Thread: All Elite Wrestling
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Old 02-21-2023, 10:59 PM   #13166
Tom Guycott
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Evil Vito View Post
One of the beauties with early AEW is that almost nobody wrestled on consecutive weeks. They had a roster that was big enough to allow them to rotate the ring-work, guys would wrestle once every 2-3 weeks but pretty much everyone important would be featured in vignettes, promos, angles etc. They had a good rotation going.

That continued right on through the pandemic, especially with their taping schedule being what it was (live episode Wednesday, taped episode Thursday, then everyone goes home for 2 weeks).

Now it's just the polar opposite. Same people wrestling every week and while I'm not about to complain about seeing a guy like Danielson wrestle every week, it's a problem when you have sizable chunks of the roster going unused.

I understood AEW got burned over the summer with fuckloads of guys going out hurt at the same time, but they are mostly healthy now. Mox was supposed to take a vacation on September and it never happened. Khan's all but said he "can't afford" to lose Danielson for a month to do the G1. Why not? Are advertisers demanding all the big names work every week? It's a mess.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lock Jaw View Post
Speaking solely about my experience watching for a couple months after Punk went over... seems like Tony relies heavily on the internet fans to "fill in the gaps" on his stories for him. Since that is his primary demo he sees no need to change as long as people keep filling in the gaps for him.

Once enough of the IWC turns against him, then we'll see Meltzer and the other "journalists" turn against AEW to shift with their market as well, and then things will unravel quickly....
That's always been a problem for the entire time: relying on people like us to carry the product. Folks like us who even know who the fuck Meltzer is, let alone care one way or the other about what he says. Folks like us who have at least a cursory care about what's going on in NJPW, NWA, MLW, AAA, or the surprisingly still upright corpse of Impact.

Relying on the internet wrestliing community to watch all of their shows, including the web-only stuff that's obviously nowhere near appointment watching, and understanding that an angle is happening between X and Y that involves a thing that happened between them at an indy show in Britain over some New Japan title where most of the "normal" fans will have prob'ly have only seen Dynamite and wonder who the hell those two guys even are.

Relying on the IWC to *know* who someone like Shibata is and caring enough to want to see him against Orange Cassidy. Relying on the IWC to "fall for" just plugging New Guy Z in with Veteran W and expecting them to automatically get an instantanious rub of stardom instead of actually building anyone.

And again, it comes down to being an opposite extreme from WWE. When you had the perfect storm in something like The Ryder Revolution, it was unique in being a time and place event where he - individually - was about as over, if not moreso, than any of the top guys on the card *because* he had a burgeoning social media groundswell that the company just didn't understand or quantify, and was in a position to capitialize on it in a way that Matt Hardy before him couldn't (realistically speaking, Matt had the vision, but was WAAAYYY too early on that forefront, trying to build a fanbase when the world was still just getting used to dial-up and chatrooms and not when everyone had a microcomputer in their pocket and could instantaniously interact). Heck, WWE still had commentators bash "the internet" and and style it to be a total of 30 basement-dwelling neckbeards globally, and only maybe half of those might possibly be into wrestling just to trash it instead of a thing that, again at that point, EVERYONE had access too at pretty much any time if they had a nice enough cellular phone or computer/laptop... while AEW likes to pretend now that that is all that exists and the only way everyone consumes everything in every interest all the time and all of those interests intersect for everyone.

There should not be a need to hold Bryan Danielson from the G1 or stop Mox from vactioning or doing the originally planned NJPW timeshare because nobody around can be assed to actually "build" folks (plural) that anyone would or should care about to be able to carry the company in the absense of one or two talent, but there is a very bad habit to only trade on most folks who already came in with some sort of name behind them from elsewhere. About the only people who seemingly bucked that trend were Darby Allin, Hook, and Dr. Britt. Even then, most of those people end up spinning wheels instead of being any sort of help or hinderance.
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