21. The thin that really makes me excited though has nothing to do with wrestling. It's the ads they air for the event. Parodying some good movies. The parodies are so spot on that it's kind of creepy. Also they are quite hilarious. If you wan to see what i'm talking about go to wwe.com and click on commercials for wrestlemania.. I think they have five out now.
Pulpl Fiction
Basic Instinct
Forrest Gump
Braveheart
and A few Good men
Look and tell me what you think.
You're way past the golden age of wrestling. Now that there's only one company out there producing mainstream events, it's a monopoly and Vince's ideas on how to put on a good show are old and outdated. That means there's no alternative to the WWE.
Given a choice between Vince McMahon's productions, or the small ballroom and gymnasium wrestling of ECW headed by Paul Heyman, I'd pick ECW any day of the week. Even better are the IWA Japanese wrestling deathmatches and barbed wire ring events.
By the way, practically every mainstream wrestler with any talent came from ECW.... Chris Jericho, Hardy Brothers, Undertaker, Chris Benoit (if he's still around).... aw, who else is around? I don't even know. It's depressing to watch these guys try to wrestle..... whoever taught their style has no technical wrestling experience. No holds, no reversals, little grappling..... it's boring!!
Yeah, it's probably been about 12 years since I've watched a Wrestlemania, and at least 15 since I've enjoyed wrestling.
Used to buy tickets to watch the first few Wrestlemanias on closed circuit at the local aud. Paid $100 for a seat (that turned out to be crappy) at the Skydome when they held it in Toronto. And even when I had pretty much lost interest, in the early 90s, I made a point of going to one of the local bars that opened on Sunday just to show Wrestlemania on their big screen. It was once a year, and a pitcher of beer, a heap of wings and a bunch of friends made it good.
But I just can't stand Wrestling now. They've long since given up even pretending its a sport, and it's so full of sex and messed up values and soap opera crap, I can't stand to watch it.
Wrestling peaked in the mid-80s. It was fun up until 87 or 88, and then it started going downhill.
I gave up on it not long after WWF became the only major player. Not that I liked WCW towards the end, but the WWF began to start hiring a lot of the people who ran WCW into the ground. I did really like it when the Monday Night Wars were in full swing. It was funny, I grew up being a diehard WWF hater, but by the late 90s/early 00s I was tuning into WWF for the wrestling. That was how upside down things had gotten.
Now I'm interested in whatever I can find from the early 80s and before [though stuff much earlier than that is hard to get hold of] and from promotions that I didn't get a chance to see when I was a teenager.
I did like ECW, but they ran a lot of stuff into the ground. When they wanted to have good solid wrestling it was great, but I couldn't get into the various table/garbage matches.
You guys hit the mark on Pro Wrestling. I recently picked up a copy of WILD MEN OF WRESTLING distributed by Diamond Entertainment and it had two disk. It features 80's Wrestling from Florida. I'll let you know how it is when I'm done with it.
Although I only see it being shown on PPV, you may want to check out UCF or K-1