Thursday, April 25, 2019

Twitter Request Line, Vol. 256

The enforcer from Cobb County, GA
Photo Credit: WWE.com
It's Twitter Request Line time, everyone! I take to Twitter to get questions about issues in wrestling, past and present, and answer them on here because 140 characters can't restrain me, fool! If you don't know already, follow me @tholzerman, and wait for the call on Wednesday to ask your questions. Hash-tag your questions #TweetBag, and look for the bag to drop Thursday afternoon (most of the time). Without further ado, here are your questions and my answers:

Taking the good boy of Chikara away from me really hampers a top five, because really, no one really used a law enforcement gimmick after the '90s outside of the Boss Man. I'm not gonna scrape and pretend I know about the AWA, but I think I can get to five without it.

5. The Mountie - Jacques Rougeau's late-Rock'n'Wrestling gimmick had several things going for it. One, it was a heel gimmick, and I think the best cop gimmicks are heels. Two, it didn't take itself too seriously, which for a heel gimmick works. Three, he had a fucking cattle prod. How much did that rule? Four, the theme song ruled.

4. Officer Warren Barksdale - I feel like he didn't get a chance to flesh the gimmick out too much before he kinda faded into the aether, but despite some questionable bloggings, he was an enjoyable part of recent Chikara.

3. and 2. Tyler Breeze and Fandango, The Fashion Police - They were a bright spot for those who endured the slog of recent WWE television watching, at least until 'Dango got hurt. Sure, the police portion was flimsy at best and it leaned more on absurdist humor, but hey, I'm scraping here.

1. Big Boss Man - One of the best big guys ever, and his run as muscle for the Corporation was a chilling foreshadow for the state of police currently.

To paraphrase a tweet from esteemed, award-winning shiposter @GarbageMcFart, it would be Michael Elgin, and he would be dead. No, I keed, I keed, my answer is Bryan Danielson. In addition to being the greatest ever to don tights and kickpads, he seems like a legitimately interesting person whose politics probably wouldn't want to make me attempt to throw him through a wall only to get pummeled into a fine paste.

The layup is if the wrestlers had a union and successfully backed Owen Hart not going up into the rafters the night he died. While his death wasn't the wedge between the Harts and WWE, it certainly delayed the eventual reconciliation. If he had survived, he might have gotten the push Triple H did, at least initially. From the history of WWE, Trips' rise was inevitable given he had always been in Vince McMahon's ear and thus had a clear path to Stephanie's affections. But the turn-of-the-century WWE would've been a lot more interesting. And Bret Hart might have been in that first Hall of Fame class in 2004.

The trickier one also involves Owen Hart, in that what if the piledriver spot he and Steve Austin did at SummerSlam didn't involve the fucking of Austin's neck? Austin would have been free to work well past the date he retired, for starters. Would he have become a nuisance presence in the company politically? He flexed his muscle with Jeff Jarrett, and who knows who else he might have tangled with. Hell, he might even still be active now.

The most insane? What if Tom Magee were at least as good in the ring as Sycho Sid? You gotta be really awful for McMahon not to push you, and that bar is lower to the floor the further back in the past you get. Ultimate Warrior was dogshit in the ring, but he got a Mania VI coronation with Hogan. Imagine if Magee was at least on that level? He might have gotten the Mania VI coronation without the ego, and he would have stayed past the eventual flop his title reign would've been. And hey, if he's rich and famous, maybe he doesn't get the shit kicked out of him in a parking space dispute last year.

The team leader is Terry Funk, who in his 45 century career has seen a few things. You can't kill him, I'm convinced. The man was doing deathmatch-adjacent shit into his 60s. Do you think a gassed-up purple alien is any match for him? Fuck no. Second is Daisuke Sekimoto, who isn't on the same power level as the Hulk, but is close. Third and fourth are Billie Kay and Peyton Royce, because they can annoy the shit out of Thanos long enough to the other team members to do their thing. Finally, Daniel Bryan rounds out the team, because if anyone knows a way to leverage the Infinity Gauntlet off his big purple hand, it's the American Dragon.

I do not listen to any podcasts, but if I did still listen to them, WrestleSplania would be at the top of the list. It's a wrestling podcast that isn't from the perspective of dyed-in-the-wool wrestling fans who do wrestling fan things and say wrestling fan shit. Kath Barbodoro's bona fides as a wrestling fan cannot be questioned, but she, like a lot of the casual-seeming leftist Twitter-adjacent wrestling fans, she talks about it in a different way that paints wrestling as something that isn't embarrassing. Rachel Millman's perspective of someone who is discovering all the good wrestling for the first time is also unique. Again, I don't listen to it, but by the Twitter conversation around the show and the community it fosters say to me that it is a show worth supporting.

Chikara dabbled in time travel, and as a company I trust to do goofy shit, I can say they didn't even do it that well. So I'm not sure any wrestling company can do time travel stories well, certainly not WWE. WWE won't be able to do an altruistic hero until McMahon dies, and even then, I'm not sure Paul Levesque would know noble sacrifice and selflessness if did a bunch of steroids and then learned how to do a Canadian Destroyer. Body swap could work though, but it would all have to come from the performances. The problem here is that WWE writes very specific characters and doesn't branch out. Did you notice how Sami Zayn right now hates the fans, like about 13 billion other heels before him? Unless you had, say, John Cena body swap with like Heath Slater, the contrast might not work well enough. So the goofiest story WWE could do is the one everyone in the company has to restrain McMahon from doing when he gets the idea. That's right, incest, baby! Let's hope he never watches Game of Thrones.

I have two from the original six! The first is Thor. I'm almost positive that due to the critical and financial reception to Thor: Ragnarok that Marvel is chomping at the bit to team Chris Hemsworth and Taika Watiti and possibly Tom Hiddleston up again. So he'll be the elder statesman for the new group. The next OG returnee is Dr. Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk. The team works with other hammers to face off against big bads. I mean, Carol Danvers canonically is like 6 Hulks, I think. But I think Captain Marvel works better in space, and I think I want Avengers 5 to be on Earth against Dr. Doom. Next up are Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and The Wasp. Spidey replaces Cap as the most noticeable figurehead, and both Ant-Man and the Wasp, although not Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne, are callbacks to the first comics team. Finally, the new new guy on the roster is Wolverine, played by Daniel Radcliffe. Wolverine isn't as synonymous with the Avengers as he is with the X-Men, but he's been a member of the team on several occasions. Plus, it'll give him opportunities to clash with frequent frenemy The Hulk.

You want someone pulling up nonchalantly and hitting an impossible shot like they were laying the ball up? You want Jeff Hardy jumping off something big. Maybe not SummerSlam '09, which is the first spot that game to mind, because he lost that match. But Hardy has made habit of sacrificing himself for the huge pop and making it look like it was normal.

HIM hasn't really done anything in awhile, right? The Viking Experience is their comeback vehicle, baby!

Television is heavily scripted, catered to the whims of a septuagenarian madman. The pressure to perform to move the metrics and are probably still under intense scrutiny to get their shit in and get the crowd to react so that it can come off good to the people at home. For live shows? All they gotta do is what they do best, wrestle, with no pressure. Especially now that the model has gone from touring to video consumption, whether TV or streaming, they can let loose, because house shows do not matter.

Salad is so stigmatized. It's the "diet" food so people think it has to be boring, hence the limited selection of ingredients. Ooh, maybe someone will switch it up and use mesclun and other bitter greens instead of iceberg lettuce. Fancy. In reality, salad can be as creative as you want it to be. I mean, most outlets try to provide the variety, but almost all the time, you gotta pay extra for that shit. Maybe you could offer your strawberry and chicken salad with poppyseed vinaigrette as the meal starter instead of that struggle bag shit you serve with the Italian dressing in the souffle cup? Just sayin'.

1. Charlotte Flair
2. Celeste Bonin
3. Mia Yim
4. So Cal Val
5. Taeler Hendrix
6. Nattie Neidhart
7. Naomi

I am not explaining these rankings at all.
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