Tag: wrestling

Biting on the Sale Price Fallacy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I started my journey of taking online surveys to make money for future blets back in July, as I’ve stated numerous times, the end goal really was to be ready for whenever if and when and mostly if, the WWE Shop would release a replica of the NXT UK Tag Team Championship blet.

Well that still hasn’t happened, and since the belt debuted in 2018, they’ve released countless “tribute” blets, which I put in quotations because almost all of them are entirely existing plates, screwed onto new and gaudy straps, individualized to whichever wrestler they’ve decided to “tribute,” and then charge anywhere from $500-800 for them.

Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Eddie Guerrero, Ric Flair, John Cena, Edge, Triple H and even Chyna have had tribute belts made in their honor.  The Rock and Macho Man Randy Savage have had custom belts designed as theirs.  As noted in the past, Xavier Woods’ YouTube channel’s belt has even been made available. 

Hulk Hogan has tribute belts both to his red and yellow persona, as well as his nWo Hollywood Hogan character.

The Undertaker has had two tribute belts made, this year alone. 

I know it’s a big deal that 2020 marks 30 years in the WWE for the Undertaker, but you know who’s probably the most sick of all this Undertaker tribute-ing?  The Undertaker.  Mean Mark’s made little secret of his generally low-key secluded life when not actively being the business, so I have to imagine a guy like him is put off by all this attention, but does it because of all the paychecks he’s going to continue to get for the rest of his life, by unwavering loyalty to Vince McMahon, but even still, that’s a whole lot of fuckin’ Undertaker to absorb throughout a year.

Anyway, because it’s painfully evident that the WWE Shop is in no rush to ever, if at all, release the NXT UK Tag Team Championship replica, I’ve long past the theoretical full MSRP of a brand-new release blet, and just been continuing to earn more money on the surveys that I do, because why the fuck not?  It’s an easy way to make a little bit of side scratch, and hopefully eventually one day, the blet I really want will actually be made available.

But in the meantime, because of the time of year it is, I noticed that the WWE Shop decided to drop some Black Friday deals of their own, including on blets, and despite the fact that they didn’t have the one blet that I really really wanted, I still felt some excitement and almost a need to capitalize on the fact that they were deeply discounting so many of their inventory.

This is obviously the sale price fallacy, where I simply wanted to buy something solely on the fact that it was on sale.  And despite the lack of NXT UK Tag, I still had in the back of my mind some choices that I’d be willing to pull the trigger on, if they were on deep discount, and seeing as how they all were, I winced and realized that I was about to make an impulse purchase on one of them.

Continue reading “Biting on the Sale Price Fallacy” →

I want to like this more, but the jokes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Thirty years after WWF Wrestlefest is released in arcades, some company announces the release of RetroMania Wrestling, the “official” sequel to WrestleFest

As the title of this post says, I really want to like and be excited about this game more than I am, but there are just so many jokes and snark to unleash and get out of my system before I can resign myself to the fact that I’ll still probably impulse purchase this on Steam so that I can play with my brother and my bros.

When I was a kid, I loved Wrestlefest.  I almost always picked the Ultimate Warrior despite the fact that by then, I was already well on my way to being one of those contrarian mark types of wrestling fans and was a by far bigger fan of Mr. Perfect than I was the Warrior, but the cheapskate cheesing kid with very limited quarters didn’t like the fact that Mr. Perfect lacked many power moves, but most importantly the ability to drop a body slam, so there was no way to get cheap easy eliminations with Mr. Perfect when playing in the Royal Rumble mode.  One of my fondest memories of this game was being a such a master button masher, that no matter the fact that I had zero health in a Royal Rumble match, I would still kick out of every pinfall attempt, and I ended up outlasting two other human opponents, with me winning the rumble after back dropping the last human player out.

Hell, even as an adult, I loved Wrestlefest, and I installed Mame and got a rom of Wrestlefest, it was basically the greatest thing on the planet, that I could now play one of my favorite arcade games ever, with basically unlimited quarters, since credits could be added with the press of buttons.  I dabbled with all other characters I didn’t want to waste money with when I was a kid, and realized that the best player in the game was Sgt. Slaughter, who not only had good power moves, but an automatically initializing submission move in the cobra clutch, that anyone slapped into it had like a 20% chance of actually not tapping out of.

Needless to say, you’d think I would be over the moon that when a “sequel” was announced, I’d be more excited about it, especially since at first blush it’s basically the same game, just with different characters, settings and some modern polish.  But you hear the title, you see the roster, and realize that there’s obviously no legal affiliation with the WWE, and it kind of feels like something is missing, and the whole thing kind of comes off like a non-canonical fan-fiction of a production.

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Happy Trails, Animal

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The end of the road for this warrior: legendary tag team wrestler, Joe “Animal” Laurenaitis passes away at the age of 60

Here’s a big oof moment – when looking for a picture to use for this post, I came across this particular image from Survivor Series 1990, and realized that now, every single person in this particular promo was dead.  Kerry Von Erich, Road Warrior Hawk, the Ultimate Warrior, “Mean” Gene Okerlund, and now, Road Warrior Animal, all gone from mortal existence.  This particular Survivor Series was also the debut of the Undertaker, whom has just officially retired from the business after 30 years in the WWE but is otherwise alive and well.

But back to Animal, 60 is not quite an age where the royal we can say he’s gone too soon, but at the same time it’s not really an age where we can say that he lived a full life, closer to general white male in America life expectancy than not.  The cause of death hasn’t formally been revealed, but I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to assume that it was probably his heart, it was probably enlarged, and couldn’t have been helped by some of his life spent with his former tag team partner, who was a notorious partier, substance abuser, and was someone who was gone too soon, at the age of 46.

For the record, I was always more fond of Animal than I was Hawk, even though I fully understand that when the day was over, Hawk really was the stronger worker and more talented of the two.  I guess I just preferred Animal’s power game and his general aesthetic, and the single center mohawk looked cool, and not like he was prematurely balding like Hawk’s dual mohawks.  Hawk would carry matches, take the brunt of the punishment, but then make the hot tag to Animal, who came in and bulldozed opponents, before eventually putting someone up on his shoulders for the Doomsday Device, which to this day, is still one of the more legitimately devastating looking finishers in all wrestling, and there’s a reason why so few tag teams even try to replicate it today.

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New Father Brogging, #021

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As my paternity leave winds down, I naturally feel like the last six weeks have blown by, and that I wish I had more time.  Mentally, I’m not really that prepared to return to work yet, but it’s not like I really have much of a choice if I want to be able to provide for my family, other than to suck it up and get back to it.  But I definitely wish I had more time, without a doubt.

Overall, the last six weeks have been mostly anything but easy, as raising a child is definitely no small feat, and I should be fortunate that I even had the luxury of paternity time in the first place.  As necessary as it most certainly felt to me, the reality is this is something that my company did not have in place when I first started there, which wasn’t even a full five years ago.  I remember the big deal it was within the company, and even getting some national news traction about how when we went full paternity, and thinking nothing of it back then, because I wasn’t even married yet, but having capitalized on it now, I couldn’t be more grateful to work for a company that offers it, because I know that such is not the case everywhere else.

But throughout my paternity leave, my child has grown a bunch, begun eating solid foods, competently rolling over front to back to front, has graduated out of swaddles, and has been teething, chatting a lot more, and we’ve begun trying to get her to sit up on her own strength.  One of my prime hopes was that while I was off, we’d be able to get her into a casting call for some sort of baby company, and put her to work a little bit, and once she actually did get put on a shortlist of candidates, but then they hit us with the curveball that all babies would be required to be able to sit up on their own power.  Bummer

Aside from baby-ing, over the last six weeks, I managed to get my brog back up and running, although it’s an indeterminate time to whether when or if I’ll ever get the pre-2010 archives back up and running, because that’s way lower priority than the brog.  I also had some house issues, when some freakish storms exposed some leaks in my home, which turned out to be a time consuming and costly ordeal in its own right, which really messed me up, and I also found out that my own dad has been having some minor health issues on his own, leading to my sister and I to have some real talks about the inevitable future.

Needless to say, it’s been a time during paternity leave, and it’s hard to comprehend that these six weeks have evaporated so quickly.  Put being on full-time daddy duty 10-12 hours a day, with next to no help and practically no down time for myself, and it’s been very understandable when people try to expound the difficulties of parenthood.

To reward myself and/or indulge in some retail therapy, I decided to get myself a new belt, as well as track down my own belated birthday gift, in this sweet Power Rangers T-Rex DinoZord.  And the belt is mostly as a result of an Amazon gift card my sister got me for my birthday when her own attempt to get me the T-Rex stalled out due to a flaky seller in Japan, and much like Target gift cards, I’m left with a wtf do I purchase, until it came to my attention that Amazon actually had a few people selling legitimate belts.  So now I have a Ring of Honor tag replica, that guys like Kyle O’Reilly, Bobby Fish, the Young Bucks, Hardys, AJ Styles, Kevin Steen Owens, Cesaro, CM Punk and Seth Rollins have held in their histories.

And modeling the belt is my new life-long tag team partner.  As intensive as some parenting might have felt at times, I wouldn’t take anything away from the last six weeks, and I’m sad that it’s likely I’ll not get another massive chunk of time like this to spend with my child for the immediate future.

It’s hard to even describe the cringe of Randy Orton apparel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Perusing through my news feeds, I came across this story that detailed how WWE wrestler Randy Orton has apparently released a clothing line, known as SLTHR; presumably as in “slither” because his in-ring persona is that of a snake-like aggressor who cannot be trusted and strikes quickly. 

After looking at his announcement image for five seconds, and the painfully low-effort design of Old English typeface, and the horrible utilization of the no-vowel spelling of words as if we’re trying to go back to Aramaic, and my face literally did the Steve Carell from The Office face meme.

Holy shit man, it’s hard to really put into words just how terrible the idea of Randy Orton clothing is.  It’s awful because in all the years Orton has been on screen in non-gear attire, it’s always douchey bro clothing, and it basically validates the blurred line between character and person that Orton’s personal clothing line is basically the same kind of crap.  It’s awkward because as much as Orton loves to pick fun at wrestlers with indy pasts or those who he feels has not made a respectful amount of money in their careers, a guy schilling out his own apparel seems a little desperate to be making more money himself.

And it’s just plain bad, the way it looks, how it’s branded, and how it’s “announced,” over social media.  If the one shirt is any indication of what any other products are going to look like (I can’t under good consciousness make any conceited effort to check out the rest), I wouldn’t be too optimistic.  I’ve never actually see anyone wear a WWE-licensed Orton shirt in public before, not even ironically, so I have a hard time believing anyone would be willing to actually spend real money and purchase much less wear Orton’s SLTHR crap either.

Another funny thing to me is that this is barely a week removed from where Vince McMahon himself put the company on blast, to tell all wrestlers to stop using their WWE gimmicks and likenesses to try and profit on shit like Cameo, Twitch or any other third-party creative outlets.  Orton is notoriously infamous for being coddled and protected by the WWE, and numerous wrestlers past and present have all insinuated all the rules he’s been allowed to bend and outright break, on account of his privilege, and this is turning into a glaringly prime example of just such.  Sure, “Randy Orton” is actually Randy Orton’s name, and there’s nothing against the rules of him using it to sell his own shit, but the optics of this combined with the eggshells all his other peers are walking on certainly doesn’t help the overall picture.

Overall, just everything about this is cringeworthy and turrible.  For a guy that is currently being billed as the greatest wrestler of all time, it reeks of desperation, and much like Orton himself, seems so very flat, boring and completely lacking in creativity.  But hey, if there are any wrestling fans out there that get put into the friend zone of anyone they’re unrequited crushing on, at least now they have an official shirt that can wear to really drive home the reality of the situation.

Some words for Kamala the wrestler

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel that I needed to clarify the disambiguation, because given the fact that the name “Kamala” is exploding the internet right now as Senator Kamala Harris has been formally tapped to be Joe Biden’s VP running mate, there has been an ironically cringey overlap between she, and James “Kamala” Harris, the professional wrestler who has just recently passed away.

When mythical wife stated to me that “some wrestler died,” I quickly did a Google search to see that it was Kamala who had passed away.  I’ll be honest, Kamala “The Ugandan Giant” wasn’t necessarily a guy I cared a tremendous amount, as I always thought he was more of a racist caricature of a character.  And given the fact that he was 70 years old at his passing, it was one of those moments of insensitivity that I felt where at least he lived to see 70, and wasn’t a guy who was found dead in a hotel bathroom from an overdose or heart explosion from a lifetime of steroids and painkillers.

But then as a little time passed, and it was revealed that Kamala had passed away, basically because of coronavirus, then I winced and felt guilty for no-selling the news of his passing, because now it wasn’t so much a passing because a guy had lived out his life, as much as it was a guy having what remaining life he had left to live, stripped away from him, on account of an extremely preventable sickness that shouldn’t been neutralized like three months ago, and now that’s something to be sad about.

As I said, Kamala wasn’t tremendously important to me, growing up as a wrestling fan, but even I knew that Kamala was a guy who’s career transcended three decades in the industry, and has rubbed shoulders with countless industry legends in the process.  In the 80’s he feuded with Hulk Hogan, in the 90’s he feuded with the Undertaker, and he even came back in the early 2000’s to still take some bumps and put over the then-current generation of performers.

In fact, it was actually in 2005 when I probably came the closest to marking out for Kamala, when on an episode of RAW, he got into an altercation with Umaga, who was being pushed pretty hard as a bruising heel at the time, and there was a segment where the husky Samoan and the husky Ugandan were up in each other’s faces, and I was like “oh shit, this is really happening!”  They would have a match where Kamala more or less got squashed, but I can admit that for about five minutes, Kamala was pretty much the baddest guy in the industry when he stood toe-to-toe with the WWE’s top heel for a brief match.

Rarely is a loss of life is ever not sad, and the wrestling industry loves to throw around the title of “legend” to all sorts of former professional wrestlers, as long as they didn’t burn bridges with the biggest promoters.  Like, I’d seen Marty Jannetty being called a legend; the guy’s career’s legacy is being the guy Shawn Michaels smashed through a window, and now he’s more known for wanting to bang his own daughter and admitting to murder on social media.  He’s definitely no fucking legend.

Let’s make it clear that in spite of my own personal ambivalence towards the character of Kamala, he is, undoubtedly a legend.  His career transcended decades, he had feuds with legitimately some of the biggest names in the industry, and had a character that basically proved that black don’t crack, as when he showed up in 2005 looking basically the same as he did in 1985.

Despite living to 70, the man frankly should have kept living, but ‘Murica being what it is today, even the Ugandan Giant from Deepest, Darkest Africa was in the prime age of susceptibility, and unfortunately the business and the world lost a life that should very well have been preventable, which is the saddest part of all of this.

Happy trails, James Harris.

Somehow, being a Marty Jannetty managed to get darker

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s funny, as I’d been going through all of my old posts from the last decade, I came across this one from 2017, which was this cringe-worthy story about how Marty Jannetty supposedly wanted to bang his own daughter.  The span between 2016-present, I’d forgotten a lot of the things I’d written, because they never saw the light of day on my brog in the first place, but there’s no other way to describe the situation – Marty Jannetty apparently wanted to bang his own daughter, and the most fortunate thing that could’ve happened was that the biological test proved that they were not actually related.

But basically, I declared that the definition of being a Marty Jannetty was no longer exclusive to being the weaker half of any professional wrestling tag team, but also implied a man who would want to bang his own daughter.  For example, it could be said that the current president of the United States has almost made some Marty Jannetty-like remarks, like when he stated that if Ivanka were not his daughter, he’d probably be dating her.

The point is, I declared that the definition of a Marty Jannetty had changed back in 2017 based on some ironically fucked up behavior, but very, very shortly after revisiting that post, one of my friends shares with me a text message that basically just said:

Marty Jannetty confessed to murder on Facebook

Naturally, this friend never really gives me any context to remarks like this, so I had to look it up, but well yeah, it basically looks like Marty Jannetty confessed to committing a murder, on theFacebook.

In the grand spectrum of things, as fucked up as potential incest is, I’d still rank it not as bad to, potential murder.  So I guess perhaps it’s gotten even darker to be defined as a Marty Jannetty, because now that would imply that you might be a murderer, and if we want to get specific, someone who can kill a guy and that will ultimately confess to it on social media, 30 years later.

Either way, I’m sure the Nick Jacksons, Chuck Taylors, Angelo Dawkins, Tuckers and Erick Rowans never liked being called Marty Jannettys in its original definition, but I think it’s safe to say that perhaps we should start looking for new terminology for the weaker half of tag teams now, because ‘ol Marty is taking his shit into some really dark and undesirable to be compared to places these days.