Ask 411 Wrestling: Will the Wyatts Be the New Ministry of Darkness?

Hello there, welcome to the only wrestling column were tater-tots aren’t on the menu at all (because they’re potato gems dammit!), Ask 411 Wrestling! I am your regular guide to the world of knowing things, Mathew Sforcina!

Big, big, BIG thanks to Ryan Byers for filling in for me while I was off on the high seas, he did his usual bang-up job. Go give him the follows on the Twitter, why not, he’s good people. Not quite ‘Final Boss of a video game level’, but still.

Speaking of that, guess what? I’m not the Hidden Final Boss of a Video Game! Yes, you can now have the fun and joy of questing to stop my taking over the world and such, right in the comfort of your home!

To do so, go and get a copy of Pier Solar HD on any platform from the fine folks at Watermelon Games, install it and all that good stuff. Then, at the title screen, Press L+R+Down (Q+E+Down on keyboard), then input cheat 77-03-01-37. The Big Boss is now me! Yay!

While you go buy the game and wait patiently to kill me, BANNER!

[email protected]

Zeldas!

Check out my Drabble blog, 1/10 of a Picture! I didn’t stop doing that, obviously.

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As always, I won’t discuss another guy’s work. Just not blernsball.

The Trivia Crown

Who am I? Though clearly aimed at young children, I am still one of the most dominant professional wrestlers in a particular type of match. My tag team partners have included a rat and a puppet, and one of my favorite wrestling holds has a name that invokes Nazi iconography. I have logged over 30 years in professional wrestling, and my adventures don’t show any sign of stopping anytime soon. Who am I?

But I will discuss this, or rather, give the floor back to Ryan since no-one got it. The answer was Super Muñeco.

His name literally translates to “Super Toy,” and his character was originally designed to appeal to children, but he has had remarkable staying power, wrestling under his current gimmick since the mid-1980s. Because he’s there to be a hero to the children and nobody wants to disappoint kids, he’s won an insane number of mask vs. mask and hair vs. hair matches, with most counts totaling over 100. Two of his most prolific tag team partners were Super Raton and Super Pinocho, the lucha libre answers to Mighty Mouse and Pinocchio. Plus, in his matches, he often utilizes the “Suastica” (or Swastika), an abdominal stretch in which the attacker hooks the victim’s leg that would normally be left free in a standard abdominal stretch.

So there you go.

Who Am I? Like the guy writing this question, I was once hidden inside a video game. Despite a career lasting over a decade and working for both major companies (at the time), I only have a few tag reigns in my title lineage, all of them with the same guy (heck, my only singles title I ever won didn’t even have a physical title!). I’ve been managed by Women’s Champions, World Champions, Yoga Practitioners and a Devil. Despite one of my tag team double team moves having the same name as one of my singles finishers, just with the word ‘Total’ stuck on the front, the two moves were totally different. A guy who was once part of a push to be more like video games, and who’s last PPV match is fairly memorable, I am who?

Getting Down To All The Business

Nightwolf starts us off with a simple question about if Bray Wyatt is now The Undertaker. Sort of.

With Erick Rowan back in the fold and the Wyatt Family now being 4 members, do you see the Wyatt Family becoming like the Ministry of Darkness? Here me out: In 48 hours, the Wyatt family decimated the Brothers of Destruction and carried their lifeless bodies to the back. Sure Wyatt lost to Roman Reigns, but maybe this is a fresh push for Wyatt to take over as the new Face of Fear. He could work his way towards a feud with Triple H and the Authority, but without the stupid Vince was the higher power b.s. angle.

Obviously timing has proven that Bray Wyatt is less ‘Satanic Undertaker’ as he is more ‘J.O.B Squad Al Snow’, given how quickly Taker and Kane came back from the decimation. But the main thrust of the question, if Bray can become the new creepy Face of Fear of the WWE? Perhaps, if you’re referring to The Barbarian when you mean Face of Fear.

But to actually become the Face of Fear requires one important thing, which is an ability and allowance to actually cause fear. And you’re not allowed to do that in WWE now, because parents might complain.

I’ve railed against this before (with slightly crappy grammar due to how angry I get over it), but the fact is, pro wrestling can be family entertainment, sure, but even when it is, it still has to be the sort of family entertainment where little kids get scared at times. The real money in wrestling used to be made by scaring little kids with a giant monster who was going to beat their hero, and they have to come along to cheer said hero, or tune into the PPV, because that hero needs them cheering for them if they are to defeat the big scary monster. Sometimes the monster wins, but the hero comes back wiser and tougher, or a new hero comes along, but sometimes the monster is vanquished, but at the end of the day, you need to scare the kids.

But when you don’t make your money on PPV, when you don’t really care all that much if kids come to the shows every week, when your company survives and arguably thrives playing it safe and being as non-threatening as a physical stunt show/sports event can be, then having a character be a true evil threat, that’s actively hurting your chances.

Now, that’s not to say Bray can’t work as is, you could even still run the Wyatt V Authority angle. You just need to give Bray a motivation, in this case Raven’s one in ECW.

Raven would go on and on with his speeches, he’d hook guys into following him, he’d mess with people’s minds… But at the end of the day, Raven had a clear goal, a clear aim. He never said it, as such, but he was clearly motivated by good old fashioned greed, and he wanted the ECW Title, and/or the tag titles. Everything Raven did (for the most part) was about that belt, it was just under the surface.

So, you could use that with Bray, if you have him continue to be ineffectual for a while, until just after WM say, when Roman Ambrose Bryan Cena is on top once again. Then have Bray start talking about ‘having the pieces’ and ‘knowing the ropes’, how he’s watched and learnt enough about the true threats to be able to start the true plan. And then, with a new guy as a fifth, you flip the switch from ineffectual gang of misfits to well oiled machine that wins everything all the damn time, and have Wyatt control most titles and then go after the bosses because he wants the control to ‘share his message’ but really he just wants the power.

That could work. But Bray Wyatt as a truly scary face of fear? Not in this WWE.

Manu Bumb asks about a list.

Who all did John Cena beat during his US Title open challenge?

Here’s the list of who got beat, on air (Raw and special events)

Bad News Barrett
Big E
Cesaro
Dean Ambrose
Dolph Ziggler
Kane
Kevin Owens
Rusev X2
Sami Zayn
Seth Rollins X3
Stardust
Xavier Woods
Zack Ryder

… You’d think it would be longer.

Snapmare Billy Bob Rodeo Face Jiggypie misses the Diva Trope Maker. (Sunny would be the Ur-Example here).

Are the WWE and Sable on good terms right now? I missed her second run with the company and have no idea how she was brought back, for how long or even what feuds she had. I truly believe she played an integral part of the Attitude Era (Fully Loaded 98) and often wonder if she’ll get the Hall of Fame nod. Do you think she us worthy?

Sable coming back into the fold, at least before Wendi Richter and/or Madusa came back in (depending on how far back your memory lasts) in 2003, was the ultimate example of how Vince will forgive anyone if he sees a buck in it. Despite the bitter lawsuits that flew when Sable left in 99, she eventually came back for a run on Smackdown where she another in a long line of beautiful divas who ‘worked’ for Vince McMahon’s on air character. She feuded with Torrie Wilson and Stephanie McMahon, turned face to appear in Playboy with Torrie Wilson, then heel again, before leaving the company on good terms in 2004, in order to spend more time with Brock Lesnar and her family.

Given Brock’s status with the company, it’s safe to say that Sable is on goodish terms still, although she’s unlikely to challenging Charlotte for the Divas title any time soon.

HOF? Beyond the default and obvious “If Koko gets in…” thing (I need a photo for that), I can see the argument for her getting in, the issue is that the two main things they’d hang the hat on, being posing for Playboy and fighting men, are both things they’re not exactly going to trumpet right now. But yeah, I can see it happening. Heck, there’s no other woman floating about that isn’t too problematic to induct (Miss Elizabeth) or really obscure by WWE standards (Mildred Burke, Manami Toyota) or just not happening (Chyna) that would get in, and it would give Brock a reason to turn up to the HOF, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was inducted in ’16.

Joey Joe Joe Shabadoo wants to know who is the quickest off the rank so to speak.

With the events of Survivor Series now behind us, I had a question concerning Roman Reigns’s championship, er, reign. What is the shortest amount of time that someone has held the heavyweight championship upon first winning it? I’m assuming Yokozuna at WM IX comes close. Thanks!

It’ll be Andre, surely, but I’ll look up all the first title runs less than a day, because there’s been a surprising number of them. Note that I’m counting the World and WWE titles as equal here, so guys like Mysterio, Bryan and Hardy and such don’t count since their ‘first’ tiny reigns came after longer reigns with the other belt.

Dolph Ziggler’s first World Title reign lasted 11 minutes and 23 seconds, which took place on Smackdown’s 600th show, from the moment Vickie Guerrero granted him the title through to him losing it back to Edge.

Yokozuna’s first title reign at Wrestlemania IX lasted a huge, staggering, amazing huge 2 minutes and 6 seconds. Thanks Hogan!

Whereas Andre The Giant’s first and sole WWE Title reign is a little iffy, in the sense that the ‘true’ time, from the time he ‘won’ the title to when he handed to DiBiase is 1 minute and 48 seconds, but you could argue that he was champ from when he won it to when he was ‘stripped’, but that’s picking hairs, 1:48 is the answer most would agree on here.

Whereas Roman Reigns got to reign all over us for 5 minutes and 15 seconds, so he’s nowhere near the Andre/Yoko double punch.

So yeah, Andre still holds the record here, and is unlikely to be beaten any time soon. Probably.

Hopefully.

Joseph had a lot of questions, so we’ll deal with a few of them at a time, as a lot of them are deep and such.

If you look at a show, a card, an event (whatever you want to call it) of wrestling, what goes into looking at it as a whole? There’s been a fair amount of stuff about the importance of the first match that’s been published, but what about the rest of the card? Wrestlemania X7 is held up as the greatest PPV because there’s just something for everyone. If you look at all the matches, they check all the boxes and every match serves a purpose. I guess I’m just asking if you could expand on that.

Putting together a wrestling show is a lot like making a pizza. Everyone has their own opinion about the specifics, and while there’s no truly ‘right’ way to do it, given that different people have different tastes at different times, there’s a few things you never do and the basic ideas remain the same.

The overall thing driving your show plan is the desire to balance what the audience wants and what they need to have, assuming that you’re not doing a charity gig or some event where you don’t expect the audience to really pay attention and/or care. If you’re doing a normal show, you need to give the fans enough of what they want to satisfy them while giving them enough hooks to force them to come back. You don’t want them to zone out part of the way through the show, but likewise you want them to not get their fill and thus not come back next time.

Now who and what your audience is radically alters how you end up putting the show together overall. A PWG crowd is not going to want to see a Danshoku Dino V Yoshihiko match, while a CHIKARA crowd isn’t going to want to see Danny Havoc V Jake Crist in a Barbed Wire Baseball Bat Four Corners Exploding Death Match. There’s a lot about pacing, about controlling the flow of emotions, about giving the audience time to breath, surprising them, there’s so much about booking a show that I don’t really have a grasp on, or at least I can’t speak about from a position of authority given that I’ve not booked a company for any length of time.

Suffice to say, as a whole, you (usually) want a show that builds on what has come before it, and builds to something in the future, with many different styles of wrestling and with a variety of stories and match types, start hot, pace to a hot match before intermission, a quick squash after intermission, then comedy right before the main event. As a very general outline.

But like any rule in wrestling, it can and should be broken in certain circumstances. Sometimes you want to build the show as one long build to the main event, sometimes you want more of a specific type of wrestling to get it over, and sometimes you have to toss everything out to truly shock people. But the above is a general enough place to start.

Feel free to just combine this into 2, but if you were booking a show just in general, how would you set it up?

Well I sort of did, but ok, say I’m asked to put together a show with a bunch of guys.

I’d start with looking to see if there’s anything in the past shows I need to build on, and/or if there’s anything in the future I’m building to. Assuming there’s not, I then go through the list of guys I’ve got, see if there’s anyone I know who wanted to work with someone else, or whom I want to see wrestle, or whatever. Then, best heel V best face in the main, best young heel V best young face in opener, feed rookie to biggest guy first match after intermission, pick best comedy potential for comedy match, do a tag match second, women’s match third, toss in everyone else I can afford into 1-2 matches, trying to make sure I put old hands in there with young guys when possible.

Then give myself a 20 minute promo at the start of the show.

*99/100 of a Chandler*

Is there–in general–a minimum or maximum amount of matches that should be set for a card? I keep thinking of a number, but every time I can come up with one I can think of some exception.

Not really, as there are storyline reasons where you need to have 12 matches on the card (tournament) and then storyline reasons for having say 3 matches on the card (Rumble, Champ, Other). I’d say 3 is the lower limit, two big matches and one shortish one, unless you make it very clear up front there’s just going to be 1 or 2 matches on the card (A couple of iron man matches if you were sure that would work or something), and as for an upper limit… With a tournament, 16 matches (15 tourney matches and one non-tourney) is where I’d draw the line, and without that, you’d need one heck of a storyline reason to go past 10 in my mind. (TV tapings are a different beast though, I’m just talking in terms of normal wrestling shows).

But I’m interested to hear what you guys think on this one.

David asks about a spot.

What match is this from, [and] was it a rib?

If you can’t see that gif on that page, here it is in video form.

Now then, the match specifically, it’s clearly a dark match, and I think it’s Steve Bradley getting the win there, he’s a guy WWE had on a developmental deal from 99 through to 02, first guy to ever pin Kurt Angle, for the record. But having Robinson as the ref makes it 01/02. So let’s see if I can find a record of him winning a match with the Roll the Dice in that time on historyofwwe.com…

…

Memphis, September 18, 2001, Steve Bradley pinned Scott Vick with the Roll of the Dice at 5:03. So that’s it, at an educated guess.

As for if it was a rib or not? Yes, and possibly no. Former ref Jimmy Korderas has appeared on a couple of podcasts, and there’s been two explanations for this sort of thing.

When he appeared on the Austin podcast, Austin shared stories about how guys would go to the Gorilla position during dark matches and get onto the mic and the ref’s earpiece and get them to do cartwheels and somersaults and the like as a rib on both the refs and the guys in the ring. But, on Colt Cabana’s podcast, the explanation was slightly different, as it was suggested there that sometimes when they did stuff like that it was a deliberate thing, as ordered from the back, to see the reaction from the guys getting the tryouts. Would they freak out? Would they forget everything? Would they react at all? Stuff like that.

Now in this case it’s almost certainly the first, but the latter I can see happening at other times.

But either way, a cartwheel is one thing, but Bryce wins this battle easy.

Andron wants to talk about PPVs and WWE’s survival, both historical and long term.

Well firstly do you think that WWE gives us too many payperviews per year or do you feel that the PPVs are ran in too quick of an interval?

No, given that the market has changed, at least in terms of how WWE operates and makes money. WWE no longer depends on the PPV revenue to ensure healthy profit margins, and thus doesn’t need to worry about getting the balance just right, although 1 a month is the best option all around. But as far as the network goes, they should probably be running more shows on their, not less. Given that PPVs are now just giant Raw episodes anyway, you might as well have 1 or 2 Network exclusive shows a month to entice people to tune in. Want to see Cesaro get a title shot? Well he’s getting one at “WWE Live: You Honestly Think He’s Got A Chance?” Only on the WWE Network!

The shortened intervals are a problem, but then again, do one title switch on one of those shows (say, Paige over Charlotte) and you add in the “anything can happen” factor, and hopefully that’ll tick over a few more subscribers.

What is the edge you think WWe has over its competitors? How did WWE manage to out last WcW and EcW? Do you think it was just mare experience that WWE is managing to out last TNA?

Each of those companies was beaten by something different.

ECW was the easy one, in that no matter how influential and important the company was to wrestling as a culture/as a product, the fact is that at the end of the day ECW was never in a position to truly challenge WWE or even WCW on a financial level. They were a regional company that got a great buzz around them, but couldn’t afford TV, couldn’t get any bigger without TV, and were running on empty for a long time before it finally closed up shop. WWE just had to let ECW run out of power, which it did eventually. (Although Vince did help it along a bit at times, both to keep it alive and to help kill it…)

WCW was the one that WWE deserves some credit, but it’s also the one that they take way too much credit in the win. When Bischoff found the winning formula, when he combined the big names fans still liked with the workrate to keep them hooked, it is to Vince’s credit that, back to the wall, he listened to (the story goes) Shane and Russo, and trusted them and their ideas. And then stealing honing the ECW formula, coupled with the rise of Austin and the backing into Mr. McMahon, they rose from the ashes and went on to kick WCW’s butt… But only because WCW bent over, wiggled their hips and begged for a kicking.

WCW could have, should have, killed WWE, or at the very least kept them at bay for much longer, if they’d taken guys like Goldberg, Jericho, Benoit, Eddie, etcetcetc, pushed them, elevated them, created new stars who could go, if they’d done that Austin/McMahon wouldn’t have been as huge as it was, or at least it’d be much more a long dogfight. But WCW didn’t do that. WCW did the exact opposite, and then made every wrong choice possible, and in the end of the day WWE didn’t kill WCW, WCW killed WCW, or at least handed the gun to Jamie Kellner and called him bad words if he didn’t pull the trigger.

TNA? Inertia. By the time TNA started, WWE is now firmly entrenched in the media landscape as all wrestling is, and worse still, there’s a generation of fans (not nearly as big a generation as past ones, but still) who won’t accept wrestling that isn’t on WWE’s level in terms of presentation and style and overall look. So for TNA, GFW, any new company that wants to make a go of it, they need to invest millions to look the way a good chunk of the audience will accept as how wrestling should look.

But TNA shooting themselves in every appendage they have, including stapling new ones on just to shoot themselves in it, coupled with WWE’s stranglehold on the industry, that’s why TNA will be outlasted, why in a few years TNA will be another video on demand section on the WWE Network.

Can WWE come up with a good enough of an Attraction for its future wrestlemania like the undertakers undefeated streak? What are the chances that many sales they had was due to people who are trying to see if Undertaker would lose his streak this year?

They arguably don’t need to anymore, as the brand Wrestlemania is what drives it forward now. The individual parts, at least those not named Rock, Austin, possibly Cena and maybe Rousey still, aren’t that important, as no-one is really moving the needle but Wrestlemania is still huge business, as cities are bidding for it like mad and it’s probably profitable before the show even takes place. So finding some sort of attraction to make people tune in is the least of their worries. Yes, I’d say Taker’s streak did drive sales to some degree, but outside the Taker V Cena match, or a Rock match, or Austin’s return, or Rousey getting to work WM in exchange for losing to Holm photos of Dana White enjoying Gilbert and Sullivan or something, there’s not really anything on the immediate horizon that could be an attraction, certainly not for a while.

But I think if/when Cena moves into that role, when Wrestlemania becomes the only time you get to see Five Knuckle Shuffles and AAs and the like… That may well be something. But that’s not for several years, probably.

I mentioned Russo in passing, but Connor insists on more Russo talk!

Do you think Vince Russo deserves all the hate he gets?

It’s a hard question to answer, given that the ‘hate’ tends to be for a variety of reasons. For every Jim Cornette whose hate is pure and clear cut, some people hate Russo for killing WCW or ruining TNA or for making women into sex objects or for pushing women at all or because he’s from New York or because he’s born again or because they thought his booking in EWR was stupid or…

There’s a lot of variations out there. At the end of the day, however, I think Russo hate is mostly deserved, but should be tempered a little, given that I think not enough people give him credit for some things. Yes, when given full reign he was horrible, but there’s some things he has changed which, while forgotten now, were good. Like characters not suddenly being one happy family just because someone turned heel/face, or the overall concept that women should have characters and tell stories, or that you need some unpredictability.

But, of course, he has lots of negatives, all of which someone is listing below in furious response to my ‘deluded blind worship’ of Russo or whatever I will be accused of.

I’ll end the column there on the hopes that leaving this right about the comment section might defuse some of the blind hate, but we’ll see. Thanks for reading, and do come back next week, where there’ll be a stat question you might well be interested to see the results of! Until then, dear readers!