Thursday, June 13, 2019

Twitter Request Line, Vol. 263

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
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 280 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:

I'm a biased source in that Nintendo is my only outlet for gaming, so it should come as no shock that the best news this week came in the form of not one, but TWO Nintendo Legend of Zelda games in the pipes. A third game, Cadence of Hyrule, is a third-party game with Nintendo licensing to include Zelda characters. I'm still probably getting that one, but it's nowhere near as titanic to me as the Link's Awakening redo or the Breath of the Wild direct sequel that were showcased here. I spent HOURS and tons of battery power playing the original Link's Awakening, but since Nintendo is awful about its archives, I have no way of replaying it. If that news weren't already good, the remake is going to have a Create-a-Dungeon option. Zelda Maker is here, baby! As for the Breath of the Wild sequel, those who know me know that the original game became my favorite game of all-time after playing it, so you know I'm down with the sequel. The initial footage shows Zelda walking around with Link, which feeds into the hunger that a lot of longtime fans of the series have had to actually play as the Princess of Hyrule. Getting to fight as her in the Smash Bros. series is just not enough. My God, I am BEYOND stoked for the future of the Zelda franchise.

I'd say you are, although technically, he's only really a facilitator. In the '80s and '90s, Japanese wrestling promotions started to innovate pro wrestling onto the path where it is today. While greats like Giant Baba, Antonio Inoki, Jumbo Tsuruta, and Genichiro Tenryu were the big stars in the early parts of the '80s, their styles were very much similar to the greats in America. Two different groups of people started to change that: junior heavyweight male wrestlers and the female joshi wrestlers. Tiger Mask and Dynamite Kid blew the lid off what wrestling could be capable of with their influential series of matches that included things like flips and other feats of athleticism that were heretofore uncharted territories in pro wrestling. Meanwhile, women realized that they needed to do twice the cool shit to get half the credit as the men, so they started going hard. While I immensely respect the Four Pillars of Heaven of All Japan and the Three Musketeers of New Japan, it's no coincidence that most of their big special moves were innovated by joshi wrestlers. Jaguar Yokota, not Mitsuharu Misawa, innovated the Tiger Driver '91. Kyoko Inoue, not Kenta Kobashi, did the first Burning Hammer (what she called the Victoria Driver).

Anyway, it was those wrestlers who had the most direct influence on late '90s puro, the WCW Cruiserweight Division, and first wave American Indie wrestlers, all of which Meltzer was a fan. Hell, Meltzer is even one of the OG joshi fans. While he can be incredibly sexist in some regards, especially if you ask him about Tomoaki Honma's alleged domestic abuse, he turns into perhaps the biggest feminist ever when discussing joshi. Anyway, so many of the second- and third-wave indie wrestlers not only took influence from all those wrestlers that came before them, but many of them were or are still are huge marks for themselves, and think the highest praise ever would be to receive The Full Five (or more) from Meltzer, whose favorite wrestling came from all those different eras where he lavished praise in the form of four+ star matches in bulk. So while it might be inaccurate to say it's all because of Meltzer why matches today are the way they are, it's fair to say he might be the biggest facilitator, the Silver Surfer to two-decades-worth-of-Japanese-wrestling's Galactus, so to speak.

Oh wow, well, I'm no wrestler, but I do have a plan. It's foolproof. Basically, I recruit Max Landis and Ben Shapiro to be on my team, tell them we'd be shoo-ins to win, everyone in Chikara is puny. Then I would go to Sidney Bakabella and tell him that we want the Proteus Wheel to show them who's boss. We then get to the ring, I pat both guys on shoulder, and run back to the back while the Wheel just wails on them until they're longpig tartare. How do you like that?

I can think of three that I just can't deal with. Two of them feature Alberto del Rio!
  1. Mexamerica - Granted, it was just del Rio and a manager in Zeb Colter, but it just infuriates me how lazily it was ideated. Like, did they want to do something hip and edgy and all they had on the whiteboard was "US and Mexico, two great flavors?" No idea.
  2. The League of Nations - "They call themselves The Lads!" That was the only good thing to come out of it, and even that was just because it was such an absurd line delivered with the most unearned enthusiasm from Michael Cole possible. WWE's answer to letting everyone know that they're changing was just to throw every foreign upper midcarder in a stable to lose over and over again to Roman Reigns, which probably makes it the most WWE stable of all-time, I guess.
  3. The Corre - The only good thing to come from this was the segment in the Royal Rumble where they and the New Nexus battled with each other. Everything about this stable was poorly executed, right down to the stupid extraneous "r" in the name.
The way WWE "plays up" its talent's hometown visits is a direct result of Vince McMahon's sociopathy, and for all their faults, the members of The Elite seem genuinely to care about their peers/contractors. So while I don't think everyone is automatically going to win in their hometown, they'll be treated like something special there.

My parents used to make this dish called "meat and peas" which was, as it sounded, ground beef browned and simmered with canned peas. It was a lot better than it sounded, but still it was a symbolic of a family in the struggle at the time. Of course, when I talked to other kids and found out that their parents didn't make meat and peas, I was a little confused, given that when one is a child, their parents and their household tend to be the world. Well, at least that's how it was in the '80s before the advent of information at one's fingertips. My son is always on his iPad, so he knows more about the world in current than I ever did at that age with only sometimes-outdated books at my disposal. But that's a whole other story.

As of right now, all the "new" wrestlers I've seen have come from two events, Chikara's Young Lions Cup Stage One and Josh Barnett's (sigh) Bloodsport. There have been a few wrestlers I was impressed with from either show, for example: Masashi Takeda, Air Wolf, Jaden Newman, Still Life with Apricots and Pears, and Davienne for example. The most impressive, however was Hideki Suzuki. Granted, having a dude go full grapplefuck with Timothy Thatcher is one of the easiest ways to get me to like him, but he was even better than advertised, so suck on that, Voices of Wrestling.


  • Crystal Pepsi - It might have been my fragile ten-year-old brain talking, but it was good. It even had Van Halen selling it! Sure it was Van Hagar, but still it was one of their better songs.
  • Surge - The greatest soda in the history of our sport is no longer discontinued, but I chalk it up to people loving it so much that it had to come back, so it counts!
  • Mountain Dew Voltage - Negative connotations aside, I've always liked regular Mountain Dew, but the ancillary flavors have always been hit or miss. Voltage was a big hit, but god forbid they keep that around and not the shitty "gamer fuel" flavors. Fuck gamers.
  • Pepsi Kona - Sure it wasn't particularly good, but god bless Pepsico for thinking that its soda didn't have enough caffeine that it had to add coffee to it.
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