Episode 405

Transcript

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Speaker 29 Hello again, friends. I think I'm losing my voice.
And you are our friends.

Speaker 29 Welcome back to another edition of Jim Coronet's drive-thru on another fun, sunny day here in the fun, sunny land of Cornette.

Speaker 29 I'm your host, the great Brian Last, and here he is, the leader of the cult of Cornet, Mr. Fun and Son,

Speaker 29 Jim Cornet.

Speaker 44 You know, I was laying back just to see how long that you would tickle those ivories, Brian, and

Speaker 44 play that funky music, white boy.

Speaker 44 But without breaking up or trying to break your train, just to see how long it would go on. But when you finally screeched out like some kind of

Speaker 44 elementary school wicked witch play.

Speaker 44 Hello, you had friends

Speaker 44 and you are my pretties, all of you.

Speaker 44 Is that the way it's going to be today? I've had some.

Speaker 44 I'm not even going to go into it over because I'd have to be

Speaker 44 talking about family members' medical records, but we had a little stressful incident for about two or three hours of the day or just evening and a half ago, but everything's fine now.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 all of the other things, it's the oppressive heat has returned and various things like that.

Speaker 44 But at least, Brian, I'll have you. I'm trying to go for the positive, the happy talk, as you term it.
And you've come up with this phrase that you use every once in a while.

Speaker 44 There's a good thing I can talk about, Brian. The Bundy family is growing and flourishing here on the grounds of Castle Cornette.
You know the Bundy family, don't you?

Speaker 29 Is this like some kind of role-playing you guys do? Like you're Al and Stacey's

Speaker 29 name.

Speaker 44 No, no, no.

Speaker 29 His parents are Steve and Marcy.

Speaker 44 Why can't you get your mind out of the gutter? And besides, it wouldn't be Steve. It'd be the other one.
What was the other one's name?

Speaker 29 Was it Jefferson?

Speaker 44 Jefferson. But nevertheless.

Speaker 29 McGinley.

Speaker 44 Yeah, there you go. Yeah, Ted McGinley.
Whatever happened to him? It seemed like he just vanished.

Speaker 44 Nevertheless, that's the family of deer that live here on the castle and adjacent to and around the area of the castle grounds. They wander and migrate and mitigate around.

Speaker 44 But Stacey named them Al and Peg and Bud and Kelly because it's the papa deer, the mama deer, the

Speaker 44 little girl deer, and the little boy deer. And

Speaker 44 the kids are growing.

Speaker 44 They're almost fence hopping height at this point. It's amazing that they have expanded at the rate they have over the last, of course, I've got the

Speaker 44 deer feed down in the bucket under the redbud tree that says it's guaranteed to grow and

Speaker 44 the flossy coat, whatever the goddamn.

Speaker 44 attributes are of a of a growing deer, it promotes them.

Speaker 44 There's a sign. What What are you saying?

Speaker 29 There's a sign you have that says this?

Speaker 44 No, it's on the bag of the deer fag. That's how I got yes on the bag there.

Speaker 29 You made it sound like you had a sign up on a property.

Speaker 44 No, well, it's a sign from above that it's going to be growing.

Speaker 44 No, it's the labeling on the product. It's what I've been feeding them.
And

Speaker 44 Peg will now actually expect it at this point. At almost the same time every evening, she comes up to the back door to get her apple.

Speaker 44 She loves apples.

Speaker 29 Oh, you guys are just dying for ticks. You guys are just begging for Lyme disease.
Just please listen.

Speaker 44 Oh, come on now, for heaven's sake.

Speaker 44 We have a

Speaker 44 professional fumigator come and spray on a regular basis the perimeter of the house.

Speaker 29 But nevertheless, so you're poisoning them too. It's like some weird portraits.

Speaker 44 No, just

Speaker 44 the perimeter of the house, not out in the goddamn, what is the matter with you?

Speaker 44 What we do is we open the back door,

Speaker 44 and if there will be Peg, and we'll have the apple in our hand, we'll hold it up in the air, and she sees the apple, and then you bowl and ball roll it.

Speaker 44 They don't like things thrown in the air, but if you bowl and ball roll it,

Speaker 44 then we walk out slowly, get about 15 feet away, bowl and ball roll her the apple.

Speaker 44 And then turn around and go back. And she walks right up and takes it

Speaker 44 and gives us a

Speaker 44 pawing motion with her front paw.

Speaker 29 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 44 No, every

Speaker 44 time you give her the apple, she walks up to the apple, she paws like two or three times on the ground, like, thank you.

Speaker 44 And it takes the apple.

Speaker 44 So I've ordered some little fun outfits and hats for them. And I'm thinking about some kind of traveling act.

Speaker 44 Little hats on the little deer. It'd be fun.

Speaker 29 Do you take the stems out before you roll the apples?

Speaker 44 These

Speaker 44 These are just goddamn apples in a bag from the store.

Speaker 29 Oh, bagged apples.

Speaker 29 Well, what are the not even the good stuff? You're poisoning them and then you're giving them like the crap apples.

Speaker 44 No, not crab apples. Regular apples.
They sell in the grocery store for people to eat.

Speaker 44 Not the crab apples.

Speaker 29 I said crap apples.

Speaker 44 What kind of apple? What are you talking about? Road apples? Crap apples. We call them road apples down here.

Speaker 29 Were you a fan of married with children?

Speaker 29 Yes, I mean, did you have enough time to even watch it really when you were? It was on mostly when you were working, actually.

Speaker 44 Oh, yeah, but then it went into syndication, and then also, you know, you could record the thing because there was Kelly Bundy,

Speaker 44 so there has to be some enjoyment to life. I wasn't just recording all wrestling.

Speaker 44 I've got a bunch of fucking, I think, probably two seasons of In Living Color also.

Speaker 29 The first season

Speaker 29 hope.

Speaker 29 well yes of course and all six episodes on a beta tape somewhere of eerie indiana do you remember that i used to like it that was a show that was my dad told me about that one day he came home he read about it in the paper and he put it on and i loved it i actually bought a digital copy to show my kids

Speaker 44 Greatest show in the world lasted six episodes. Six.

Speaker 29 Well, maybe, was it more than six episodes?

Speaker 44 I say six. Actually, Police Squad lasted six.
Erie, Indiana probably lasted a half a season. They used to

Speaker 44 do half seasons in those days and send the hook out for

Speaker 44 the shows that didn't get about 15 or 20 million viewers. They said, oh, get that shit out of here.
They're taking up space.

Speaker 29 This may have been more something Stacey would appreciate, but did you ever see Freaks and Geeks?

Speaker 44 You have asked me about that before here on a program,

Speaker 44 and it elicited, elicitated, necessitated someone

Speaker 44 who may or may not have even been you, I'm not sure,

Speaker 44 to send us the box set of freaks and geeks, which resides on the shelf in our TV room, and I've still never seen it.

Speaker 29 You should watch that. You may really like that.

Speaker 44 I don't know if I'd like the geeks, but I'd like the freaks.

Speaker 29 No, the geeks are the coolest ones, actually.

Speaker 44 Are the geeks better than the freaks?

Speaker 29 The geeks, I mean, not getting any action or anything, but they've kind of got the adventures that you could probably relate to.

Speaker 44 i don't know how to take that blind head i mean just like in the program so i will assume it's not an insult i'm guessing i'm guessing you weren't picked first for like dodgeball correct

Speaker 44 no generally i avoided either side of of the dodgeball team because at some point you were good i only threw things at people i was mad at because i had a tendency even when i was a smaller child to

Speaker 44 stake things

Speaker 44 personally quickly like apples the deer is yeah well no the animals are a different thing but people if you if you throw something at me and hit me with it chances are i'm i'm gonna chase you at some point and fucking throw it closer range

Speaker 29 well i guess the point is anyway freaks and geeks another great show that lasted one season and

Speaker 29 it was clearly brilliant when it aired and whenever it aired was like

Speaker 29 who knew it was like saturday one week wednesday one week you couldn't keep up with it but great show

Speaker 44 and i'm you know i'm struggling now to remember all of the characters but we you say that there is a

Speaker 44 there's evidence that this show aired now besides my beta cam or beta tv a

Speaker 44 beta tape off tv you say there's evidence of this is it a professionally produced thing or some kind of bootleg operation what did you say you recorded on beta eerie indiana

Speaker 44 Yes.

Speaker 29 You recorded that on beta that aired in, what, 91, 92?

Speaker 44 Yeah, well, I had my first beta

Speaker 44 in 1983.

Speaker 29 But the idea you were still recording on it, I didn't realize, I guess, that beta blank tapes were readily available still at that point in the early 90s.

Speaker 44 Well, everything was

Speaker 44 readily available to me because I was ordering my VHS and beta tapes from,

Speaker 44 oh, goddamn, what was the company in New York? I was getting them by the case. They had a case of 10.
I was getting them a case at a time for both formats. And see, that was the thing.

Speaker 44 And I now would go mad. I'm glad I was 20-something years old and had all this energy because in integrating into my schedule on the road and wherever I was, especially from 1980,

Speaker 44 late 85 through

Speaker 44 the end of my tenure in WCW in 1990, right? So that's a five-year period. I lived in Charlotte

Speaker 44 and I still recorded all of Crockett's television programs that we produced that aired in the Charlotte Metro market, which was all of them,

Speaker 44 as well as the TBS shows, as well as

Speaker 44 potentially pay-per-views or any other goddamn thing that was going on that I needed to get. And then,

Speaker 44 as we've mentioned before, my friend Norman Dooley would send me the other stuff from around the territory days via the the U.S. Postal Service.

Speaker 44 But Brian,

Speaker 44 it was more difficult to do that then

Speaker 44 than it is today because I

Speaker 44 had, I'm trying to visualize the setup, but I'm going to say between four and six,

Speaker 44 four or five, one or the other, four or five different

Speaker 44 home videotape machines in my setup and around my television. And back in those days, in those days of cable, it was very basic.
Charlotte, North Carolina,

Speaker 44 you could get like 44 fucking cable channels, right?

Speaker 44 That was it at that point.

Speaker 44 And, but it was possible instead of going through the fancy damn DVR box or just the cable boxes they have today.

Speaker 44 If you had cable service and you went into a goddamn high-end video machine tuner, you could set different channels. And the reason why I had all these different goddamn video machines set up

Speaker 44 was because

Speaker 44 when I would leave town on a tour for Crockett or whatever,

Speaker 44 I would have to set the VCR for the Saturday and Sunday TBS shows. And then we added the one on Friday, the Power Hour that I was hosting, right?

Speaker 44 But then there were two different local stations that aired the Crockett syndicated shows of

Speaker 44 NWA Worldwide and

Speaker 44 NWA Pro or whichever two, whatever they were called at the specific time.

Speaker 44 And if it was a pay-per-view weekend, I had to call the local cable company. That's where that line comes from.

Speaker 44 In those days, you had to call and order it over the phone.

Speaker 44 And then I had to set a machine for this. So I had

Speaker 44 at one point in my setup, you know four or five different video machines running to record all these different programs have i bored you

Speaker 29 not at all i guess my question that wasn't that wasn't a full-throated denial but go ahead my question still comes to you recording on beta in the 90s when did you stop recording on beta and were you recording anything on vhs

Speaker 44 i stopped recording on beta when i stopped recording um

Speaker 29 beta was a better format no i'm not disagreeing with that, but again, I never heard about anyone recording anything in the 90s on beta.

Speaker 29 I figured that it was, again, you were getting it right from a good source, but I figured it was near impossible to even, I don't remember seeing it in stores.

Speaker 44 Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, all contraire, Monfray, but no, I could get the tapes all day long up through

Speaker 44 where I stopped recording.

Speaker 44 To be honest, once I left WCW, I did not feel the need to follow their programming, right?

Speaker 44 And then with Smoky Mountain, most everything was on VHS

Speaker 44 because that was easier to deal with, obviously, with everybody else involved.

Speaker 44 And I'm getting the master tapes on professional quality tape anyway, so it's not like I need to preserve this shit at home.

Speaker 44 And because I had the beta machines and one of them,

Speaker 44 Knock on Wood, my pride and joy that I got in 1986 is still fine and functional today.

Speaker 44 But I would just, if I wanted to record regular programs, I would set them because I still had several video machines set up. And that way, it left my VHSs clear if I'm using them to copy something.

Speaker 44 Don't you see?

Speaker 29 It's amazing.

Speaker 44 I've got the Rolling Stones pay-per-view concert from when did that was it like 1989?

Speaker 44 Well, I've got that one, but I think they did another one, or maybe I'm thinking, I'm not thinking of, I have several concerts on pay-per-view

Speaker 44 that were done from the 80s through the 90s that I did on beta because it's a better video quality. And why not? Because I'm the only one that's going to fucking watch it.

Speaker 29 Hey, since you opened this door, why don't we discuss one of the big issues happening right now? And again, I'm losing my voice a little bit. I apologize.

Speaker 44 Although some listeners may like it if I lose my voice, but some listeners have offered to take your voice away or at least interrupt the fucking normal flow of it from your fucking throat to your goddamn mouth.

Speaker 29 You have recently talked about the fact that you couldn't order the pay-per-view. And we had to talk about the fact that pay-per-view is a dying thing.
In demand is done.

Speaker 29 UFC

Speaker 29 just announced their new deal with Paramount Plus.

Speaker 29 I should say just Paramount because they're going to be simulcasting things or aerating things directly on CBS, the Tiffany network.

Speaker 29 But they announced this major deal.

Speaker 29 And we could talk about some of the specifics and how it we could discuss monopolies too. We could discuss a lot of things.

Speaker 29 But what do you think about the fact that they are very publicly coming out and saying

Speaker 29 the pay-per-view model is dead? We're getting away from the pay-per-view model. There's nothing there.
I mean, I saw some quotes like there's nothing there except movies and boxing.

Speaker 29 And I don't even hear about boxing anymore.

Speaker 44 Well, and that's most of the people that are boxing these days are doing it at Costco.

Speaker 44 Here's the thing with, and a lot of people, there's going to be, by the way, Brian, I'm pretty sure some type of

Speaker 44 chatter or rumors or

Speaker 44 just people not knowing what the fuck's going on over the next few days at least on some kind of social media. Maybe it might not be widespread, but

Speaker 44 in my little town here.

Speaker 44 In my little town,

Speaker 44 it was on the news today, the local news, that, but while they were talking about Paramount having the streaming rights for UFC to, as you said, you just said, go to their fucking thing that they do.

Speaker 44 The graphic on the screen at the bottom just said, Paramount buys UFC.

Speaker 44 Because I was on the phone, right? And I had the TV on, but it was muted. I'm on the phone and I look up and I see that graphic and I wait, what?

Speaker 44 And I pause it when I get off the phone. I go back and they're talking about streaming rights.

Speaker 44 And it wasn't even my afternoon man, Gilbert Corsi, that, you know, did OVW and understands the world of this. It's the noon people and they're reading the copy that, you know, the story,

Speaker 44 but they didn't really specifically.

Speaker 44 They said, oh, yes, Paramount has bought the rights to televise these events, but they didn't. there was a lot of ambiguity as to who bought what and whether they just sold the UFC.

Speaker 44 So I bet you we're going to hear some, if it was like that in

Speaker 44 other local news areas or whatever, we might hear some rumors.

Speaker 44 Hey,

Speaker 44 I don't know what these fucking services all are or what I need to do,

Speaker 44 how I must qualify, what paperwork I need to fill out. Do I need to show proof of citizenship?

Speaker 44 And then do they have to come to my house with an organ grinder and a monkey and play the saber dance while I jump through hoops. Hoops, Brian.
I say, oops,

Speaker 44 to see these things.

Speaker 29 Well, for UFC fans, this is a big savings. Previously, they were with ESPN,

Speaker 29 where to get the pay-per-views, I believe you had to subscribe to and pay for ESPN's app and then pay an additional, whatever, $69 per pay-per-view event. to stream it through the app.

Speaker 29 Wow, but Paramount Plus is like $11, $12, somewhere in that range. So it's a great savings, and a lot of these fights will be on CBS.

Speaker 29 The question is: will it expose that maybe there isn't as big an audience for UFC as has been touted, or will it go the other way?

Speaker 29 And will it show a big audience and lead to a big new exposure on that growing format television?

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 29 I understand $1.1 billion average average annual value per year.

Speaker 44 That's just insane. But I understand the words that are coming out of your mouth.

Speaker 44 But in the first place, again,

Speaker 44 a lot of people, whether it'll save them money or not, if they were the most dedicated, like the wrestling fans that are the most dedicated, they're figuring out ways to get the wrestling, right?

Speaker 44 I would assume it's the same thing with the UFC people that are most dedicated. They've already got this shit.
Now they need to get some other shit.

Speaker 44 They need to drop that shit they got and they need to get this other shit.

Speaker 44 But in the case of the wrestling, as we're talking about, or talking about, as we'll be talking about, or we're going to talk about it

Speaker 44 here in a minute, that the shit they need to get ain't even there yet.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 how are you going to get the shit? Who's going to be bringing the shit to you? Who will be shipping the shit to you, Brian?

Speaker 44 And who will be receiving the this is all questions that still need to be asked and answered about this whole rigmarole

Speaker 29 yeah that wasn't really a question or anything i could easily jump in and and uh follow up with but jim we will uh continue it was a statement of my goddamn position on the matter so let's look at the big picture here and last week As we were doing a classically themed show, we did have one story that we addressed, which was the WWE ESPN announcement.

Speaker 29 And I guess it's still being ironed out which cable services will offer free access

Speaker 29 to subscribers through cable. That's something we've seen in the past.
I get Peacock for free through my Xfiniti Comcast cable.

Speaker 29 But again, if people aren't paying for cable, if kids aren't paying for cable, it really doesn't affect them. It affects just us funny duddies with cable.

Speaker 29 But they've got that deal. Brandon Thurston posted something.

Speaker 29 Between UFC and WWE, again, same parent company, TKO.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 29 They will have media deals in 2026

Speaker 29 with Netflix for RAW and international WWE,

Speaker 29 with Disney, which is ESPN, for WWE Premium Live Events.

Speaker 29 With NBC Universal for SmackDown,

Speaker 29 with Nexstar for the NXT with CW,

Speaker 29 Paramount, the UFC.

Speaker 29 It says here a smaller deal with Fox, which is Evolve on 2B.

Speaker 44 Or not 2B.

Speaker 44 And it says here,

Speaker 29 WBD is the only major I could think of without. And of course, they have AEW, but I could tell you another one out there, and there's a couple rumors going around about this.

Speaker 29 Especially with the talk about what's going to happen to the WWE catalog, YouTube.

Speaker 29 Don't be surprised if YouTube jumps into the fray here

Speaker 29 because

Speaker 44 WWE started these vault channels for a reason and they've seen the potential revenue so don't be surprised if there's another deal there but well that's going to be the only maybe oh the only place for us old folks with the you know the old crotchetiness to be able to see the classic library but with that classic library they could put shit out there forever

Speaker 29 the idea though that this company WWE's parent company owns, I shouldn't say owns, that they have all these deals in place with all the major people.

Speaker 44 I just, by the way, when you read, when you read, when you read those off,

Speaker 44 I counted five confirmed and one that you speculated on, which, as you said, runs the gamut of every major goddamn outfit except for poor old Tony Khan's friends.

Speaker 29 So whether you're Tony Khan or anyone else. Let's say there's a different billionaire right now who ran a company and it's not AEW.
You know what I mean? It could be anyone.

Speaker 29 And let's say that's a really great wrestling company and everyone likes it.

Speaker 29 It's the same situation.

Speaker 29 There's a shutout taking place

Speaker 29 where if Tony lost WBD,

Speaker 29 he would have nowhere to go. Not to say he couldn't, again, with his money, he could do whatever he wants.
He can create a platform. He could buy a platform.
But in terms of what's there now,

Speaker 29 WWE and their parent company are locking down every single major media player. It's going to be like venues.
You think any of them are going to want deals with AEW?

Speaker 29 They probably can't have one contractually. You can't set up in this venue until 24 hours after we leave or whatever it is.

Speaker 29 But what do you think of the idea? Again, it could be Tony Khan, and it is.

Speaker 29 But no matter who is a number two right now, the next number two in the States is TNA, and they're under the WWE umbrella.

Speaker 29 They're all but sold to to WWE.

Speaker 44 They're like the Beatles on the top 40 chart in 64.

Speaker 29 What the fuck? And that's the next television deal. And they got Triple A and they'll get a television deal in the States for AAA.

Speaker 29 What do you do? Like, how does a number two, this is so much different than it was under Vince, who did everything he could to crush any competition?

Speaker 29 This is.

Speaker 29 Some of it deliberate to hurt AEW, but they're not signing these deals to hurt AEW. They're just trying to get as much as they can out of this before they try to sell it eventually.

Speaker 29 But

Speaker 29 they're creating a situation where nobody is.

Speaker 44 You're asking 18 questions with commas at the end.

Speaker 29 I'm sorry. There's a lot here to think about.

Speaker 44 Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff. But here's the thing: is that Vince tried to destroy competition and didn't want to work with anybody else.

Speaker 44 And, you know, usually if he did work with somebody else,

Speaker 44 it was either that with me in Knoxville, I was no no threat and didn't want to be, or with everybody else at Canon went and Lawler in Memphis.

Speaker 44 But, you know, he couldn't work with Triple-A, but it didn't matter. He was doing his thing.
But now that they want to control the literal fucking world

Speaker 44 and they have those Beatles spots in the top five, where okay, we got the SmackDown, we got the Raw, we got Saturday Night's Made Event, we got NXT, we got and

Speaker 44 TNA under their umbrella and Triple-A coming in.

Speaker 44 You know, you

Speaker 44 said Tony Khan could buy his own outlet. Actually, that's not even true anymore.

Speaker 44 Because now, for any,

Speaker 44 oh, poor old Shad's only worth $12 billion.

Speaker 44 And for any type of media outlet,

Speaker 44 these days it's more than that to just buy the fucking thing.

Speaker 44 They can't.

Speaker 44 This is a vast,

Speaker 44 a vast WWE conspiracy to, you know, basically shut.

Speaker 44 They're not even trying to shut a lot of people out because there's not a lot of people that are even going to get close enough to the door for you to slam it in their face.

Speaker 44 But they want a presence with every media and every media outlet so that they can milk as much money out of each one of them as possible.

Speaker 29 So they can get as much as they can when they go private and sell to the Saudis.

Speaker 44 And, you know, and I'm not saying that anything

Speaker 44 ain't going to happen either, but I'm just saying right now,

Speaker 44 it's, you know, yes, they can

Speaker 44 choke off Tony, but there's not even anybody else that can even play this fucking game anymore.

Speaker 29 That's what I'm saying. Like, if you started up a wrestling company tomorrow and you had funding and you had talent and you were ready to go, what are you going to do?

Speaker 29 I mean, anyone can right now go on YouTube. And I don't know if a WWE deal with YouTube would prohibit anyone else.
I probably wouldn't. Everyone could upload their own stuff.

Speaker 29 But at this point, social media and YouTube

Speaker 29 may be the best way to, I mean, Amazon's still out there and stuff, but

Speaker 29 again, it's a shrinking marketplace, and some of it's intentional because you're preventing any competition from ever being able to exist.

Speaker 44 But you know,

Speaker 29 every streaming platform locked down in an exclusive deal, how can anyone else exist?

Speaker 44 And I mean, to a lesser extent, maybe the mixed martial arts world and boxing, we don't know that we're not experts. Who knows, you know, who has the power these days.

Speaker 44 But they do have somewhat of a conglomerate monopoly on any kind of combat sport. And here's the thing.
If there is a well-off

Speaker 44 fan of wrestling who also was a multi-millionaire

Speaker 44 and he said, you know what, for the love of the game, I'll put something together.

Speaker 44 And on a regional basis, you know,

Speaker 44 I say that you could probably, if you put

Speaker 44 significant time, money, and effort in it, had a location that you could afford and the conditions were right, had access to fucking local sponsorships and people that would get other media that would get involved.

Speaker 44 You could do independent shows

Speaker 44 in a regional area like the southeast or the carolinas

Speaker 44 on maybe you know i don't know whether it'd be

Speaker 44 every couple of months basis you do two or three shows in a row where you're bringing in talent

Speaker 44 figure out some kind of tv thing and

Speaker 44 if a guy was willing to just say it we're going to do this and hopefully find the people to do it well

Speaker 44 and just say, I don't care whether I make money or not.

Speaker 44 After a couple of years, if you did it well and you had still local television for something like this, you could probably do some big independent shows and you would do

Speaker 44 okay.

Speaker 44 But I don't know if you'd live long enough to make all your startup money back.

Speaker 44 But I mean, otherwise, you ain't going to be in the in the big-time wrestling business, boy.

Speaker 29 See, you know how I think, because I've been saying it.

Speaker 29 Again, irrespective of the content of AEW, I think Tony needs to fight back and he needs to fight back harder and he needs to have a team of people ready to fight back because they're fucking with him every way they can.

Speaker 29 And even when it's just like an inconvenience, they fuck with him. Just like there's no excuse sometimes.
They've announced they're running a pay-per-view against all out

Speaker 29 directly against him because, you know, why not? But Tony has to do something too. It can't just be giving cute quotes to the wrestling press.

Speaker 29 I think think they should be a fucking campaign and it should be like, you know, WWE makes all this money. How come they don't pay their wrestlers as much as we do?

Speaker 29 Like, just really just make it everything, every discussion they don't want to have publicly and just bring it to them with that.

Speaker 29 That's all you could do right now because

Speaker 29 all they care about is that stock price. That's the only thing they care about.

Speaker 44 Yeah, but here's the thing.

Speaker 44 For the people that they would be speaking to or that would listen to them, they already know these things and it hadn't really been a goddamn issue so far.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 so I don't.

Speaker 29 I'm not saying advertise it to the wrestling fans. I'm saying forget about the wrestling fans.
Bring it to the Wall Street Journal. Take out a four-page ad.

Speaker 29 Bring it to the business community. That's what hurts them.

Speaker 29 It doesn't how how you trash WWE may hurt WWE to your own existing fans, but it's not going to do anything to grow AEW or not going to do anything to really hurt their company.

Speaker 29 If you bring it to the business community, then you have a shot.

Speaker 44 Okay, but then tell me why that the Wall Street Journal or the business community or these people care when either here comes this Rick Moran-looking motherfucker in.

Speaker 29 Fuck it, full-page ad. Do it full-page ad.

Speaker 44 Nobody reads the ads.

Speaker 44 I'm saying attention. Listen to me is what I'm saying.
Consider the source.

Speaker 44 You hear you've got the WWE, the worldwide leader in sports entertainment, with all all the fucking billions of dollars on the stock exchange and the goddamn superstars. They're everywhere.

Speaker 44 This goddamn, just

Speaker 44 they're the big deal here. They're the goddamn,

Speaker 44 you know, people are in the goddamn administration, these people. They're all over the place.
They're filthy with them.

Speaker 44 And here comes Tony Khan

Speaker 44 as he

Speaker 44 talks

Speaker 44 for Tom Burke, you know,

Speaker 44 and maybe one other person out there, he reminds me of Kenny Levitt in his younger days. He got a lot of energy.

Speaker 29 Oh, come on. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 44 And, you know, and, and, or, you know, they can, the WWE could say in response to anything that AEW could say, well, look at this. Here's a montage of their programming.

Speaker 44 And there's the blood drinking and the head slicing and the fucking.

Speaker 29 Hey, listen, they're not embarrassed by it. If WWE brought that to anyone else's attention, they're still not going to be embarrassed by it.
That'd be a favor.

Speaker 44 I'm just saying that to me, if you said, look, here is who is knocking us and they saw that, they'd say, fuck, we don't want to get involved with these people.

Speaker 29 I think if you had a serious campaign, Tony Khan shouldn't talk, doesn't have to talk, a serious campaign against WWE

Speaker 29 for good reason, for everything they're doing to fuck with you,

Speaker 29 it could really hurt them in the long run, if done right. And again, I don't think Tony Khan should be sitting there.

Speaker 44 Well, if done right, yes. And the eggs and ditties would work also if done right.

Speaker 44 I just don't think they could do it right. I don't think anybody will listen to them in the face of this financial juggernaut.

Speaker 44 And, you know, they can be discredited by look at the way that a lot of the shit that they come off or that they do.

Speaker 44 And you're, you know, trying to criticize us.

Speaker 44 And they can't hit them with the monopoly or the antitrust or whatever because they're on TBS and TNT and the WBD and the VD and all the other things they're on. STD.

Speaker 29 As of now,

Speaker 29 from what we understand, Tony Khan has not shopped Ring of Honor or any other AEW programming he could create to the point where we heard that, what, CW

Speaker 29 was interested in he wasn't interested in even talking to them. And then they gave NXT a bunch of money that Tony could have used.

Speaker 29 But if Tony goes and he starts trying to shop these shows, if he gets to the point where he's not just going to give WBD everything, which may be tough if they own a piece.

Speaker 29 But if you're going to try to shop any of those shows and you can't get any conversation started because of that, that's where you can start the Monopoly talk.

Speaker 44 I'm glad he's not my

Speaker 44 defense attorney, Tony Khan.

Speaker 29 What do you think this says, going back to the TKO thing, ending with this?

Speaker 29 What do you think this says about the future of TKO, WWE and UFC, the deals they've all just announced in the last week, week and a half,

Speaker 29 the commercialization of everything

Speaker 29 on these shows.

Speaker 29 What do you think the next five years is going to be like?

Speaker 29 Do you think it's going to become more fan-friendly? Do you think it's going to become more just a complete money grab? What do you see this as?

Speaker 44 Well,

Speaker 44 fan-friendly. I'm sure they'll be as friendly to the fucking fans as they can possibly be, Brian.
They're going to be patting them on the back and rubbing their tummy and reaching in their pocket.

Speaker 44 And they could come here, friend. Let me tell you all about it.
They're going to be friendly to those people.

Speaker 44 They're going to introduce them to new different shows and that they can watch and merchandise they can buy. And they're going to give them happy lives with all this.

Speaker 44 Of course, they're going to be friendly. And yes, it's.

Speaker 44 That's the thing is that we've seen now there's goddamn Slim Jim logos on the tables that are under the ring for still for no reason that they pull out to

Speaker 44 violently throw each other through and we're supposed to be worried about when it's just it makes the whole site comedic

Speaker 44 guy's being thrown through a slim jim table

Speaker 44 They'll logo anything. They'll sell to the Saudis.
They'll do whatever they need to do. Well, I don't mean sell the company, but they'll sell shows to the Saudis.

Speaker 29 Eventually they will.

Speaker 44 Hold on.

Speaker 44 They'll sell shows to the Saudis. They'll sell secrets to the enemy.
I don't know. They'll sell anything they can sell.

Speaker 44 And the same thing with UFC and the same thing with the bull riding people.

Speaker 44 If whatever they can fucking sell, they're going to sell until it doesn't.

Speaker 44 It's either not a

Speaker 44 just a license to print money anymore, or as you said, the Saudis or some other goddamn, who knows, somebody will

Speaker 44 strike oil in Switzerland and it'll be an evil Swiss billionaire.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 yeah, they'll sell it unless they're making so much money off of it, they can't fucking afford to sell it.

Speaker 44 Not that kind of

Speaker 29 sell it to me.

Speaker 44 The hills are alive with the sound of music.

Speaker 29 You want to play chicken?

Speaker 44 He only plays chicken with a real chicken.

Speaker 29 He only plays chicken on the Merritt Parkway.

Speaker 29 Well, this has been cable news.

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Speaker 29 And Jim, why don't we stay on the topic of

Speaker 29 things with my mouse? Why don't we stay on the topic of the world of cable television? We did not review AEW Dynamite last week on the show.

Speaker 29 I mean, I guess you didn't watch it knowing we weren't going to review it.

Speaker 44 Is that a fair thing? No, because there was a lot of things going on over here, and I took the opportunity not to watch that week's program.

Speaker 44 I'm sorry for the people who are living and dying with this, but it does be good every once in a while to refresh myself.

Speaker 29 All right, so that means you'll be ready to go this week, and we'll have that review coming up in a few days on one of these shows.

Speaker 29 But, Jim, let's talk about the ratings and you'll get a little bit of information about what you missed this past week. Oh, joy, AEW Dynamite Wednesday, August 6, 2025, 8 to 10:12 p.m.

Speaker 29 On average, 711,000 viewers.

Speaker 44 Holy mackerel, they're back up into the mega show territory. What in the world did they do to deserve a thing like this?

Speaker 29 This is up 16% from last week, which was 612.

Speaker 29 16% from the four-week average, which is 611.

Speaker 29 So this is a big, big 6000s.

Speaker 44 I mean, was it there suddenly, did they advertise something heavily that I didn't pay attention to? Or was there some reanimated corpse of Buddy Rogers? Was in the main of what happened?

Speaker 29 Well, you know, they do announce their matches beforehand, obviously, on social media, but the biggest thing with AEW going into this event, I think, was the buzz about there being potential problems between MVP and Speedball Mike Bailey,

Speaker 29 the two baddest motherfuckers in the locker room.

Speaker 29 You hate when those are the guys who have to beat with each other.

Speaker 44 Hold on now, MVP. We're not laughing about you.
Now, just so we make that clear,

Speaker 44 he can strangle me through the fucking

Speaker 44 phone line.

Speaker 29 But there was some buzz about that. Again, I don't know if that led into this, but that was the biggest thing people were talking about around AEW.

Speaker 29 And quite frankly, if I was Tony, I would have put MVP out there for a promo to start the show. Build into what people were buzzing about, but let's go into it.
You'll find out what they did do.

Speaker 29 Uh-oh. These were compiled by WrestleNomics, quarter one eight to eight fifteen p.m

Speaker 29 mjf's backstage promo and the start of jon moxley versus speedball mike bailey oh good lord with picture and picture

Speaker 29 766 000 viewers

Speaker 44 okay and they started

Speaker 44 much higher than they have been over the last

Speaker 44 recent weeks, let's say. So

Speaker 44 was there some big lead-in that led to this, or did they retain this audience? Or

Speaker 44 where are we going from here? And Moxley. And

Speaker 44 so one would think, as you said, that since that was out there,

Speaker 44 one ought to either make something out of it or something, but instead they're feeding the spitball to Dick the Boozer.

Speaker 29 Well, let's go to quarter two, 8:15, 8:30 p.m. The continuation of Moxley versus Speedball.

Speaker 29 Tony Storm and Alex Winsour's backstage promo, the Death Riders Darby Allen angle, an ad break, and Mercedes Monet's promo,

Speaker 29 727,000 viewers.

Speaker 44 Well, again, a drop, but not nearly the drop that they normally have. That's only 30, well, 39,000 people.
That's not close to the way they used to drop.

Speaker 44 More in line with what they've been doing lately, where they they start low and stick with it, but this is still a little higher.

Speaker 29 We go to quarter three. This is going to be interesting.
This match, that this match didn't hemorrhage viewers is amazing, and what a spectacle it was.

Speaker 29 Alex Winsor, 8:30 to 8:45 p.m., Alex Winsor versus Billy Starks versus Queen Amanata

Speaker 29 versus Sky Blue

Speaker 29 with picture and picture,

Speaker 44 You saw this. You were a witness to this.

Speaker 29 I watched this and it was sloppy at times and it went so long. All I'm thinking is,

Speaker 29 even if you're a fan of these women in this division, this match seems like it's going a long time.

Speaker 29 And then apparently it did not chase everyone away.

Speaker 44 Well,

Speaker 44 we must applaud their efforts.

Speaker 29 We go to quarter four, 8.45 to 9 p.m.

Speaker 29 The post-match of the previous match with Mercedes Monet, Tony Storm,

Speaker 29 and Athena.

Speaker 29 An ad break, the Young Bucks backstage angle, and Don Callis and Kyle Fletcher's live promo.

Speaker 44 What in the world?

Speaker 29 And the high point in the key demo, 263.

Speaker 44 For the last 15 minutes of the first hour that never happens they're back up to where they started from

Speaker 44 that is is yeah did many of the other networks go off the air suddenly for an extended period of time as to what is different about this show

Speaker 44 than everything else they've been doing it's fascinating i'm not even knocking them i'm just genuinely puzzled now

Speaker 29 Well, we got our quarter five, the big nine o'clock hour, nine to nine, fifteen p.m.

Speaker 29 Cope's backstage promo and the start of the Young Bucks versus Bro Dito, the team of Brody King and Bandito.

Speaker 29 Bro Dito

Speaker 29 with picture and picture, 744,000 viewers.

Speaker 44 And that, I would think, is their biggest start to a nine o'clock hour in months, isn't it?

Speaker 29 Yeah, I think so. Oh, yeah.
And I think that was also the biggest quarter four in as long as I can remember.

Speaker 44 Yeah, but now here's the question: now that they've actually put the put it to the ultimate test, the Buckaroos,

Speaker 44 where do we go from here, Brian, now that all of the children have grown up?

Speaker 29 We go to quarter six, 9:15, and 9:30 p.m.

Speaker 29 The continuation of the Bucks versus Brodito

Speaker 29 with picture-picture ads,

Speaker 29 the Mark Briscoe MJF video,

Speaker 29 and the Hurt Syndicate backstage angle,

Speaker 44 Okay, they're down 16,000, but still remarkably consistent for a show unlike in, I would think, years at this point at this level. And what did they do

Speaker 44 with MJF and the Hurts Syndicate?

Speaker 29 Well, he's not in the Hurt Syndicate anymore.

Speaker 44 Well, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 29 MVP loves him like a little brother,

Speaker 29 but it's over. And he better watch out when he gets the world title because Bobby Lashley is hungry.

Speaker 44 That's it for now.

Speaker 29 But, Jim, quarter seven.

Speaker 44 Do we have any idea

Speaker 44 what it was going to be before they said, oh, fuck no, we ain't going to do this shit?

Speaker 44 All right, never mind.

Speaker 29 But we go to quarter seven, 9.30 to 9.45 p.m.

Speaker 29 An ad break.

Speaker 29 The FTR Stokely halfway backstage angle. Did you see this promo where,

Speaker 29 because Stokely has to wrestle Cope next week? Somehow that's the punishment. He has to wrestle Cope.
He does this promo. He goes, you don't think I know how to fight?

Speaker 29 I've been fighting my whole life. I'm short.
I'm bald. I don't get no hose.

Speaker 29 And as he's saying this, Cash Wheeler can't keep a straight face. It's like Gene Okerlund standing next to him.
But that promo.

Speaker 44 And by the way, that would work work if they'd ever bothered to make him a respected, legitimate, established main event manager and put some heat on him.

Speaker 44 But now it's going to be another one of these fucking things you'd see down at the rec center and on an indie show.

Speaker 29 The Swerve Okada video, a Swerve Strickland ramp promo, Mark Briscoe and Adam Page's backstage angle, and an ad break,

Speaker 44 again that late in the show they started with that the last couple of

Speaker 44 last several episodes so bravo

Speaker 44 but what is

Speaker 44 what is it about this is they had a goddamn cage world title loser leave and gets chainsawed fucking deal a few weeks ago it didn't do this what the fuck's going on Again, the only thing I remember was the buzz around the Hurt Syndicate speedball problems, and nothing really came about on this show dealing with that.

Speaker 29 We go to quarter eight, nine forty five to ten PM, we have a twelve minute overrun.

Speaker 29 Queen Aminata and Willow Nightingale and Chris Statlander's backstage promo and the start of Mark Briscoe vs. MJF who a picture in picture

Speaker 29 six hundred and twenty thousand viewers

Speaker 29 twelve minute overrun almost a quarter continuation of Briscoe vs. MJF and the post-match with Adam Page,

Speaker 44 Good lord. Okay.

Speaker 44 When you've read that main event off, I was going to say, well, you know what?

Speaker 44 Briscoe and MJF, that's what they wanted to see. And that's the thing they all tuned away from.

Speaker 44 That's the only thing in that parade of terror that you just read off that would have interested me in the least was MJF versus Mark Briscoe. And that was the worst thing on the show in the ratings.

Speaker 44 So

Speaker 44 I, and now I guess they've officially nullified MJF with this wishy-washy bullshit with him.

Speaker 29 You know how I feel, and I like Mark Briscoe, but I think the way he's been booked up until this very recent period where they've kind of started trying to push him, but even that he started losing during that period too.

Speaker 29 I think the way he was booked and specifically losing match after match,

Speaker 29 sometimes meaningless match on this show,

Speaker 29 I don't think fans are tuning in for him. It would have to be a rebuild.
You'd have to really spend time and do it right and get people clamoring to see him.

Speaker 29 And he deserves that, but it just hasn't happened.

Speaker 29 But that's AEW. And the key demo did rise in their defense.
It went from 212 to 231 to 250.

Speaker 29 But that was AEW Dynamite.

Speaker 44 And I got 231, no idea, 250. And you ain't got 250.
No, I hit 275. What do I hear from you, Brian?

Speaker 29 Well, that was AW Dynamite for August 6th. But, Jim, you know, another thing we're not talking about here at the end of the show is

Speaker 29 it's summertime. People are outdoors.
They're getting sun

Speaker 29 for a swim. You get tired.
The sun beats you down.

Speaker 44 Swimming.

Speaker 44 It's like a heaviness, Brian, over you.

Speaker 29 That's exactly right. Hello, heaviness.

Speaker 29 And what we're asking you to do is say goodbye, heaviness,

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Speaker 44 the star of the show saying crazy things whatever it may be we all you know what's coming up you know it's a holiday coming up the holiday labor day where nobody works is coming up and right now ladies and gentlemen and until september the 8th might i add but you've take advantage right now because you don't know they might run out of mattresses.

Speaker 44 Bunch of lazy people trying to fucking stockpile these things.

Speaker 29 What?

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Speaker 29 We did it all for you.

Speaker 29 Very theatrical, but here we are. We're back.
Hope everyone's in the mood.

Speaker 44 Jim, we have a whole that's what you've been trying to play. In the mood,

Speaker 44 in the mood,

Speaker 44 what are you in the mood for? Can we talk about this?

Speaker 44 Can you answer, help me figure out how we're going to be watching all these things? And now, not even the

Speaker 44 UFC and the MMA, but I told you

Speaker 44 a couple of weeks ago, I guess now it's been the wrestling was getting harder to watch. And I mean

Speaker 44 harder to fucking watch.

Speaker 44 And they just announced the WWE deal that we were talking about with ESPN and this and that.

Speaker 44 So

Speaker 44 somebody sent me because I was saying, how are we going to get this? And the service isn't even up yet, right? You remember the whole conversation.

Speaker 44 So somebody sent me an explanation.

Speaker 44 It's an excerpt from the wrestling observer, old Uncle Dave. Now, I know somebody's going to say, well, you expect Uncle Dave

Speaker 44 to explain anything in any kind of coherent fashion. No, this is printed in it, but it comes from an actual media professional.
This is quotes from a statement that he made explaining on CNBC

Speaker 44 how that

Speaker 44 this thing will work, Brian. Have you read this? Are you familiar with this?

Speaker 29 No. So this is not from the Observer.
These are actually quotes from Dave on CNBC. I did not see that.

Speaker 44 No, no, it's not from Dave on CNBC. It's from the guy on CNBC explaining the big business, the big business transaction, how that the service that they are talking about is going to work.

Speaker 29 Yeah, let's hear this.

Speaker 44 It's not from Dave. He just printed the quotes from the fellow.

Speaker 29 Hey, you stop slapping it around. What are you doing over there?

Speaker 44 I say it.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Anyway, guy named Alex Sherman. You have any idea who that might be on CNBC? I do, yes.

Speaker 44 Well, he's one of these big business typhoons that are telling the people how this is going to work.

Speaker 44 So stop me, you know, if I'm not clear on this thing, Brian, because I think this will explain everything when I get to the bottom of it.

Speaker 44 Anyone who currently pays for a bundle of TV networks that includes ESPN will eventually get ESPN's direct to consumer service for no extra charge. Well, that sounds just fine, right?

Speaker 44 You'll download or click on the ESPN application on your mobile device or Spark TV. There will be a login screen that asks you if you're a pay TV subscriber.

Speaker 44 You'll then be able to authenticate that you do, in fact, pay for traditional pay TV and get ESPN in your bundle.

Speaker 44 Once you authenticate, you'll get access to the new ESPN direct-to-consumer product with everything in it.

Speaker 44 That means that starting in 2026, you'll get access to all the WWE Premium Live events as well as everything else on ESPN, Monday Night Football, NBA games, et cetera. You won't get NFL network yet.

Speaker 44 That deal needs to close first, but once it does, the NFL network

Speaker 44 and the games that air on it will be integrated into the direct consumer service too.

Speaker 44 The WWE live events won't be available on ESPN Plus. You'll need to upgrade to the $29.99 ESPN product.

Speaker 44 But again, just to be clear,

Speaker 44 if you're a cable subscriber that gets ESPN, you'll get it for no extra charge, and ESPN will not charge an additional fee for the live events.

Speaker 44 No return to pay-per-view here.

Speaker 44 But now, first of all, before we go into the rest of it that complicates the matters.

Speaker 44 What the fuck? It's easier to goddamn get into a foreign country than it is to prove to these people

Speaker 44 after logging in and downloading and authenticating who you are and that you are who you say you are

Speaker 44 to watch fucking television.

Speaker 44 Help me understand this.

Speaker 29 I mean, I don't know what there is to explain here. He sort of explained it, right? I mean, one of the issues is it's actually not currently

Speaker 29 with every cable system. That's still being negotiated.
Apparently, it's not available. Well, yes,

Speaker 44 we're going to get into that, but already you've got to to log in and do this and that and etc who is are people going to want to jump through all of these hoops to watch it's hard enough to get people to watch television i think the hope is you jump through the hoops the first time to log in or set up your account and then it should be as simple as pushing a couple buttons

Speaker 44 well there you are regarding the companies that don't have deals for their subscribers

Speaker 44 I'm told discussions with all of these pay TV providers are ongoing and Disney hopes to have most of them done by the end of the year.

Speaker 44 It's still unclear to me at this point if Disney can accelerate some of these discussions if their pay TV carriage renewals aren't until 2026.

Speaker 44 Long term, ESPN plans to have authentication deals with every major pay TV distributor.

Speaker 44 Disney doesn't want existing cable customers leaving the bundle just because ESPN is now available outside of it.

Speaker 44 But when the application is ready for showtime on August 21st, there are going to be a bunch of pay TV subscribers who aren't going to get their authentication access that they're paying for.

Speaker 44 It's possible this may lead to some pay TV distribution swapping.

Speaker 44 In other words, if I'm a YouTube TV subscriber, and I want ESPN's direct to consumer product, maybe I switch to direct TV or charter if I live in that territory.

Speaker 44 I'm told that when ESPN does reach a deal with these pay TV operators, subscribers will receive an email from the distributor notifying them that they now have access.

Speaker 44 It's easier to get into the fucking state capital.

Speaker 29 You know what, though? That's a good deal for people to do. And

Speaker 44 who's going to change their whole goddamn television service just to chase a fucking wrestling show?

Speaker 29 Oh, crazy wrestling fans will do anything. I saw some video the other day of some fans showed up at Randy Orton's front door.
Oh, good lord. Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 44 Well, I wonder if he came all the way from Virginia Beach.

Speaker 29 Wrestling fans will do crazy things.

Speaker 44 Yes, all of the same nuts that are currently now supporting AEW and keeping them in business and

Speaker 44 a few more that like the WWE, but large amounts of people to make these billions of dollars worthwhile. You're going to have to have four or five different services if you get them, if they'll let you

Speaker 44 to watch all of just all of the wrestling shows.

Speaker 44 It's, it's, it's ridiculous.

Speaker 44 Did you see about the AEW business,

Speaker 44 their online business?

Speaker 29 I don't know where you're going with this. I was just going to say, for cable customers like us, it's actually a good deal.
If you can embrace streaming in any way, it's a bonus. It's an add-on.

Speaker 44 Other people.

Speaker 44 embrace streaming when I get up the first thing in the morning and relax my fucking squeeze them muscles.

Speaker 44 That's what I embrace the streaming.

Speaker 29 As long as it's not in your fine mattress, some helix sleep.

Speaker 44 AEW, no, you know, that one's for later. In the middle of the night, though, if you get the super absorbent geriatric mattress, but

Speaker 44 just real briefly, I'm not going to read all this gaga, but AEW

Speaker 44 in their line of the world the discovery global is planning a new streaming service

Speaker 44 and it would seem that aew might move to the service

Speaker 44 but

Speaker 44 they're splitting all the companies up and listen to this quote i'm trying to find where it starts okay

Speaker 44 wrestling this is from uncle dave Wrestling is a weird one because HBO Max does list AEW undersports and those with knowledge of how it does say it was number two behind the NBA, but they've lost the NBA.

Speaker 44 However, it isn't a sport, and it's not under the TNT sports umbrella. And the new service, in theory, is taking the TNT sports properties.
But from what we are told, AEW is under contract to MAX

Speaker 44 as part of the deal they signed through the end of 2027.

Speaker 44 So they would be unique being on TBS, TNT, and HBO Max through the end of 2027.

Speaker 44 But basically, with the Discovery people breaking up all of their goddamn TV networks and streaming and et cetera,

Speaker 44 they don't even know whether AEW is fish or foul. What are you going to goddamn have to have to watch them?

Speaker 44 Read a book.

Speaker 44 That's what I say.

Speaker 29 A survey just came out. That's the most attractive hobby to women, men who read.

Speaker 44 Well, no wonder I've always done fairly well.

Speaker 29 Well,

Speaker 29 yeah. This has been a sidetracked.
I don't know where, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 44 I just, it's what the, it's a pain in the ass already.

Speaker 44 Hours and hours of your week that we are expected to give up our attention to these people and their various ongoing.

Speaker 44 dramatic renditions. And then now we got to chase how to fucking watch.

Speaker 44 I ought to just get the goddamn antenna i had when i was a teenager yeah i don't know if it'll work now a big giant wine guard antenna about 22 feet long with a 10-foot mast on it with a rotor where i could turn it 360 degrees i could pull in all kinds of tv stations and i didn't have to once i bought the thing didn't have to pay a penny for it

Speaker 29 See, again, you ought to look at streaming. I guess the best way to look at it is a smart TV, which you've now seen.

Speaker 29 The streaming services are just channels, channels, and you go to the channels and you pick what you want to see on the channels.

Speaker 29 You just have to log in, set up your account, and then hopefully the TV doesn't reset itself and make you do that over and over and over,

Speaker 29 which sometimes happens.

Speaker 44 That's why I haven't watched TV on the, in the office up here in about the past four years, because I got one of them.

Speaker 44 And every two weeks, it has, Days, can you come over here and hook this thing up again? Says it's offline.

Speaker 29 Hey, realistically, let me give you three options. Here are the options.
We're going to change a topic here, ladies ladies and gentlemen. Yeah.

Speaker 29 Let me give you three options.

Speaker 29 Survivor series?

Speaker 29 Between Survivor Series and Royal Rumble? Give me four options. Between Royal Rumble and WrestleMania or after WrestleMania.

Speaker 29 When do you think Vince is going to be back on WWE TV?

Speaker 44 Oh, good lord.

Speaker 44 Honestly, I don't know that they're going to do that because it will overshadow the work they're doing with

Speaker 44 Paul Levesque now. It's hard to even call him Triple H.

Speaker 44 It's like the old Eddie Graham thing. I got to get Dusty out of Florida because I can't get anybody else over.

Speaker 44 They're painting Triple H as the picture.

Speaker 44 Unless they just are

Speaker 44 painting the picture of Triple H, I should say, as the leader, as the guy, as

Speaker 44 the new visionary that's taking him into, you know, the promised land, whatever the fuck.

Speaker 44 If Vince comes back in anything meaningful, in any kind of speaking part, even to just say, hey, thank you, I'm back,

Speaker 44 meeting the, you know, the ladies out back or whatever,

Speaker 44 it overshadows Triple H and his aura and his authority. And if

Speaker 44 I can't believe that he would just come back, nor would they feel it was necessary to do one of him. Well, he's just here, he's sitting in the crowd.

Speaker 29 WWE icon, Vince McMahon.

Speaker 29 And then he can stand up and people go, oh my God, look at that face.

Speaker 44 Yeah, no, he's not going to do that. And he's not, they're not going to give him, nor is he going to accept an award.

Speaker 44 I don't think they're going to do that. They're not going to.

Speaker 44 They showed a clip of him in the Hogan tribute, you know, holding his arm up, et cetera.

Speaker 44 Something like that. They're not going to erase him from history.

Speaker 44 Is he still on YouTube?

Speaker 29 He's not on those Saturday Night Main Event intros. It makes it sound like Jesse Ventura was a one-man commentary team.

Speaker 44 Well, but

Speaker 44 they're not going to stick it down anybody's throat. And also, because they were featuring, and I guess still are contractually obligated to have Jesse as a part of Saturday Night's main event.

Speaker 44 That made sense. But the point I'm making is they're not going to remind you a bunch, but they're not going to erase him.
But I don't expect seeing back on TV.

Speaker 44 I don't know what good it would serve

Speaker 44 either side to that extent.

Speaker 29 It's going to be funny when he tries to start something up and he can't get a deal anywhere because WWE has all the deals everywhere.

Speaker 44 Well, and that's, you know, another of the things is they may not be anxious or if he would want to, but would they ask him when they know that he'd just as soon meet somebody at one of their TVs while he was making a guest appearance and then take their deal away from them?

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Speaker 29 Jim, I have some quotes here that a bunch of listeners have been sending in.

Speaker 29 Let me ask you about him. I guess this is filed under the category of, is this true or not? Or what do you think? Oh boy.
Paul Heyman was recently on the Ariel Hawani show,

Speaker 29 talking about his relationship with Hulk Hogan.

Speaker 29 Here's a quote. He was always super cool to me.

Speaker 29 You know, and even cooler to me, once he knew that I was riding with Affair and Sika, the Wild Samoans, because he loved the Wild Samoans, and they loved him.

Speaker 29 Every time I saw him, he was was a complete gentleman to me.

Speaker 29 The best thing he, I know people have both their glowing love of Hulk Hogan, and I know people have their behind the scenes how much they hated him.

Speaker 29 And that's a sentence there somehow. But

Speaker 29 first thing he's just saying he had positive experiences when he was a photographer as a teenager.

Speaker 44 Well, yes. And that's, you know, again,

Speaker 44 a lot of time that I was

Speaker 44 around Hulk Hogan was when I was a teenager and a little bit before that, because since I'm a few years older than Paul, even though, I mean, look at the difference. But,

Speaker 44 you know, and if he's riding, Hogan would have treated him like some Jabroni if he didn't know that he was riding with Affa and Sika, and he was kind of halfway smart to the bed.

Speaker 44 And of course, I'm sure Paul exaggerated his credentials like he does everywhere else. But yes,

Speaker 44 Hogan was very polite to him.

Speaker 29 And you've always talked about the story where Heyman ran up to you one day, you showed up and said, you're not going to believe this.

Speaker 29 I ran into Jack Nicholson at the China Club, and he said, Watch out for the racket.

Speaker 44 Yeah,

Speaker 29 and you just thought it was bullshit. You couldn't believe you, you don't buy it in any way.

Speaker 44 Exactly, yes, yes.

Speaker 29 So, this would have been the same time period here. Heyman recalled starting in WCW in 1988, managing his version of the Midnight Express against Jim Cornett's team.

Speaker 29 A few months in, during tour in Chicago, Heyman had a memorable interaction with Hulk Hogan.

Speaker 44 Uh-oh.

Speaker 29 Here's a quote. I pull up.
A limousine pulls up behind me. I get out of the car.
Hulk Hogan gets out of the limousine. Brother, how you doing, brother? Hey, man.

Speaker 29 So since you're still doing it right, I don't know if this is translated wrong or what this is. You're doing it great.
Talk to me for a minute, brother.

Speaker 44 No, so whatever. So Hogan comes up to him.

Speaker 44 He's like, oh, I see Paulie dangerously is what you're saying.

Speaker 29 That kid who used to ride with Afon Sika, he established that they would have known him or Hogan would have known him from years earlier.

Speaker 44 Yes. Well, and well, and now, to be fair, he's on TV.
He's worked for Vern. He's been into business about a year and a half at this point, Paul has.

Speaker 44 But I'm sure Hogan was watching like I was, taping every wrestling program available at that point.

Speaker 29 So we get into his limo. And we get into his limo, and the first thing he says, he goes, how long's your contract for? I'm a big fan of your work.

Speaker 44 Oh boy.

Speaker 29 Paul Heyman was surprised to find out that Hulk Hogan, the biggest star in wrestling, was his fan. Before Heyman could even express his respect for Hulkster, Hogan began praising him, saying,

Speaker 29 All he's doing is, brother, I'm only as good as the opponents they bring me. They always need opponents, and you can talk for my opponents.

Speaker 29 And there's only so many times I could bounce around Bobby Heenan, only so many times I could throw Jimmy Hart over the top rope. We gotta get you in here.

Speaker 29 Heyman found the moment touching. He said Hulk Hogan treated others the same way.

Speaker 44 He found it touching.

Speaker 29 He said Hulk Hogan treated others the same way and always acted graciously.

Speaker 44 Why did he go?

Speaker 29 Well, again, there's no firm conclusion to that story here. My question was,

Speaker 29 would he have told you? Would he have said something to you during that period of time if Hulk Hogan had pulled up behind him in a limo, had a secret meeting with him saying, come to the WWF?

Speaker 44 Well, possibly, but at the same time, if it was legitimately it happened and no, he wouldn't have told me because I wouldn't be standing in front of him because he would have gone

Speaker 44 because it's it's a thing,

Speaker 44 yes, they signed a contract to him and

Speaker 44 Dennis and Randy when they came in. I actually, I don't know if they signed a contract when they first came in because Dennis left after three months and nobody made a stink about it.

Speaker 44 And they finished Randy up not long thereafter.

Speaker 44 And Paul, as we know, between the time he came in with him at 88 and the time that I left in 90, had already been fired once and he got fired again.

Speaker 44 I don't know what his contract status was the first six months he was in the company. Okay.

Speaker 44 He might not have even had one because Dusty had brought them in when we asked them to, because we needed somebody to work with.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 is certainly if this was what time period did you say that he said this was? This was 89 or when he first went in.

Speaker 29 They said it was right after he went in after a few tours in Chicago. So I'm placing that at early to mid-1989.

Speaker 44 Okay, maybe

Speaker 44 again, did they run, did the WWF run in town against us in February of

Speaker 44 89 when we did the pay-per-view Chi-Town Rumble? Were they even in the same town as us that night, but that was February? But nevertheless, Paul, he dangerously

Speaker 44 had just left the sinking ship of the the AWA,

Speaker 44 had come to Crockett promotions

Speaker 44 pretty much almost at the same time as they were on the say-so of

Speaker 44 me and the Midnight Express through Booker Dusty Roads at the same time as they'd just been bought by Turner Broadcasting, where they bring in George Scott as Booker.

Speaker 44 And Paulie calls me the first thing. Oh, God, we're doomed.
He never used managers.

Speaker 44 And they took me and Paul and the rest of the managers off the road at the live events for a couple months until they relented.

Speaker 44 And Paul and I were trying to pay our own way to go to make the fucking match.

Speaker 44 And our angle with the midnight midnight had

Speaker 44 was basically cut off and ended by that February pay-per-view.

Speaker 44 And Paul was as miserable as I was.

Speaker 44 So, do you think that if the biggest star in wrestling

Speaker 44 had made a personal invitation to him,

Speaker 44 I need somebody to manage my opponents. Please come and work for Vince McMahon and you'll be my

Speaker 44 sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, and, you know, cream sickles.

Speaker 44 What the fuck do you think he would have done? If he was under contract, he would have done it in six months.

Speaker 29 I can think of one reason why he wouldn't have.

Speaker 44 Why?

Speaker 29 What did Hulk Hogan say? How many times can I throw Bobby Heenan around? How can I bounce him around? How many times times can I throw Jimmy Hart over the top rope? Heyman wasn't doing any of that.

Speaker 29 He was looking for a manager to take a bump. That wasn't going to happen.

Speaker 44 Well, but he was working with me.

Speaker 44 He would have worked around it, believe me.

Speaker 44 He would have figured out a way. He would have carry and crossed at some bitch.
You think I'm taking a bump, but I'm not.

Speaker 44 But no, no, that's the because again, a lot of people are thinking about, well, Paul Heyman's a big name in the industry and he, you know, had a, he didn't even have ECW. He didn't have shit.

Speaker 44 He had his own press agency and he'd been on TBS for four months. So it's not like I'm trying to be detrimental to his

Speaker 44 talent. But no,

Speaker 44 Hokogan didn't beg him to come there four months into the fucking run.

Speaker 29 This would have been right after Jack Nicholson told him to watch out for the rackets. I mean, he's hearing it from every side.

Speaker 29 He's hearing, you know, every celebrity he meets has something to say about this.

Speaker 29 Really wasn't.

Speaker 44 But I get that's why he didn't go to work with Hulk because our angle was so hot, even Nicholson was a fan.

Speaker 29 All right, Jim, our next question, sent via email to corny drivethrough at gmail.com, is from Ken Miller. What is Jim's favorite breakfast cereal?

Speaker 44 Oh, good Lord.

Speaker 44 Do you know how long it has been since I have had

Speaker 44 any type of breakfast cereal in my mouth?

Speaker 29 Do you have it in your pants? Where else would you have it?

Speaker 44 Well, I used to keep some in my pocket just in case I got hungry on the road.

Speaker 44 I have probably not had

Speaker 44 cereal

Speaker 44 since I lived here at home with my mother before I ever moved away.

Speaker 44 So let's say since I was 20 years old, and because she would have it in the

Speaker 44 in the pantry, and

Speaker 44 when I would want a snack, I would take rice krispies and put them in a bowl of milk and then put extra sugar on top of them because that's the only reason I was eating the goddamn shit to begin with.

Speaker 44 Just sugar, just sugar everywhere. Well, my teeth are crowned.

Speaker 44 And otherwise that I've never eaten cereal in my fucking life. And Stace has cereal, but she adds like the healthy wheat type of, it's like chewing roofing tile

Speaker 44 and all that stuff and and even milk doesn't help that so i i it was rice krispies because they were

Speaker 44 i gotta have some crispness and some crackly and some poppy

Speaker 44 uh but at the same time it's got to have a bunch of sugar on it so you've never tried cocoa puffs

Speaker 44 corn pops well i went cuckoo for cocoa puffs when i was a kid

Speaker 44 But my mother didn't eat Cocoa Puffs.

Speaker 29 So I still like having cereal around. Just I can grab a handful and chew on it.

Speaker 44 Well, see, you're a strange, strange individual.

Speaker 29 Maybe so, maybe so.

Speaker 44 But I have good cereal. But otherwise, but no, but no.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 in the 80s, when I went on a diet and I was trying to stay away from fried food, I came up with a recipe from somewhere where that you would break up the Kellogg's cornflakes and mash them into a goddamn chicken breast and bake that.

Speaker 44 And it was like an oven-fried chicken, but now they have actual oven-fried chicken mix, so I haven't had the need to smash my own corn flakes.

Speaker 29 All right, well, that was your favorite cereal. Jim, let's get another question here.

Speaker 29 Jim, this next one was sent via email.

Speaker 44 Actually, my favorite cereal, if you want to just know the truth, was the

Speaker 44 Green Hornet. Yes, the 40s version.
And then followed by The Perils of Pauline. But go ahead.

Speaker 29 Jim, our next email sent to Corney at gmail.com.

Speaker 44 Zombies of the Stratosphere was another good serial.

Speaker 29 This is sent in by Brian, but people call me Hutch.

Speaker 29 I'm a fellow villian as well.

Speaker 29 Anyways, I was wondering if you ever had any problems with any referees in Smoky Mountain or WWF or any other promotion.

Speaker 29 Did you have any arguments, fights, or disagreements? Thank you for the show. Keep up the great work.

Speaker 44 With referees?

Speaker 29 You ever just have like a prickly referee that you had problems with that wasn't one of the regular ones?

Speaker 44 Well, remember that fucking weasel son of George Scott's, Byron Scott, became a referee in WCW for a little while when they hired him during the period we just mentioned. And

Speaker 44 even Bobby Eaton didn't like him. He's the one human being.
I remember Bobby just coming up on his own rather than even agreeing with a knock. It was like, he'd come out with it on his own.

Speaker 44 Look at that stooge.

Speaker 44 But we never had words with him. I I didn't have any problems with

Speaker 44 or issues with the referees in Smoky Mountain because I hired all of them. I wouldn't have.

Speaker 44 Every once in a while, we had one referee in

Speaker 44 Smoky Mountain that I would have to encourage him to up his game every once in a while, but it wasn't in a flash.

Speaker 44 Well.

Speaker 44 He was dedicated, but every once in a while, he'd do some inexperience, you know, whatever. But no,

Speaker 44 i mean you know there was the the referees that they had from the state athletic commissions when crockett first started going up i mentioned new york new jersey i think maybe

Speaker 44 oh god damn pennsylvania was another one and and

Speaker 44 maybe you know one of the other northern states that They were just so old and they didn't know our spots. They didn't, they couldn't keep up with the pace and it hurt the match, that type of thing.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 I can't remember just outright having a

Speaker 44 out of all the stories I've ever told you, Brian, has a referee ever just completely fucked up and had to be throttled within an inch of his life?

Speaker 29 I can't think of one.

Speaker 29 I'm trying to just think of referees you didn't like working with, even

Speaker 29 taking the

Speaker 29 person out of the equation as a referee.

Speaker 29 Was David Manning tough to be a heel in their work?

Speaker 44 No, I mean, I got got along with david manning he was he was the the

Speaker 44 the referees in dallas were a little bit glory happy except for bronco lubich who didn't care bless him but then he got bronco on on the spot show because he's counting with his foot yeah he couldn't get up and down by that point

Speaker 44 but david manning was you know

Speaker 44 He was like the Bruce Pritchard of

Speaker 44 the Fritz von Erich world-class wrestling office. He was dedicated and there from daylight till dark and that whole thing and a little bit full of full of poop, but he was

Speaker 44 another Rick Hazard even who rode with me in the Midnight Express on some

Speaker 44 of the shows while we were there. He was one of the referees.
He was from Georgia originally. He was a fun guy.
We didn't have any problem with him.

Speaker 29 Is there any issues with it?

Speaker 44 Well, that's with David Manning. You had to,

Speaker 44 you know, it was hard to get heat because he was going to stay babyface, but he was going to be there forever. So he had a point.
I'm sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 29 You know, there are issues with babyfaces and heels riding together. Any issues with the heels riding with a referee?

Speaker 44 Well, no, that's the thing. It's you could tell

Speaker 44 a referee in the territory days with Kayfabe was neutral.

Speaker 44 In terms of, you know, if guys had to get a ride and make it to the show,

Speaker 44 you know, the promoter or the booker or whoever was not going to yell at the referee if he rode with one of the boys, or a lot of times the referees would drive and they charge some of the underneath boys, trans,

Speaker 44 to ride in their car so it helped them make ends meet. So referees were neutral, but you could tell the

Speaker 44 top referee in most of the territories, the main event referee, he would choose to ride with the baby faces on purpose.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 sometimes that Jerry Calhoun in Memphis was Jerry Lawler's brother-in-law at the time. So

Speaker 44 people kind of knew anyway. There was so there was sometimes reasons why you wouldn't Jerry Calhoun wouldn't be seen with the guy that was about to kill Lawler next week.

Speaker 44 But if it did, Thomas Marlin wasn't there, he'd ride with Dundee all the time or some of the top babyfaces.

Speaker 44 But Paul Morton, bless him, it was whoever was usually going to pay him trance or maybe Pat Malone just for the conversation or whatever.

Speaker 44 And it was, it was accepted. But the

Speaker 44 babyface referees were harder to work with for the heels because they wouldn't, even if you were good at distracting them,

Speaker 44 they wouldn't stay distracted for

Speaker 44 two more seconds long enough for you to do your deal. They had to turn around and catch it.

Speaker 29 They were strong baby faces. That's the thing.
They weren't just baby faces. They were like strong baby faces.

Speaker 44 Yes, like I'll brook none of your nonsense here tonight when you're trying to have the fucking fucking match, right?

Speaker 44 And but Fergie used to, when Carl Fergie, they brought him to Louisiana to be a referee.

Speaker 44 He had wrestled in Tennessee, but he was making more money refereeing in Louisiana than he was wrestling in Tennessee.

Speaker 44 But every time I jump up on the fucking apron to distract him in a finish where I had to and the boys are going to do something behind his back.

Speaker 44 He's like, oh, Courtney, let me turn around. You're killing my blowjobs.
You're killing my blowjobs.

Speaker 44 And then if it was the spot where then he would shove me down and turn around and the baby faces had foiled it and he would count the baby faces and they'd win,

Speaker 44 I'd go, okay, Ferg, get your blow job. And he'd shove me down.
He'd turn around and count one, two, three. Yeah, the Rock and Roll Express wins.

Speaker 44 Every time he shoved me down, he thought about getting blown.

Speaker 29 Who was the referee the night that the

Speaker 29 local ring announcer or the local timekeeper went into business for themselves and wouldn't ring the bell because they wanted to see the Rocket Roll Express meet them in that express?

Speaker 44 Oh, God.

Speaker 29 Because what do you do in that situation if you're the referee?

Speaker 44 I would almost want to say

Speaker 44 that it was Tommy Young just because, you know, chances are it was a main event in Charleston, South Carolina, in the Crockett territory that early in

Speaker 44 January 86.

Speaker 44 But it may have been Sonny Fargo, roughhouse.

Speaker 29 Oh, really?

Speaker 44 Because he was still a referee

Speaker 44 into 1986 and refereed a lot of. That's why me and Bobby especially always got a kick out of it because

Speaker 44 a referee is roughhouse Fargo.

Speaker 44 And he was a stiffest son of a bitch.

Speaker 44 Boy, if he touched you in any way and/or to try to get him to fucking turn his back, but

Speaker 44 if

Speaker 44 that's the thing, it was like we, it took a few minutes to realize what, and I guess we've lost a few members of the audience, but early in

Speaker 44 the Midnight Express and Rock and Roll Express's run in the Carolinas,

Speaker 44 it was a world tag team title match. It was, I guess, probably, was it, when did they won from the, it was January or February before we won it on the Superstation,

Speaker 44 the

Speaker 44 superstars on the Superstation special.

Speaker 29 February 86?

Speaker 44 Okay, sometime in January, I don't have the Midnight Express book in front of me, but we're defending, or they're defending,

Speaker 44 or no,

Speaker 44 they were defending. So that, wait a minute, have I fucked this whole story up?

Speaker 29 I'm not sure. You've started several.
It was, no,

Speaker 44 it was us defending the title against them. So it was right after we won it.

Speaker 44 Because the point being,

Speaker 44 we were supposed to go a 60-minute Broadway.

Speaker 44 And that, you know, but the timekeeper was one of the local in Charleston, was it the VFW Veterans of Foreign Wars or some type of, he was an older fellow that had been there forever as part of the sponsoring group or whatever.

Speaker 44 And we'd gone the 60 minutes, but he wouldn't ring the bell because he was convinced the Rock and Roll Express were about to win.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 they had been calling the time.

Speaker 44 like five minutes remaining, you know,

Speaker 44 Crockett did that back in those days. Five minutes gone, 10 minutes gone, whatever.

Speaker 44 And the, the boys had timed their shit.

Speaker 44 They heard the rock and rolls making the comeback. We got a minute or two left.
And you're doing some false finishes. And after one minute, we didn't hear shit.

Speaker 44 And everyone like, what the fuck? And that's why I look over in the

Speaker 44 time kits, a local timekeeper, too. And I'm like, what the fuck? And

Speaker 44 they're just not looking at me. So we've, they wait a couple more minutes.
And that's when we had to say, fuck it. And we did a top rope DQ or whatever it was.
It's in in the book.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 the promoter, Henry Marcus, went to the guy afterwards and said,

Speaker 44 why didn't you ring the bell? And he said, I was just, I was watching. I was so convinced the Rock and Roll Express was going to win if I just had a, if they just had a little more time.

Speaker 44 And if fuck.

Speaker 44 So,

Speaker 44 but in all the local towns in those days, you had

Speaker 44 local ring announcers from the radio station or even just a local guy and local timekeepers from the sponsoring group, the VFW. And

Speaker 44 the announcer in Evansville, Indiana for years was just a member of the State Athletic Commission that was

Speaker 44 a nice fellow, but as dry as fucking toast.

Speaker 44 But just, you know,

Speaker 44 it just happened to be whoever it was.

Speaker 29 Do you remember the first time you worked with Tommy Young? And did you guys like gel right away? Did it take time? I mean, you worked really well with him.

Speaker 44 No, the first time we worked with him was the first week we were working for Crockett. I can't remember the exact match or a specific show, but he was the main referee.
So

Speaker 44 the first week we worked in it. And well, we came to work for Crockett.
We were in Georgia, but still,

Speaker 44 you know, we did the syndicated TV. So shortly after we got to work for Crockett, mid-85.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 I mean, you didn't really need to

Speaker 44 work hard to gel with Tommy. He was brilliant.
He was the best in-ring referee that we ever worked with. And he was just natural.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 he was fun to...

Speaker 44 for me to work with and play off of because he was so good at not,

Speaker 44 he had his own personality, but it didn't look phony. It wasn't over the top.
It was legitimate for him and people could tell. And

Speaker 44 just the little things that he did, we've talked about it a million times in the ring in matches or the way he went for the counts or the

Speaker 44 urgency with some things or the puzzlement of other things or

Speaker 44 registering on his face when he saw He had made a three count, but he looks up and he sees the champion's leg on the ropes. And then there's the, oh my God, I've made a mistake.

Speaker 44 It just flowed with him. And we could argue back and forth with the people all day long.
And

Speaker 44 they liked it, but it was a natural,

Speaker 44 you know, back and forth rather than something that we really planned. He just picked up on shit and then we did it.

Speaker 29 All right, Jim, our next question sent via email to Courney DriveThru at gmail.com. I'm moving my mouse around a lot.
I apologize. Was sent in by Alex in North Carolina

Speaker 29 watching some old WWF matches from 1999. And it got me to think:

Speaker 29 would Big Bubba Rogers have gotten over as Jim's bodyguard if he had the leaner but intimidating look he had in 1999?

Speaker 29 Interesting question because

Speaker 29 shortly after he turned babyface in 1990,

Speaker 29 he did get a lot leaner then than what he had been previously, but

Speaker 29 to the question, would it have made any difference to the success of Big Bubba Rogers?

Speaker 44 Well, but he said in 1999, is that

Speaker 44 I got confused there at the start. Help me out with the start of it.

Speaker 29 He's saying he's watching WWF from 1999, and when Big Boss Man was there as part of the corporation, I would presume, he was leaner and more intimidating, he thought, than when he was bigger and intimidating.

Speaker 44 Well, yes, but he wouldn't have gotten over as my bodyguard in 1999 because I wasn't even on television.

Speaker 29 Would 1999 Big Boss Man

Speaker 29 work in 1986 managing Jim Cornet

Speaker 29 or managing bodyguarding?

Speaker 29 Thanks for the question,

Speaker 29 Alice. Yes,

Speaker 44 worded so well as it was. Here's the thing is what I'm going to try to tell you there.

Speaker 44 I think Bubba was perfect when he was Bubba Rogers for

Speaker 44 the thing that they were doing just because he was so much bigger

Speaker 44 at 350, 360 pounds, you know, when he first started.

Speaker 44 He was so much bigger than the baby faces and everybody else. And even he was heavier than the Road Warriors, but he could move

Speaker 44 so flexibly and so quickly and like for a big guy, but he could do all that shit.

Speaker 44 And he didn't look like a

Speaker 44 bodybuilder type of fellow so it was a completely different kind of a more heelish kind of size and bully

Speaker 44 and also nobody had any frame of reference for what he had never been anybody before they'd never seen him before

Speaker 44 nobody knew

Speaker 44 anything than what that they were being presented that he was just killing people and just didn't sell anything.

Speaker 44 And you didn't often find in those days a guy that could

Speaker 44 be put into a top spot and last more than a short period of time because he sucked. You were just trying to steal a house out of him.

Speaker 44 You couldn't find a guy that they had never seen before and stick him in a top spot and have them get over on an ongoing basis. And he did.

Speaker 44 And but at the same time,

Speaker 44 People forget in 1986, 1987,

Speaker 44 he was only like 23 or 24 years old.

Speaker 29 Yeah, see, that's the thing. Once he has the full beard, he looks so much older than he is.
Yeah.

Speaker 44 Well, and that was by design because he had such a baby face. They wouldn't have taken, they wouldn't have been scared of Big Bubba Rogers without, you know, a little,

Speaker 44 a little disguise there.

Speaker 44 But by the time he's boss man in 19,

Speaker 44 the early 90s, yeah, and also he needed the size with Hogan.

Speaker 44 But, but then he had to slim down.

Speaker 44 Not only because he was having, he had knee issues.

Speaker 44 I can't remember chapter and verse, but just because he needed to lose the baby fat if he was going to continue to perform athletically at that level.

Speaker 44 In 1999,

Speaker 44 you know, he's almost 40. So yeah, he couldn't be that big and be doing that stuff.

Speaker 44 But by then, he was over as two different people.

Speaker 44 So didn't,

Speaker 44 it didn't harm his aura. I don't know that

Speaker 44 even though he was in better physical shape in 1999, if we'd have started him out like that,

Speaker 44 you know, 15 years earlier, if he'd have got over as

Speaker 44 well.

Speaker 44 Does that make any sense?

Speaker 29 I think so. What do you remember about the match with the rock Ole Anderson at Crocket Cup 87?

Speaker 44 Oh, good lord. Actually, if you go go back and watch it now,

Speaker 44 for a guy that's only been in the business at like a fucking year at that level, Bubba, I thought was fucking tremendous.

Speaker 44 And they had a believable fucking fight because, you know, Oli's not going to back down from anything, but Bubba sometimes would, and Oli would be going, make me, make me.

Speaker 44 You know, so with,

Speaker 44 I didn't know he said, what, no, yeah, no, make me, make me.

Speaker 44 If he's going to be backing up, you know, that kind of shit. So

Speaker 44 that's what in the old days, especially the Anderson brothers, they'd get in those exchanges or the funks would do it too. Guys would be throwing punches and the babyface would start coming back.

Speaker 44 And they'd either say, keep going, keep going, or make me, make me. Work for it.
Work for it.

Speaker 29 I get such a kick out of it. But anyway, where were we going? I get such a kick out of babyface holy, like trying to get the crowd going.
He's like marching in place. Just

Speaker 29 imagine imagine this guy who'd been a heel forever, all of a sudden, being Mr. Babyface.

Speaker 44 Yeah, and the same thing when he was a babyface selling, he started firing back up. And if you didn't make him stay down, he would fire back up and just take over.

Speaker 44 But when you look at those matches now, they're so different. From it's so refreshing

Speaker 44 from what to see what that looked like versus the same shit you see every day now from everybody.

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Speaker 29 Jim, our next question was sent in to CorneyDriveThru at gmail.com from Jason in Baltimore, Maryland.

Speaker 29 I have a what-if-type question for you.

Speaker 29 How would the Midnight Express errors have differed if Dennis and Stan had swapped their runs?

Speaker 29 For instance, how would your time in world-class and mid-South have been different with Stan?

Speaker 29 And how would Dennis have done in the late 80s NWA?

Speaker 44 I firmly believe they came in the right order

Speaker 44 because honest to God,

Speaker 44 and Stan had had a little bit more success with the fabulous ones by 1983 or the end of 83.

Speaker 44 I think Bill Watts, not him personally.

Speaker 44 I think Bill Watts's schedule, Bill Watts' company, Bill Watts' territory would have run Stan Lane off in six months.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 I think he would have said,

Speaker 44 I don't want to be here anymore. And he would have gone and done something else.
Not even personal with us, or just, we can't live like this.

Speaker 44 Maybe we would have all left and gone somewhere else, but I don't know if he'd have put up with it that long. The first time somebody tarred and feathered one of his cars.

Speaker 44 But the road schedule and the fans

Speaker 44 belligerence and violence. And the, did I mention the road schedule? And even for the money, because he and Steve had been doing quite well, even in Memphis to that point.
So

Speaker 44 Dennis and Bobby were a little,

Speaker 44 a little more motivated to

Speaker 44 get the check, but

Speaker 44 I can't see poor Stan have because even

Speaker 44 the schedule that he took on to come in as part of the midnight with Crockett, and then he'd already started expanding. So across the country, a lot more airplanes.

Speaker 44 But I think we spent more time in the van that Dennis bought from Stan than Stan had spent in it to begin with.

Speaker 44 And just the multiple shows and the,

Speaker 44 you know, the territory, it would have driven Stan out of his mind that he wouldn't be able to go out to a

Speaker 44 a nightclub that you didn't think he was, you know, he was going to end up stabbed with a broken bottle in

Speaker 44 and fucking just that level of heat down there he would have had to have dallas he would have loved

Speaker 44 he would have loved dallas because you could you were a star on television

Speaker 44 and

Speaker 44 you could go to all these fancy places and the hoi polloy would make over you and everything

Speaker 44 But he wouldn't have made it through Louisiana before he said, fuck it, I'd rather goddamn,

Speaker 44 as Sid said one time, go sell farm chemicals.

Speaker 29 What about the money? I mean, without revealing anything that, you know, you don't need to reveal.

Speaker 44 Well, no, Stan had been Stan and Steve, the fabs for the previous two years. They probably weren't

Speaker 44 between the pay they got in Memphis and the gimmicks they'd been selling, they weren't far from making what me and Bobby and Dennis were turning cartwheels and handsprings for in

Speaker 44 Louisiana, all things considered. By the time you take in the extra travel, I firmly believe

Speaker 44 with all of my heart that they were making Stan and Steve 75, 80 grand,

Speaker 44 and maybe more with gimmicks because of the level they were at. And

Speaker 44 they were certainly not making less than $1,000 a week just from wrestling.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 then, you know, pictures on top of it, they were the hottest picture sellers. And they were doing four grand a week in pictures and t-shirts at their hottest run, 83, 84, something like that.

Speaker 44 So they're splitting that, but still.

Speaker 44 My last check before I left Memphis was $60, as I believe we read off on the program here a while back.

Speaker 44 So with four grand a week, I'll

Speaker 44 entertain the option of letting somebody take a stab at me, literally.

Speaker 29 And again, he left Memphis, Stan and Stephen, they went to the AWA, which, although the weather may not be to what Stan liked, the schedule probably was.

Speaker 44 Yeah, no, the weather outside was frightful, but they worked 17, 18 days in all big buildings in major towns.

Speaker 44 So it, you know,

Speaker 44 I don't think it would have just been a, he would have been miserable. Because that's part of the reason.

Speaker 44 That's part of the reason why he didn't stay any longer in Smokey Mountain. We finally decided to retire.
Because instead of being in like the,

Speaker 44 not even staying at the Marriott, but being within distance of at the, while we were at the Red Roof Inn, he could walk across the street to the airport Marriott in Atlanta or whatever.

Speaker 44 Now he's at the Super 8 in Morristown, Tennessee, and there ain't nowhere to go.

Speaker 44 And that didn't,

Speaker 44 Stan Lane cannot live like that. Tom Pritchard was fine.
He's going to the fucking room. He don't give a shit.

Speaker 29 and what about dennis let's say you had 1984 dennis as you were going through everything in 1988 with the sale to turner and the booking

Speaker 29 how would that have worked

Speaker 44 i think

Speaker 44 dennis was also always the guy who was able to get more heat but stan was always the guy that was more cosmetically pleasing for the pay-per-view era

Speaker 44 and i'm i'm afraid that again in in reverse

Speaker 44 Dennis may not have

Speaker 44 carried off

Speaker 44 the spot that we had for the last, what, year and a half of Crockett and then with WCW was just the

Speaker 44 blonde, pretty boy heel team to go out and have the tear down the house match on the upper card, be the U.S. tag champions, whatever the case,

Speaker 44 and be able to be plugged back into the main events if necessary.

Speaker 44 And I think Stan looked better better for the pay-per-view era and more television friendly than dennis did

Speaker 44 part of his tan and flowing locks

Speaker 29 jim our next question sent via email to corney drivethrough at gmail.com is from mac

Speaker 29 just a quick question do you think that punk and rollins is this generation's michaels and brett

Speaker 29 Two guys that hate each other, but will work together to make millions?

Speaker 29 Do you see a comparison at all?

Speaker 44 Well, I mean, I guess I didn't know exactly where he was going,

Speaker 44 but

Speaker 44 I don't think that Seth and Punk

Speaker 44 have anywhere near the,

Speaker 44 what's the word I'm searching for? The irritation amongst each other. They don't.
They don't dislike each other nearly as much as Sean and Brett did at one period of time.

Speaker 44 I know they were friends first, and then they made amends to however degree years afterwards, but at the height of the thing,

Speaker 44 I can't imagine that Punk and Seth dislike each other anymore because they were

Speaker 44 going into, well, I say they, mostly Sean,

Speaker 44 but potentially Brett was sandbagging a few interviews, but they were sabotaging each other on live television.

Speaker 44 Whereas so far, Punk and Seth haven't done that. So

Speaker 44 in the ring, classic rivalry, you've got a point going there. Two guys that

Speaker 44 at various points are four guys

Speaker 44 that at various points are kind of like the state-of-the-art guy in the ring in the company or whatever.

Speaker 44 But I don't think the real life

Speaker 44 negativite

Speaker 44 is anything like what Michaels and Hart was, where it's just going to spill over where they're fighting in the fucking bathroom.

Speaker 44 Maybe I'm wrong, and they just hide it better.

Speaker 29 Yeah, the money may help.

Speaker 29 But who knows?

Speaker 29 Jim,

Speaker 29 let's talk about some retro figures. I have some here, some recent arrivals.

Speaker 29 Let's get your thoughts on some of these.

Speaker 29 I have here from a rather new toy company, Latoonie.

Speaker 29 What? I thought it was L-A-Tooney, but apparently it's Latoonie, L-A-T-O-O-N-I-E.

Speaker 44 La Toonie!

Speaker 29 It's a very catchy name, I must say.

Speaker 44 They are doing

Speaker 29 a line of retro LJN style figures called Wrestling Giant series, and I have here Andre the Giant.

Speaker 44 Was that his footstep coming?

Speaker 29 That's her!

Speaker 44 So that's one of those big.

Speaker 44 Peter North rubber jobs that just clinks down on the desk there.

Speaker 29 This is the biggest andre the giant ljn in size ever ljn style and size ever made if you put it next to an ljn

Speaker 29 it's approximately two heads taller

Speaker 29 and he's in a what's what's what's the girth like let's let's not talk too dirty but if you threw it at someone they would go down quick oh so you can go down on it at the same time all right i'm trying to that's one of those specialty items i don't know this is not what you're supposed to do with this fine fine toy it's gigantic did vince name it?

Speaker 44 Did Vince name it?

Speaker 29 This is my Andre the Giant? Do you mean like, did he? Yes.

Speaker 44 And oh, boy, howdy, I'll tell you what.

Speaker 29 Oh, come on now.

Speaker 44 Talk about a square peg in a round hole. Oh, do you know Andre the Giant was so big his bathtub had stretch marks? You've heard about this.

Speaker 29 What do you think you should do with Andre the Giant if you're making toys?

Speaker 29 And let's say, let's look at WWE's Mattel line, for instance, because they try to, I think, to the best of their ability or something like that, make it to scale so that a wrestler who's 5'10, that figure would look the same scale next to someone 6'5.

Speaker 29 Yes. If you're doing Andre, what do you do? Do you make him 7'4 ⁇ ? Do you make him 6'10? No,

Speaker 44 you make him eight feet tall. You got to accentuate the positive and delimitate the negative.
And don't mess with Mr. Inbetween.
Go all the way, beat Jack Pfeffer with it.

Speaker 44 Make him about

Speaker 44 a time and a half bigger than the other ones, because that's the idea of Andre the Giant.

Speaker 44 Then the little kiddies could all swarm Andre and take him down and tie a net around him like they did Gulliver when he visited the land of Lilliput

Speaker 44 and set fire to his toes.

Speaker 29 All right, well, let's.

Speaker 29 Let's move on from there. Maybe someone will put out a new line of Gulliver's Travels toys.

Speaker 44 Yeah,

Speaker 44 he went all over the place.

Speaker 29 Jim Hastell toys, we've mentioned them in the past. They're brand new grapplers and gimmicks, or it's not brand new anymore, but their grapplers and gimmicks line has several new figures.

Speaker 29 I have here the model Rick Martell

Speaker 29 with his perm,

Speaker 29 a sweater wrapped around his neck, and a can of arrogance in the Hasbro style.

Speaker 29 Rick Martell, does he get his due as a babyface or as a heel?

Speaker 44 Oh, I thought you meant from the toy company.

Speaker 29 No, and by the way, the finishing maneuver is the arrogance splash. Oh, boy.
Which is never.

Speaker 44 Yeah, I know. Did you ever see him do a splash?

Speaker 29 Not the arrogance splash, no.

Speaker 44 No, and you know, that is a shame because Rick Martell does not, he was a tremendous worker,

Speaker 44 both as

Speaker 44 a babyface, he was a good-looking, white meat, as they used to say, guy that when he sold, you know, the fans get behind him, but he was a very good in-ring

Speaker 44 technical worker as far as executing moves, but also in terms of psychology psychology and knowing how to sell and etc. And as a heel,

Speaker 44 he's French-Canadian. And,

Speaker 44 you know, with love to our friends up there in the French-Canadian parts of Canadia, but they're a bunch of heat-getting motherfuckers. And so the accent helped and the model look helped.
And

Speaker 44 I can see where they came up with the gimmick for him because he was so smiley and purdy, but excellent worker, but nobody,

Speaker 44 you don't see any Rick Martell matches. Is Rick Martell on any of the highlights they play of other people?

Speaker 44 Now that you've brought him up, why do we not see more Rick Martell these days, just even by accident?

Speaker 44 It's like, was he never even in with any of the guys they still like?

Speaker 29 Well, one thing to remember, he is one of the guys that during his career, which he took very seriously, invested his money, I believe, in real estate and made a fortune to the point where he doesn't have to do conventions or any of these things that some guys have to do.

Speaker 44 Well, no, I didn't even say that. I'm just saying

Speaker 44 there's no footage played of with it. I don't remember all these other documentaries that they've done on these other people or specials, them beating up Rick Martell.
Do you?

Speaker 44 They're just not showing any footage. He's not mentioned.
He's not talked about.

Speaker 29 Well, again, it would be old footage at this point, but he was a world champion.

Speaker 44 If you don't need any goddamn money, then what are they doing to these figures? Is this some bootleg shit or is he raking these people over the coals over at Hastel Toys?

Speaker 29 I don't know how it works, but it's a very nice-looking figure. And again, a very cool little can of arrogance, the spray.

Speaker 44 What's it smell like?

Speaker 29 It does not have a scent. Jim, another figure from Hastell Toys.

Speaker 44 They should just put a little alcohol in there with a hint of taint.

Speaker 29 Jim, I have here

Speaker 29 Damien Demento.

Speaker 44 Oh, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 29 With his finishing move, the demented drop.

Speaker 29 This is apparently Damian Demento, and it comes with, I don't know what you would call his shoulder pad situation, but a very nicely put together figure. Looks like it's in the Hasbro style perfectly.

Speaker 29 Jim, was he still there when you came in? Because he was there early 93. And let's talk about guys that look like killers in the magazines, and then you saw them wrestle.

Speaker 44 Yeah, you know, and that's the thing is, I'm trying to remember, was he there?

Speaker 44 We came in late July, 1993. I, you know,

Speaker 44 he's one of those guys that, yeah, it was a great look, but you don't really remember the matches. I only remember him standing there.
I don't remember one match he ever fucking had.

Speaker 29 See, I was seeing him on local TV here. He was an IWCCW, Mondo Clean,

Speaker 29 and he kind of had like a, you know, I hate to say Rogue Warriors because he didn't have face paint, but like that kind of looked. He had the crazy hairdo and the shoulder pads.
And yeah.

Speaker 44 And I'm thinking maybe he might even have been on a dennis coraluso show or two that i might have been around i'm not

Speaker 44 but also there was a damian demento and a danny demento

Speaker 44 wasn't there well this is damian that was fat's domino so the point is yeah great look but hey

Speaker 29 which name passes the name test mondo clean or the name vince mcmahon gave him damien demento

Speaker 44 well i mean i i don't know if i would put the bet the farm on either one of them, but I would go with Damian Demento over Mondo Clean

Speaker 44 unless I was bald-headed with earrings and peddling Lysol.

Speaker 29 Jim, one more from the Hastel Toys Grapplers and Gimmicks line. Brand new Santa Claus, a new Santa Claus Hasbro-style figure with his finishing move, the sack attack.

Speaker 29 And it comes with a big white sack.

Speaker 44 You know, Santa Claus, even when I was a kid, he had a big white sack.

Speaker 29 What do you think of the idea of doing a Santa Claus figure? There have been numerous appearances by an alleged Santa Claus on wrestling throughout the year, sometimes not as a heel.

Speaker 44 Well, that's the thing is, I don't, is this part of the, you know, Christmas toy line of Santa and his evil dwarves? Or do they have,

Speaker 44 you know, Mrs. Claus to go with it? Or just because Santa sometimes pops in on a wrestling show, they should do Xanta Claus.

Speaker 29 Actually, I believe that is in the works because I saw he's doing a Balls Mahoney and a Xanta Claus, it looks like.

Speaker 44 Oh, my God.

Speaker 29 Okay, then Mitch and Hostel Toys. Hello, Mitch.

Speaker 44 Well, then do Boo Bradley, and you've got him covered.

Speaker 44 But poor old Xanta Claus, maybe I could see that, but I don't know about Santa Claus because, you know.

Speaker 29 That is one of those things we still need as a line of guys in their Smoky Mountain, I hate to say character, but as they were in Smoky Mountain, we have a Tony Anthony as a plumber.

Speaker 29 Apparently, there's one coming up at him as a hillbilly, but not one of him as the dirty white boy, which

Speaker 44 he was for like 15 years.

Speaker 29 Well, Jim, let's go to another line of toys here. These just came in.
A lot of people like me were waiting for them, and these are spectacular. These guys deliver every time.

Speaker 29 Epic Toys, their wrestling megastar series.

Speaker 29 Four new figures. I'll start with this one, Barry Wyndham.

Speaker 29 And he's wearing the vest. It's a soft goods vest, a little leather vest here,

Speaker 29 that he wore in the early 90s, but it's like the 1988, 89 version of Barry Wyndham. Blonde hair.
You could change his hand to give him a claw hand with a black glove.

Speaker 29 What did you think of Barry Wyndham when he finally turned heel in 1988?

Speaker 44 Oh, well, again, you know, BW from,

Speaker 44 what, 1984 through 1989 or thereabouts was just.

Speaker 44 surreal in how good he was in the ring for a guy that tall,

Speaker 44 how he, and that body weight, how he could move that fast and that gracefully, and the effortless bumps he took, and the way he threw himself into everything.

Speaker 44 And he had the, he could sell his ass off as a baby face, but as a heel, he had the mulligan demeanor.

Speaker 44 He was

Speaker 44 incredible in the ring. And everybody considered him one of the top five guys in the ring in the business when it came to strictly pro wrestling performing.

Speaker 44 And,

Speaker 44 you know,

Speaker 44 again, with today's

Speaker 44 eyesight or today's glasses on, as they say, he was a dadgum good promo because he didn't sound canned and over-dramatic and phony like the guys do today, but he wasn't the promo of the people that surrounded him, the flares and the yarns and the dusties and all of the NWA guys.

Speaker 44 So, you know, that's what everybody

Speaker 44 always wanted him to be the guy in the NWA, which he was in the ring.

Speaker 44 His promos may have been good enough to get by because he was so good in the ring, but he wasn't the charismatic vocal draw of, you know, the top guys.

Speaker 44 And then

Speaker 44 everything just kind of over the next few years went to hell.

Speaker 29 What did you think of the idea of him using the claw and wearing the black glove?

Speaker 44 That was great because

Speaker 44 even though another generation had gone by in the Carolinas and Georgia since Black Jack Mulligan had been the top guy there, and there was a whole nother part of the country that maybe had not even seen Black Jack Mulligan, they weren't, it wasn't like they were playing off of

Speaker 44 the thing with the like the new blackjacks when Bradshaw and Wyndham were the new blackjacks that had to copy Lanza and Mulligan. It was just, here's this fucking big,

Speaker 44 tall kid from Texas,

Speaker 44 and he's got the fucking glove on this claw hand that he's using.

Speaker 44 And his hands were fucking big because the rest of him was big too. Don't take that the way it sounded.

Speaker 44 And so it worked on his own, but it was an homage if you were in the know to blackjack.

Speaker 44 But that you could also slip something in the glove glove and blah, blah, blah. It was a thing as a heel to get heat.
It wasn't just kind of corny because his dad did it. It was his own thing.

Speaker 44 I didn't mind that. As a heel, he did great work at that time period.

Speaker 29 Were you surprised when they turned them? I mean, him and Luger were just put together just before that. Luger just turned just before that.

Speaker 29 Were you surprised when he turned on Luger?

Speaker 44 You know, to be honest, I may have been, but I can't remember exactly. And I can't remember why they did it

Speaker 44 because it didn't involve us at that period of time.

Speaker 29 The horseman's money.

Speaker 29 That's right. And women.

Speaker 44 But I think at that point, they

Speaker 44 also with Ole had bowed out by that point. They wanted to beef up the horseman.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 Flair loved Wyndham. And so JJ.

Speaker 44 Dusty obviously did. So it was just like, let's beef up the horseman.

Speaker 29 Jim, another figure from this line of wrestling megastars, Epic Toys, the barbarian.

Speaker 29 This is the look he had

Speaker 29 in

Speaker 29 the early 90s in the WWF after Bobby Heenan started managing him. After he kind of dropped the Road Warrior-esque look, grew his hair out, no more face paint and had fur.

Speaker 29 This figure here has a...

Speaker 44 Didn't he also have antlers on a helmet? Or am I thinking of Nord?

Speaker 29 This figure has a removable antler crown.

Speaker 29 It also has a soft goods furry. It's actually very, it feels very nice.
A furry.

Speaker 29 This is not a vest. It is a cape, I guess you would say.

Speaker 29 The barbarian.

Speaker 29 What do you think? I mean, he's got that name and it's such a great name. What should his look be? Should it be something like that?

Speaker 29 Should it be something like the face-painted crazy guy in the Paul Jones family?

Speaker 44 Well, I see where they were going with, you know, the

Speaker 44 face paint and the

Speaker 44 leather wristbands and accoutrements that guys were wearing at that point in time, if they were a big guy with, you know, a good body,

Speaker 44 was kind of an homage to the

Speaker 44 Road Warriors. Well, not kind of an homage, outright ripoff for the most part of the Road Warriors.

Speaker 44 But the barbarian, to me,

Speaker 44 I can see if

Speaker 44 you would have more of a medieval type of, but I would hope maybe more of a Thor god of thunder type of,

Speaker 44 you know, boots and, you know, whatever, maybe the furry cape, but not like a caveman where it's kind of over-the-top funny because barbarian at that point was like looked like he would eat you for lunch.

Speaker 44 Or maybe a Conan type of thing is more what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 44 But as I recall, the antlers didn't look any

Speaker 44 more serious on him than it did when the boogeyman tried to wear them.

Speaker 44 And it just kind of, it looked like it was a little too, too cartoon, as Frank Hickey would say, and doomed him to the mid-card.

Speaker 29 I just saw Body Slam again the other day for the first time in a while.

Speaker 29 I forgot how much I like his voice, the barbarian, because he could barely speak English, it seems like, but one of his lines to M. Harry Smileak is, your name Smith.

Speaker 29 he can't even say it but his voice sounds so funny is he your your name smell

Speaker 29 he's been he's been in this country for 45 fucking years and he still talks kind of like that you know they would have worked as a tag team looking at them in that movie tjo khan and the barbarian worked well together in terms of look and style at that point jim two more figures here Same line, Epic Toys.

Speaker 29 Steve Dr. Death Williams.
This comes with his white and red robe, his Dr. Death boots.

Speaker 29 A fine-looking figure here, Steve Dr. Death Williams.
Will we ever get an 84 Mid-South, Dr. Death?

Speaker 29 Blue singlet.

Speaker 29 Big gut. We will find out.

Speaker 29 This one's in good shape. Finally, Jim, from Epic Toys Wrestling Megastars, Ric Flair.

Speaker 29 And this is Ric Flair in his green robe with the green trunks and everything, but they actually have a fancy little robe here that the figure comes with.

Speaker 29 And give them credit, they are the first Holy Line to put out a Ric Flair figure in the last few years that doesn't have Belowjob mouth.

Speaker 29 I know everyone wants it to go, woo, but when you actually try to put it in a figure, it just looks like he's ready to blow someone.

Speaker 44 Yeah, it's like a six-inch tall version of a sex doll, right?

Speaker 44 And I want to not only the rookie Dr. Destee Williams before he lost the weight and trimmed down and had the blue singlet on, but how about the real rookie when he had a t-shirt on underneath that?

Speaker 44 Yeah, that was real early.

Speaker 29 The white shirt.

Speaker 44 And with Flair, now, is this the green the lion jungle robe, like Elvis's jungle room, the jungle robe?

Speaker 29 Uh, yes, I believe so. It's uh,

Speaker 44 yeah, so the figure only costs $39.95, but the robe costs $5,000, is what you're saying.

Speaker 29 Yeah, and I wonder if the estate of Mr. Wrestley 2's wife gets a cut of any of these little robes that are made off her design.
But this is a very nice-looking figure.

Speaker 29 What do you think about Flair's colors?

Speaker 29 I've never been a fan of Flair and purple, even though there are matches I love of Flair that he's wearing purple. I never liked it.

Speaker 29 Green was okay, but the older he got, green wasn't really a flattering color. Red, I thought always worked, but he kind of stopped wearing red so much.

Speaker 29 White every now and then when he was a baby face or even a heel. What color was Ric Flair best in?

Speaker 44 I liked it. I'm with you on the green.
I was never a big green fan. Remember that light blue robe that he had?

Speaker 44 I think he and Valentine, when they were tag team champions, had some type of blue concoction.

Speaker 44 But really, all of his stuff looked so nice and it was different designs. And even if it was the same color, it was a different style or whatever.
So except for.

Speaker 44 Like I said, the green and

Speaker 44 honestly, I didn't have a problem with

Speaker 44 the purple. I thought the purple was cool.
And he had the, you know, the he had different color tights, knee pads, or trunks, I should say, knee pads, boots for every occasion.

Speaker 44 Only the green. You see anything green? Not a fan of the green.

Speaker 29 So you weren't a fan of the light blue trunks. You're not talking about the robe from Starkade 83 because I never liked that robe, even though that's one of his most famous ones.

Speaker 44 I can't remember, but I like blue. I'm a fan of blue.
Baby blue, robin's egg blue, navy blue, blue velvet, cordon blue.

Speaker 29 Well, again, very cool figure. These are from Epic Toys.

Speaker 29 And on the topic of figures, you may want a Jim Cornette figure, and there's a place to get it right now, and that's Cornettes Collectibles at Jim Cornette.com.

Speaker 44 Well, that's exactly right. And folks, I don't even know if I can reveal the news right now because it may take till next week to get set up.

Speaker 44 But we have new product coming up on the website at jimcornet.com. You just go there and click on collectibles.
So you'll want to tune in next week when we make that announcement.

Speaker 44 And there's also always

Speaker 44 DVDs, books, t-shirts, action figures, and more. And big news coming up next month.
It's just a couple weeks now.

Speaker 44 I will be able to reveal and revelate.

Speaker 44 what the fine wrestling connoisseurs are going to be wanting to purchase out there this holiday season for christmas hanuka kwanza arbor day and everything everybody celebrates cornisaurs

Speaker 44 the cornisaur the cornisaurs of fine cornet collectibles

Speaker 29 cornisseurs that's right at jimcornet.com all of those things

Speaker 29 right there Well, you know, Jim, we're talking figures and we're talking commerce and we're talking storefronts.

Speaker 29 I actually don't know if we're talking storefronts, but everyone needs a a storefront, either real or virtually or imagined.

Speaker 29 If you have a business, a real business, not an imagined business, but you could use a virtual storefront.

Speaker 29 And of course, we have talked about how our online store is powered by our friends at Shopify. And we think we could tell a lot of other people something else, right, Jim?

Speaker 44 Something else, anything else. Just stop it.
Just stop it, man.

Speaker 44 I'll tell you what, right now, you're going to get more than a storefront.

Speaker 44 you're going to get the whole daggum store people when they walk through the door they're not just going to automatically be in the backyard you're going to get a store to go behind that storefront because that's how good shopify is shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world 10 of all e-commerce in the united states of america today

Speaker 44 is tied up with Shopify there, and you can be, you can make it 11%.

Speaker 44 And they will send out a team of contractors and carpenters to build your storefront and put your store behind it. And then they'll tell you how your shit ought to look when it goes on sale.

Speaker 44 And then they'll find your customers and they'll tell them all about it.

Speaker 44 They will send people up and down the streets of every major city, tapping people on the shoulder, going, hey, did you hear about herbs seasoning? He's got seasoning for Dalmatian flanks.

Speaker 44 And you can buy it from us right now. And they'll pull it out of their pockets.
That's how personal the service from Shopify is.

Speaker 44 Brian, you've that's well, as a matter of fact, you've seen the Shopify team wearing our show shirts. That's hard to say.
Shopify team wearing our show shirts.

Speaker 44 They walk down the streets, they tap people on the shoulder, they say, hey, you want to buy this shirt off of me?

Speaker 29 That's not hard to say.

Speaker 44 And sometimes people will give them $10 just to get them to go away. They don't even want the shirt.

Speaker 29 Again, let's go back to the very beginning where we all began, ladies and gentlemen. Virtual storefront.

Speaker 29 And you need a partner for your business, someone who can make sure your products are available everywhere on the World Wide Web, if we are still indeed calling it that. Of course, our online store.

Speaker 29 You can go to ArcadianVanguard.com. But the great thing is, you can just go to the shop app and search for Jim Cornette.
Boom, drive-through t-shirts. The shop app is where you want to be.

Speaker 44 for your and that's where that purple pay button is

Speaker 44 is it purple brian or would you say that that's a more of a lavender mauve?

Speaker 44 But nevertheless, even if it's more lilacy,

Speaker 29 lilacy, I would say it's lilacy.

Speaker 44 It's lilacy, it's it's a very lilacy of color purple that you can just punch that. Everybody knows what that is.
You punch that button, the elevator comes the whole

Speaker 44 nine yards. So anyway, Shopify, they'll help you with product images, product descriptions, generating discount codes, social media campaigns.

Speaker 44 They will tell people about your product, and then they will enable them to give them money where they will then turn over and give it to you, and you will have the money, and you'll send out the product, and boom, and there goes the kid in the bicycle.

Speaker 44 And they've got 24-7 customer support in case you want to call a lawyer to sue that kid that ran you down with that bicycle. But you can turn your dreams into reality.
Reality.

Speaker 29 Let's focus on, well, we can talk about Kaching. There's Kaching.
I can't say it, but we can focus on it. Let's focus on reality.
The thing that is scaring me so much at this moment, Jim.

Speaker 44 Yes.

Speaker 29 Reality is every businessman needs an online store that they know and trust a partner they can rely on. We trust Shopify.
The wrestling toy makers can shop.

Speaker 29 can shop Trepify, can trust Shopify, and so can the listeners. And we have a great promo code with a sale, which with a great deal, I should say.

Speaker 29 We should probably get all this before this all goes even worse.

Speaker 44 Why don't you just stop, man?

Speaker 44 Sign up right now for a $1 a month trial period because Shopify is reality.

Speaker 44 Shopify.com slash JCE.

Speaker 44 You're going to get a $1 a month trial period so they can hook you. They can get their claws into you and they can show you how indispensable they can be in your life, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 44 Shopify.com slash JCE,

Speaker 44 $1 a month trial period. Start selling today.

Speaker 29 Well, there it is, the official ka-ching of Shopify. We trust them you can too.
Check them out.

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Speaker 3 Kids spill.

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Speaker 29 Talk about something we promised the people a few weeks ago at WWE.

Speaker 44 With other talk, we'll do this talk before we do the other talk.

Speaker 29 Real quick, before we get going, I don't know if you've seen the images on social media. They're going around and a lot of people naturally are sending them over.

Speaker 29 Vince McMahon was on a special that I believe aired on Fox. I did not get to see it.
It was a TMZ Hulk Hogan special hosted by Harvey Levitt of TMZ,

Speaker 29 where he had a sit-down interview with Vince remotely. Yes.
In an office that had 14th and I behind him, his new corporate offices.

Speaker 29 Did you see any of the footage or at least the images? Did you see any of them?

Speaker 44 I have seen a couple clips and a couple of the pictures that people were.

Speaker 44 My God, now he looks like Sputnik Monroe.

Speaker 44 With the gray

Speaker 29 Pepe.

Speaker 44 But what has he done?

Speaker 44 And folks, what I'm trying to describe, and I don't even, I'm flabbergasted here, bum fuzzled. Before when we saw him, he was the silent movie villain and his hair was jet black.

Speaker 44 Well, now a lot of it is still jet black, but there's a gray streak in the front where he looked like Sputnik Monroe if Sputnik was five minutes into his own cremation.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 29 between that lilacy tint.

Speaker 44 With a lilacy tint on his lips.

Speaker 44 His lips look his well, no, no, that's not lilac around the eyes. That's that's some kind of shade of gonorrhea magenta

Speaker 44 but hold on we'll get to the eyes

Speaker 44 the the lips it looks like that he's got some kind of tube in him that's literally sucking all the oxygen out of his body because your lips turn blue and you're you know

Speaker 44 you're suffocating or whatever and

Speaker 44 he looks his cheeks and his chin now look like his dad Vince Sr.

Speaker 44 But the the shape of them,

Speaker 44 because he was a kind of a jowly fellow, never met him, unfortunately.

Speaker 44 But Vince Sr. aged

Speaker 44 naturally, I guess is the term to say, and also didn't make it to 80. So

Speaker 44 the rest of Vince's face, the eyes,

Speaker 44 it's like

Speaker 44 They're not

Speaker 44 the holes of his eyes are getting smaller to where all you can see is the pupils peeking out.

Speaker 44 And it looks like he's, is that rosacea or some skin condition around the eyes that caused them to look like two red piss holes in a snowbank?

Speaker 29 See, I don't know.

Speaker 29 Cause the other thing is as you're looking at visually what he looks like now, you hear his voice and it's, you know, I mean, I do a bad, goofy, awful impression of it, but it's not too far off.

Speaker 29 He sounds so gruff now. So between the look and

Speaker 29 i can't imagine any meeting isn't uncomfortable and that's before he says anything

Speaker 44 yeah it's like what he's looking at the eyes are so watery and constricted of some kind it's like something's pleading to get out

Speaker 29 i'm sure there's plenty pleading to get out

Speaker 29 what do you think about him being upset about not being invited to the hulk hogan tribute on raw Well, that was the two things.

Speaker 44 He felt that

Speaker 44 Hogan didn't deserve to be booed like he was in Los Angeles. That was terrible.
And he was offended at being left out of,

Speaker 44 you know, or he didn't say offended, but he felt he should have been there. I can't remember the exact verbiage of it.

Speaker 44 That he should have been there on stage with everybody else.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 here's the thing: it's TMZ.

Speaker 44 Now, for people who talk about fake news, I mean, does anybody even consider TMZ news or do they know that

Speaker 29 it's, you know, puff pieces on celebrities i would think so there was no shocking unplowed ground that was covered in this was there not really i mean again tmz it's typically stuff that celebrities want out there their publicists will say to the paparazzi be here at five there's stuff that's unflattering to celebrities and then there's just hey we're going to air 911 calls of celebrities you love which is disgusting in my eyes.

Speaker 29 But this wasn't really a news thing. This was like them doing a Hogan special.

Speaker 29 We've been talking about, I think on this show, we joked about when will Vince be back on WWF TV, WWE-TV.

Speaker 29 He's doing interviews. Again, Hogan dying is a big deal.
Obviously, it affected him

Speaker 29 tremendously. He crashed his car two hours before it happened.

Speaker 29 He was so affected by it.

Speaker 44 The universe had told him what was about to take place.

Speaker 29 But again, knowing that Vince McMahon has a company and a staff and a a lot of money to burn and they're looking for properties to purchase that Vince can run the creative of.

Speaker 29 Meanwhile, the Janelle Grant thing is still happening. Brock has just returned to WWF-TV.

Speaker 29 I keep doing it. WWE-TV.

Speaker 29 What do you think it says about the fact that Vince is

Speaker 29 reappearing publicly? Because this is the most we've really heard from him since that Netflix documentary, right?

Speaker 44 Oh, yeah. I mean,

Speaker 44 there are not that many Vince McMahon, you know, television clips and interviews or magazine profiles or whatever these days. And it's when he's at a ball game, people tweet pictures of him.

Speaker 44 It's a Vince sighting in the wild.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 I agree that,

Speaker 44 again, you know, Hogan was a big deal. And I'm sure they

Speaker 44 TMZ having Vince McMahon on

Speaker 44 and WWE having Vince McMahon on are two different things. Because I mean, as you said, TMZ,

Speaker 44 you know, plums the worst of the sewers of the celebrity world.

Speaker 29 Yeah, no one's going to say, how dare you have him on your Hogan special. They'll just say, oh, wow, he was interviewed.
Let's look at this freak.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 that's two different things. I still don't think there's a need on either side for Vince to be back on WWE television.
I think he's.

Speaker 44 He probably agreed to do it with TMZ because, oh, they're Hollywood pal, or I can't, I don't want to do the hoarse voice now. I'll destroy my voice.

Speaker 29 Because he wants to be out there. You know, that's the other thing.

Speaker 29 I think Vince would love to be, despite the way he looks and the way he sounds, I think he wants to be out there in the public because he thinks that's the way he could defend himself.

Speaker 29 That's why you read

Speaker 29 SmackDown right after everything happened, you know?

Speaker 44 Do you think that it's just that nobody else has asked him to be out there in the public so far?

Speaker 29 Probably no one else has asked him to be out in the public while agreeing to not ask questions about the Janelle Grant case or any other sexual harassment among former female talent in WWE.

Speaker 29 or anything else except yeah yeah i heard that he was at the hogan funeral and laurenitis was too what was that like

Speaker 29 awkward right

Speaker 44 jesus christ um oh family i guess

Speaker 44 well there was not uh

Speaker 44 well

Speaker 44 i'm trying to think of who was messing around with who and who was related to who, but was there, or the, is the Bella side of the family that has excommunicated Laurenitis over the thing, were they involved with the Hogan side of the family or what kind of in-laws were present in this thing?

Speaker 29 Oh, I don't, I can't speak to that. I believe Laurenitis has no

Speaker 29 current affiliation with the Bellas.

Speaker 44 He has no current affiliation with any family.

Speaker 29 Any family at all.

Speaker 44 As a result of, yeah.

Speaker 29 The Laurenitis family put out a statement and said, who?

Speaker 29 So, I mean, it was having a lot of problems right now.

Speaker 29 One last thing on Vince. If he had appeared on Raw, if WWE had invited him, they invited Nick Hogan and Jimmy Hart and Sergeant Slaughter and various people, Bruce front and center.

Speaker 29 If Vince was there, wouldn't it have

Speaker 44 killed it?

Speaker 29 It would have overpowered it. It would have become the story.

Speaker 44 That would, no, if he

Speaker 44 he's, I mean, Vince is brilliant in a self-promotional way, usually.

Speaker 44 And then he's saying, oh, yes, I was, you know, was hurt. I should have been there, whatever, since it's already passed.
And that, you know,

Speaker 44 but if he really

Speaker 44 in any way wanted to honor Hulk Hogan, if they'd have been dumb enough to ask him to stand there front and center, he would have turned it down because he would have known that that would be all that anybody would be looking at, concentrating on, talking about afterwards.

Speaker 44 It would have shit on the whole thing.

Speaker 44 And would Triple H have been? been able to do the promo if Vince was standing there next to him?

Speaker 44 Or would Vince, or would they have said, well, Vince, you do it. Can you imagine that?

Speaker 29 You know, and the talent who had any of the talent who had an issue with standing there for the Hogan thing, which was a responsibility of being, you know, one of the talent, I believe, they may have had a bigger issue if all of a sudden Vince was there for the first time on TV.

Speaker 29 Because again, it ushers in the idea they're making it regular for Vince to be around again.

Speaker 44 Yeah, so that would never have worked.

Speaker 44 Somebody would have put a stop to it, I would think, before it ever got off the ground if it had been suggested and he was there.

Speaker 29 Are you surprised? One would think. Are you surprised more people?

Speaker 29 I mean, seeing what happened with Linda McMahon's face and Vince's face, and I mean, they're not together and they live in different parts of the country, so I'm going to assume different doctors.

Speaker 29 That may not be a fair assumption. But are you surprised that

Speaker 29 more rich senior citizens don't sue plastic surgeons for the games they're playing on their face?

Speaker 29 I mean, what the, like, there's no way Vince doesn't look better now than before he had whatever done done.

Speaker 44 Well, and, or do do.

Speaker 44 Um,

Speaker 44 you know, as bad as he, as bad as it is, Linda looks worse. Linda looks like, yeah, you know, the, the,

Speaker 44 the character in arsenic and old lace, the brother that had his fucking face worked on by the plastic surgeon. So the criminal, they changed his appearance.
Linda looks like she's, it's fallen over.

Speaker 44 And I don't know.

Speaker 44 She was not a bad-looking woman.

Speaker 29 Yeah. Other than her hair color, I never saw her and it's like, oh, she looks so old facially.
I never thought that ever.

Speaker 44 But for fuck's sake, if she's 75 years old, then she ought to have some wrinkles. Why would anybody expect a 75-year-old person to walk around without wrinkles?

Speaker 44 And it's just, it's

Speaker 44 bizarre that you would want to. It's certainly, it's painful, would it not be? I would think so.

Speaker 44 have your face fucking operated on and all that other shit just for that please shoot some more rat poison into my forehead it makes me look young jesus christ the fucking bad special effects on lost in space looks more natural you call those special effects

Speaker 44 well i mean you know when they make the creature of the week

Speaker 44 You know, she looks like she's her face has come out of Erwin Allen's fucking costume closet.

Speaker 29 I just got this book of like, it's a gigantic book of a collection of like all the props and everything that Erwin Allen ever used on any of his productions.

Speaker 44 I want a

Speaker 44 Lost in Space Ray gun.

Speaker 29 Did you ever have a toy robot?

Speaker 29 From Lost in Space, the Lost in Space world.

Speaker 44 Well, I actually have a toy robot right now.

Speaker 44 As a matter of fact,

Speaker 44 I turn left and I look about 25 feet and it's sitting there.

Speaker 29 Well, before we leave Vince and get on to to the classic stuff, on the topic of toy robots, I think I've told you I'm obsessed with this Antonio Inoki keychain I got because it's

Speaker 29 gigantic. It wouldn't even work as a keychain.
I actually took the keychain part off of it. So now it's just a giant robed Antonio Anoki standing on a platform that does this.

Speaker 29 It's a keychain. People are supposed to walk around with this.
He's chanting Ichimi Sanda.

Speaker 29 It does that, and then it does this.

Speaker 29 I don't know what he says there, but it sounds awesome. And then I can never get it to do.
Nope, see, it went back.

Speaker 29 All right, I'm gonna give up.

Speaker 29 It has his music too, but I can't get it to play his theme music, which is so that'd be the best part. I know, it's the most rewarding theme music.
It's so uplifting and you know, nice.

Speaker 29 Let's see, one more time.

Speaker 44 Sounds like he's also got a problem with constipation.

Speaker 29 Anyone who speaks Japanese, please let me know what is he saying here.

Speaker 29 And it sounds like he has a lot of reverbs. I don't know if he's in the studio or where he is.

Speaker 29 All right, let's turn this off.

Speaker 29 All right, Jim.

Speaker 44 Well, yes.

Speaker 29 No time better than the present to talk about the present. You watch some highlights and specifically the main event stuff on SmackDown and Raw.
So, why don't we get caught up on it?

Speaker 29 It's been a while since we talked about WWE TV. What did you watch on SmackDown last week?

Speaker 44 Well,

Speaker 44 we had the extra show that we did to fill into things last week while our schedules were climped. And so, I wanted to get back and get caught up with the main goings on of the top fellers

Speaker 44 on the roster in the WWE. And

Speaker 44 SmackDown, this was August the 8th.

Speaker 44 And I mean, I'm not going to engage in any kind of breaking news or, you know, blow-by-blow description of what was said, but the concept of the thing, it just, again, astounds me.

Speaker 44 They're in Montreal. They're sold out 17,447 is what they said.

Speaker 44 And they had played the video of Cena and Cody and the Brock return and the whole nine yards.

Speaker 44 Yet it out comes Cena. And yet, again,

Speaker 44 Montreal, the Canadians are very forgiving people.

Speaker 44 And remember when Hogan was supposed to be a heel in Toronto? They, oh no, we love him.

Speaker 44 But they play his music. He comes out.
It's a huge pop. It's the Cena chance.
All is forgiven. He's the king of the world.

Speaker 44 Through the flowery intro,

Speaker 44 he gets a standing ovation.

Speaker 44 And he just is a couple of lines to put the fans over and gets the Cena chance. And he's got him in the palm of his hand.

Speaker 44 And remember, I was saying four months ago, three, but two months ago,

Speaker 44 when you listened to the things he was saying to people

Speaker 44 to the fans about the fans, whatever.

Speaker 44 Remember, he said, How do you ever apologize to any son of a bitch for that? What if anybody you knew would say this shit to you? How would you have? No, they'd never speak to you again.

Speaker 44 They don't give a fuck.

Speaker 44 It's all phony now, and they just want to see people come out and talk to them.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 he's having so much more fun being his old self. And

Speaker 44 obviously, they have realized, even though

Speaker 44 they might try to tell you a different story over on Unreal, we'll talk about that eventually.

Speaker 44 But it's obvious they've realized what the fuck, the fucking rock, he jumped in trying to turn somebody heel, wanted to be the final boss. He us up again the second year in a row with our booking.

Speaker 44 And this is the stupidest thing we've ever done, and nobody likes it. Let's just apologize and move on.

Speaker 44 And so now they got the fans chanting, thank you, Cena.

Speaker 44 And he's saying, I'm afraid I'm going to let you down. And no, you'll forget about me.

Speaker 44 I'm even afraid of Brock Lesnar. I'm so vulnerable now.

Speaker 44 But he won't back down.

Speaker 44 But then he turned around and did a fired up promo and told Brock and anybody else, if you want some, to come get some.

Speaker 44 And the place is going crazy. Before we talk about the next segment of this dramatic monologue, Brian.

Speaker 44 So

Speaker 44 can you even turn heel anymore since everybody knows it's just bullshit?

Speaker 29 I think you can. I think you have to really do it.
I think the Cena heel turn,

Speaker 29 you know, we'll talk about Unreal after we talk about the modern stuff you watched, but the Cena heel turn was awkward. It had its moments.

Speaker 29 But the longer he talked, the more he put down his opponents. People realize why they liked Cena in the first place.

Speaker 29 And

Speaker 29 it was near impossible.

Speaker 29 to sell WWE fans, wrestling fans, on the idea of come out and spend all this money on a ticket to see John Cena the last time he'll be in your town and think they're just going to boo him.

Speaker 29 And at the same time, he's in a feud with Cody Rhodes. You know, Cody Rhodes, up to this point, this is the most lukewarm he's been in WWE

Speaker 29 since the beginning of the year. WWE has not done Cody any favors this year, and I think that's that played a big part of it.
And again, it's John Cena's last year, and you're saying it.

Speaker 29 Some fans will boo because he's a heel, but you're grateful you get to see him i would assume if you're spending all that money for a ticket

Speaker 44 one would have thought they might have anticipated that but

Speaker 44 anyway

Speaker 44 then here comes logan paul because he did say anybody right so logan and logan paul gets booed

Speaker 44 and the fans get bleeped

Speaker 44 You know, when he comes out and everything on his entrance, and he is, he's got a great heel attitude and demeanor in the whole nine yards. But I just wonder if anybody wants to stab him.

Speaker 44 I just wonder if you could really just get any heat when

Speaker 44 there's footage of the people that the heels are insulting and crippling,

Speaker 44 hugging them and thanking them for doing it after him. But nevertheless,

Speaker 44 so he wants a match with John Cena

Speaker 44 in a great French city.

Speaker 44 Not here in Paris.

Speaker 44 We haven't even talked about, now they're going to Paris, the Gay Paris.

Speaker 29 But they did last year too, right?

Speaker 44 I thought that was Puerto Rico.

Speaker 29 I think they did, didn't they do a bunch of different places like Spain, Paris, Puerto Rico?

Speaker 44 Uzbekistan.

Speaker 29 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 44 Yeah, well, anyway.

Speaker 29 From Moscow to the Hague.

Speaker 44 From

Speaker 44 Milan to the Ministry of Man. Where is it to Minsk? Milan to Minsk.
I couldn't remember Milan all of a sudden.

Speaker 29 Milan. They went to Milan too, didn't they?

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 44 They mowed Milan. I don't know about you.
All right. So as soon as he challenges for the clash in Paris, Drew McIntyre's the ring and Glom Cena.

Speaker 44 And they get

Speaker 44 maybe 10 seconds of heat, and Cody's music hits, and he hits the ring,

Speaker 44 and the baby faces start making a comeback. And Cody.

Speaker 44 Cody went to throw Drew's head into the turnbuckle, grabbed him and spun, and he was propelling him that way, but Drew thought he was going to top rope him.

Speaker 44 And I've seen this happen before, and it's funny as fuck every time.

Speaker 44 The guy going to throw the head is headed toward the turnbuckle, and then he realizes that the guy that he's throwing has already left him and has just launched himself 90 degrees the other way.

Speaker 44 And he turns over, oh, where the shit? And he tried to go push him over like he meant to do it.

Speaker 44 Oh, God.

Speaker 44 But anyway, so then

Speaker 44 they challenged for a tag team match player.

Speaker 44 So Cena and Cody, remember, it took Dusty a year and a half to trust Ole.

Speaker 44 It took Cody

Speaker 44 nine days or whatever it was.

Speaker 44 But that was the

Speaker 44 setup for the tag team match. Have you ever seen anything like that on WWE television, Brian, where

Speaker 44 guys come out and talk for 20 minutes and then set up the tag team match main event?

Speaker 29 Every week. You know, these are really becoming boring tropes.
And,

Speaker 29 you know, when you really think about it, it's just the way WWE has been doing TV for a long time. What makes it better than it used to be is there's no heel authority figure.

Speaker 29 But all this shit's been happening forever. Opening promo, music, come out, talk.
Someone else's music, they come out and talk.

Speaker 29 Another person, there's either going to be a tag match or a three-way or a four-way. And the GM's going to come out and say, hey, you know what?

Speaker 29 I was standing in the back and obviously I didn't have a main event because we're on the air.

Speaker 29 So now I thought, you know, gosh darn it, I got a make events.

Speaker 44 Nothing was planned.

Speaker 44 Jesus.

Speaker 29 You mentioned this is the setup for the match and how this is something they, yeah, I mean, you were joking about the fact that this is something they always do.

Speaker 29 What do you also think of this as the follow-up to the Brock thing?

Speaker 44 Well, that's a point I was going to make here at a second,

Speaker 44 besides the fact that, and they're going to do the same thing on Raw.

Speaker 44 They're going to come out and talk it and they're going to set up a fucking, but

Speaker 44 Brock, the footage was shown

Speaker 44 back in my day, children, or in almost anybody's day that's ever lived on the planet. When you have a major superstar return and

Speaker 44 lay out, you know, goddamn another major superstar,

Speaker 44 he wasn't on TV, on any TV, on Raw or SmackDown. Was this so last minute? They just, hey, just come and we'll work the rest of it out later.

Speaker 44 Vince would have yelled at us back in the day if we'd shot an angle like that and turned into formats. Where's the fucking guy that did the angle? Oh, we don't have him for TV.
What the fuck?

Speaker 44 I don't know what the fuck's going on here anymore.

Speaker 44 But then Logan Paul and Drew wrestled the super team of Cena and Cody.

Speaker 44 And they rang the bell with 10 minutes on the air.

Speaker 44 And then they stopped so the fans could sing Cody, Cody Rhodes.

Speaker 44 And then they went two minutes to the break.

Speaker 29 Thanks, Europe. Non-stop on every show.
Thank you, Europe.

Speaker 44 Really appreciate it. And we're not even talking about the super group.
We're talking about the continent.

Speaker 29 They're about to go to France again. It's going to kick off a whole new season of Cody Rhodes to the tune of Boney M.

Speaker 44 When

Speaker 44 Jack Curtis came back from vacation in mid-South one time, we said, Where have you been, Jack? He said, Oh, I've been in Greece. I said, Well, we've been in a lot of hot water around here ourselves.

Speaker 44 So they came back with four minutes on the air and we're getting some heat on Cody. And finally, Cena hadn't been in yet.
They milked that till the end. He finally got the tag on Cena.

Speaker 44 You could see it coming a mile away, but they still wanted Cena.

Speaker 44 And it got a big reaction.

Speaker 44 So that, you know, Cody,

Speaker 44 Cody, the top baby face of the company. And now that they've succeeded in throwing a little water on his fire, they have him sell and set up the tag to the big guy.

Speaker 44 And Cody and Drew are on the floor, and Logan Paul nutshots Cena, and there's a DQ.

Speaker 44 And then,

Speaker 44 I swear, Logan, Paul, and Cena just fought through the entrance. They just fought off.

Speaker 44 And Cody and Drew were on the floor, and Drew hit Cody with the title belt, and Claymore kicked him into the front of the announcer desk and busted it out. And Cody was left laying in a heap.

Speaker 44 If only he'd have had a partner he could trust that wouldn't have fought off when he was still in trouble.

Speaker 44 But maybe they'll revisit that at some later date. But that, you know, there you go.

Speaker 29 I mean, and we talked about what's next for Cody. What do you think? I mean, at least temporarily for at least the Paris show.
What do you think about this as the next thing for Cody?

Speaker 44 Well, I mean, it's

Speaker 44 busy work. Kevin Sullivan might call it a maintenance show where you're not really taking any steps forward.
You're just kind of keeping everything going and giving them something.

Speaker 44 And, you know, and it's Paris, I'm sure they'll sell out for,

Speaker 44 they'll probably draw 747 million francs and at least 18 beans.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 that's the thing is,

Speaker 44 we're getting more and more where the WWE shows have this pattern. They have all the stars and the professional workers, the people you want to see, but they talk for 20 minutes.
They

Speaker 44 work for maybe eight or maybe they'll go 20.

Speaker 44 or they'll do the same amount of shit in that both periods of time.

Speaker 44 And then they'll DQ it. And in the middle is Gaga.

Speaker 44 And over on AEW, they'll take a rusty fishing hook and disembowel somebody at the top of the Seg One. And then it gets crazy from there.

Speaker 44 So I, you know,

Speaker 29 but they should use it. I've been saying this for a while.
They should use this, even though they have crazy content.

Speaker 29 It should be, you go to WWE, you pay this amount per average for per ticket, and this is the average amount of action you get in that entire entire night.

Speaker 29 AEW, on average, this is how much our tickets cost. And here's how much action, because there's no way it won't be like triple or quadruple the number, right?

Speaker 29 There's just no way if you actually did it that way. So, I mean, they should use that because,

Speaker 29 you know, eventually people get sick of that. Things aren't as hot as they were.
They're going into new markets or, you know, foreign markets, and that helps. But,

Speaker 29 you know, there's a reason why I kind of started getting sick of this show earlier this year. And you're not that far behind me.

Speaker 44 It's slowed down. Well, let's talk about Raw on August the 11th, Monday night.

Speaker 44 They're not in Montreal, they're in Quebec City, Montreal's little brother down the road.

Speaker 44 And they lead with CM Punk. And again, like with Cena on SmackDown, he's over.

Speaker 44 And the people are going crazy and they're chanting for him. CM Punk, blah, blah, blah.
Big entrance. He's a star.

Speaker 44 But now we're going to list the people talk to us for about 20 minutes. And even though they're the best talkers, and

Speaker 44 I got to be honest, Punk said he did the promo. He should be, he's pissed because he should be the

Speaker 44 world heavyweight champion and he's not.

Speaker 44 And he's got a problem with Seth Rollins, and he's even more determined to get the championship back. And when he beats Seth, he's not going to have to pretend to be injured.
But then L.A.

Speaker 44 Knights music plays.

Speaker 44 And L.A. comes to the ring and they have a handshake, but there's a little tension that builds because last week Punk came in during LA's match and he got disqualified.

Speaker 44 So basically, the whole thing is: you get in line, I get the title match, the rematch first, and then Punk, you get in line.

Speaker 44 And then they get prickly. But they got prickly.
They also got along.

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 this was not L.A. Knight's brilliant verbal performance.
This was not,

Speaker 44 it didn't suck. It is better than a lot of people.
But for L.A. Knight, did you think he was a little

Speaker 44 back and forth here?

Speaker 44 He's saying a lot of words to not get points out.

Speaker 29 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Okay.

Speaker 29 He should do that more. Just go to that more often.
When you get lost, just go to yeah.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Well, anyway,

Speaker 44 Heyman interrupted him. And because I think they were also they were going long because Punk started to reply to him and

Speaker 44 he'd only said a thing or two. And Heyman's voice interrupted, and Punk said, Hey, I wasn't done.
And he was kind of laughing, like, God damn, you had to cut us off already.

Speaker 29 His facial reactions all throughout this were great.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 44 I mean, you know,

Speaker 44 that's the thing is only there's only a few guys with the talent to weave

Speaker 44 what they're supposed to be talking about in with legitimate shit and sound like they're talking to you instead of at you and sound like they're being real instead of performing and react to things as you would

Speaker 44 instead of as you're told to. And

Speaker 44 that's the problem. There's only a few of them.

Speaker 44 Anyway, Paul comes out with the bronze and he spoke French.

Speaker 44 He even mentioned Frank Valois

Speaker 44 and then some other French words.

Speaker 44 And the fans were chanting at him in French. They didn't bleep it, but I don't know what the fuck it was.
So they probably didn't either.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 basically, Heyman cuts the promo and tells LA Knight not to trust Punk and has a breakdown about it. But then

Speaker 44 Punk dares him to come to the ring and Paul likes the idea. How about we have a tag team match? Where have we heard this before?

Speaker 44 And LA Knight starts to accept it, but Punk or starts to answer at least, but Punk accepts it. And then LA says, don't talk for me.

Speaker 44 And he accepts it.

Speaker 44 And then Bron Breaker jumps in and says, Wait, what are you going to do? You're 47 and you're 40. You're 100 years old combined.

Speaker 44 Steiner Math 2.0.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 so we got a tag team match for the main event thankfully there was no main event planned

Speaker 44 thankfully luckily

Speaker 29 that should be i mean that should be a thing one week hey i thought i had the main event what the

Speaker 29 you bumping me for this match

Speaker 44 but that i mean can't they even just do it once a week

Speaker 44 some people do watch both shows right

Speaker 29 you know we're talking about how tired this is we just talked about it during the smackdown review i even thought heyman was kind of heyman by the numbers here.

Speaker 29 Like there was nothing special about it.

Speaker 29 And

Speaker 29 yeah, they should mix up the formula. They're stuck in a formula for these shows right now.
And before it completely stops working, make some changes. It's boring some of us longtime fans.

Speaker 44 Long time. It seems so long.
Time has not flown, but then, so LA Knight, CM Punk, and the bronze, Breaker and Reed.

Speaker 44 And again, at least they gave them more time, but they did.

Speaker 44 I'm not even faulting them. It was a tag team match, and everything was done professionally,

Speaker 44 and everything made sense.

Speaker 44 But it's also, you've got a couple of the biggest stars in the business that you've got that you don't want getting hurt. So you're not wanting them to go out there and

Speaker 44 fucking create mayhem. So it's tag team.
It's a TV tag team match.

Speaker 44 And they got heat on two sets of heat on both the baby faces. And then

Speaker 44 finally,

Speaker 44 Punk makes a big comeback on Braun.

Speaker 44 LA Knight takes out Bronson Reed.

Speaker 44 Punk hits the big elbow off the top rope. And here's Seth Rollins.
Boom. DQ

Speaker 44 stops the go-to sleep.

Speaker 44 What did we just see? Friday night.

Speaker 44 Help me.

Speaker 44 And then they got heat on Punk and heat on L.A. Night, and Jey Uso's music played,

Speaker 44 and he came out with a chair and cleared the ring out.

Speaker 44 And here came Adam Pierce and said, Well, enough of this.

Speaker 44 I'm going to make this match for the world title in Paris. It's going to be Seth Rollins defending against Jey Uso

Speaker 44 and LA Knight

Speaker 44 and CM Punk

Speaker 44 in a four-way match, playa.

Speaker 44 And then Punk and L.A. Knight got in a fight.

Speaker 44 And Uso pulled them apart, but LA Knight elbowed him, but the Heels came back in while they were distracted and beat up all of them.

Speaker 44 And Braun speared L.A. Knight and Reed splashed Jay, and then Rollins curb stomped every one of them.

Speaker 44 So, and I feel like

Speaker 44 you have to take notes on the shows now to remember which one was wrong, which one was SmackDown because it's different people doing the same thing.

Speaker 44 What's Ed Koski got to do with this? I thought he was a big genius writer.

Speaker 44 The hell.

Speaker 29 Hey, Triple H. This is the Triple H booking regime, and he's getting away with a lot of these things that aren't too exciting.
But again, you look at the business.

Speaker 29 Hey, Ultimate Warrior may not be everyone's thing, but he's doing business. You know, you look at that.

Speaker 29 But there's a lot of the same thing over and over again. And just like with AEW, I'm sick of the multi-man matches, the three-ways and the four-ways.
They don't seem creative at all times.

Speaker 29 They just seem like a sloppy attempt to get everyone on the show as a placeholder in between things. And

Speaker 44 well, it again,

Speaker 44 there was a history and a business of having programs with people where you didn't have to add, you could make them tag matches with their friends or whatever.

Speaker 44 You didn't have to add multiple people because you could keep interest in the same matchup being rematched with different stipulations.

Speaker 44 And that doesn't mean that a stipulation doesn't start with no disqualification.

Speaker 44 Stipulations can be anything. And

Speaker 44 many of them don't affect the regular rules of wrestling, but

Speaker 44 there's no effort even being made to that practically.

Speaker 44 It's just, oh, let's these two, and then let's put two more and two more in and two more. And

Speaker 44 it's unreal, Brian.

Speaker 29 Well, that was raw, and

Speaker 29 it certainly was. And Jim, on that topic, let's talk a little bit about WWE Unreal.
We previously reviewed episode one of the five episode series.

Speaker 29 We'll talk about episode two, maybe episode four today. We're not going to review episode three,

Speaker 29 the episode that focuses on women. If you close your eyes and think, what would Jim Cornett say? You're probably right.

Speaker 44 Oh, I'll tell you exactly what I said. I started watching episode three, and

Speaker 44 there was a few minutes of Chelsea Green.

Speaker 44 And I'm not opposed to Chelsea Green. She's got a very animated spirit and an expressive face.
But after I started fast-forwarding to see when maybe we would get back, you know, more of the

Speaker 44 world title match or what's going on.

Speaker 29 You were looking for Rhea. Who are you kidding?

Speaker 44 No, Rhea was on the previous show. She doesn't have to be on every show, but something at the main event level.

Speaker 44 And I kept seeing girls, and I realized I was all the way through the end of it and hadn't seen any guys on the

Speaker 44 because I, some for whatever reason, I can get

Speaker 44 some indication of the freeze frames on the fast forward on these programs, but not on the goddamn

Speaker 44 raw. I don't know what's going on.
But then that's why we didn't watch three because my time was limited.

Speaker 44 But go on about two.

Speaker 29 Well, let's talk about WWE Unreal episode two.

Speaker 29 Again, this is all kind of the road to WrestleMania.

Speaker 29 Let's pick up from where we left off with episode one, episode two.

Speaker 44 Well, they were coming up at this point on the Royal Rumble, and they started the show

Speaker 44 with a nice piece on Dusty. and how Cody was saying, boy, you know, I wish he could have been at WrestleMania to see him finish his story.
And they

Speaker 44 showed triple h given dusty's rolex that he had sold

Speaker 44 solden sold previously to cody as a gift as a present

Speaker 44 of course making triple h the benevolent you know

Speaker 29 ruler of the kingdom how in the world did they find that if dusty pawn that watch

Speaker 44 Well, no, they didn't say he pawned it. They said he sold it.

Speaker 29 Oh, okay. Okay.
I thought it was a, I thought it was pawn, but maybe you're right. Maybe that means no well

Speaker 44 i would think if you got a rolex and you want to sell it dusty rhodes was probably you know realized that i can he had contacts that might have money for to buy a rolex right denny brown you're looking for a rolex

Speaker 44 i'll make you the world junior heavyweight champion and sell you my rolex kit But so these moments are nice. And again, this show is very well shot and edited and produced.

Speaker 44 It's very visually appealing and etc. And I said the things I liked about the first episode.
There were things I liked, things I didn't, but I didn't hate as bad as I thought I would.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 there were more things I liked in episode one than I've seen in any of the episodes since. You had Punk and you had Rhea and you had the people that they were focusing on.

Speaker 44 When Seth and Punk were talking about, well, we really don't like each other.

Speaker 44 There was, and Rhea, her real injury that she went through rehab for and the surgery. And

Speaker 44 that was kind of making it, okay, this shit is dangerous. And there is an element of there's heat between these people.

Speaker 44 I thought they were going to maybe try to lean into some of that and make it like a really cool,

Speaker 44 you know,

Speaker 44 a boost, a bonus to their programming. By behind the scenes, there really is

Speaker 44 strife and people jockeying for power and trying to cut each other's balls off, that type of thing, where it would be interesting instead of it's all fake, fake, fake, fake.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 one of the first, you know, times you see the people at Gorilla in this episode, number two, are no, I'm sorry, it was in one of the writers' meetings.

Speaker 44 Are we going to let Owens pal drive Cody eventually?

Speaker 44 Are we going to let

Speaker 44 these fucking guys and girls in suits and little fucking sissy sweaters sitting around a board table with laptops talking about whether they're going to let

Speaker 44 the top heel

Speaker 44 give the top baby face a fucking move?

Speaker 44 To me, kills wrestling.

Speaker 44 Again, the whole idea is these motherfuckers are supposed to not give a shit

Speaker 44 whether you want them to do shit or not. They're going to do it anyway.
That's what makes him star, the Steve Austin principle.

Speaker 44 Can you imagine if in the stone cold heyday, if they'd have had some

Speaker 44 Ed Kosky, again, as I've said, the blandest white human being I can possibly imagine,

Speaker 44 well, I don't want to let Steve Austin do this.

Speaker 29 What the fuck? Should we let Steve Austin give Vince a stunner? Should we let him do that? It would kill the whole Vince, Steve Austin thing.

Speaker 44 It would have killed the biggest program in history of programs, Austin McMahon.

Speaker 29 But again, this is all about showing you how brilliant the creative team is putting things together. Tons and tons of whiteboards and lots of things planned out, sometimes days in advance.

Speaker 44 And that's another sign Vince is gone.

Speaker 44 They've got things planned out days in advance. So they did a long recap of Cody and Owens on the Saturday night's main event match they had, where he pile drived him.

Speaker 44 And again, that packaged pile driver was one of the things of beauty I've ever seen in wrestling. It just perfect.
Owens gave it perfect. Cody took it perfect.
Looked great.

Speaker 44 And they've got the chaos with Triple H and Owens yelling and cussing at each other and shoving each other. And then they come back to Gorilla and

Speaker 44 Owens and Triple H are hugging each other. And oh, thank you, thank you.
You know, yeah, I just went with it.

Speaker 44 Have you noticed that whenever so far they've had a camera in the writing room and Heyman has been there, he just sits there and silently humors people, but you don't hear him speak?

Speaker 29 That's the secret to his success.

Speaker 29 The brilliant

Speaker 29 not speaking until everyone else has aired out their dumb ideas.

Speaker 44 Well, yeah, and also, I get the idea that he's not anxious to

Speaker 44 have any of it broadcast either.

Speaker 44 So they were at the Rumble

Speaker 44 again.

Speaker 44 Cody beats Owens in the ladder match, and then they talk to each other in the back. Owens is apologizing, like, did I set you down okay?

Speaker 44 I wrote, and also, I was just writing brief notes because I was laying in bed because it was late and I was trying to catch up with this shit. Somebody needs to mess up Ed Koski's hair.

Speaker 44 I just, I'm offended by the presence presence of him on the planet.

Speaker 44 They showed Triple H laying out when they put the mark in the rumble. What was his name?

Speaker 29 I show speed.

Speaker 44 I show speed.

Speaker 44 So that he was telling him everything is going to happen and everything. And then they showed it just as he said it was going to be.
At least Braun murdered him.

Speaker 29 What do you think of Triple H sitting there in gorilla with Stephanie by his side the whole time?

Speaker 44 It wasn't surprising.

Speaker 44 I mean, she she was there that night, too.

Speaker 29 Most people don't bring their wives to work to sit next to them while they're doing their work.

Speaker 44 Well, no, she was there to fucking welcome them all, wasn't she? Wasn't that the first night she was back in some type of welcoming segment?

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 it's easier for her to get on camera if she's sitting next to him, even though she has absolutely jackal of shit to do the rest of the show.

Speaker 29 Next time on Stephanie's Places, this is her place right here next to her men.

Speaker 44 Hey, there's no demand for seats in Gorilla. There's plenty of room.
Everybody doing actually work can sit elsewhere.

Speaker 44 But

Speaker 44 I'm not liking it as much as I even did at the start because they're focusing more on

Speaker 44 the fact that they know everything that's going to happen, every move that's going to be made.

Speaker 44 everything that's going to be said.

Speaker 44 And they're calling it. And when I see one of these fucking

Speaker 44 blobs saying, I'm going to tell, or I'm telling a fucking wrestling star what to do or what not to do or what they can't do, it just

Speaker 44 can you imagine if we'd have seen backstage footage in the movies from the 40s of

Speaker 44 like Don Knotts trying to tell John Wayne how to shoot a Western.

Speaker 44 It would just have killed everybody.

Speaker 29 Well, again, a lot of people thought a lot of the focus of this was about showing you the genius of Triple H, and there certainly is a campaign beyond this show

Speaker 29 to make Triple H, as you put it, the Dana White of WWE, the face of WWE.

Speaker 29 This show seems to be something that they're using to help solidify that.

Speaker 44 Well,

Speaker 44 it's solidifying for me, sort of like

Speaker 44 goddamn

Speaker 44 constipation.

Speaker 29 So, are those all your thoughts of episode two?

Speaker 44 That's pretty much, yeah, because did I go to sleep on the end of it or was it anything else happen? I can't remember.

Speaker 29 Why don't we go then to episode four? Because this is really the big one, I guess.

Speaker 44 Yo, it's the big one, Alice.

Speaker 29 This is the big one. The John Cena heel turn, the rock and gawarts, and their ideas.
What did you think of episode four of Unreal?

Speaker 44 Uh, the title was Heel Turn,

Speaker 44 And

Speaker 44 we've talked about some of this when the stories were going around of what had happened and what had really happened potentially and et cetera.

Speaker 44 And we said, how are they going to the WrestleMania documentary last year, right, was when they had to rewrite that.

Speaker 44 That was last year, right? When they had to take a while for that one to come out. Yep.

Speaker 44 Because they had to figure out a way to reshoot shit to work around everybody being pissed at the rock, and

Speaker 44 they may have had to do it again to some extent this year.

Speaker 44 They start the show with the big buildup of the rock, and Jesus Christ,

Speaker 44 he deserves it. He's one of the biggest stars in the history of the business.

Speaker 44 But since he has lost his mind and thinks he's a creative genius, apparently, when he's not, and has a team around him, including this little pimply-faced greasy gurwitz

Speaker 44 to fucking tell him how great he is and carry his piss around.

Speaker 44 He comes in every year,

Speaker 44 biggest show of the year, and fucks shit up

Speaker 44 and causes them to do shit that people don't want to see.

Speaker 44 And he's not really, he called himself in the start of this program, the greatest heel wrestling has ever seen.

Speaker 44 It,

Speaker 44 this is supposed to be a behind-the-scenes real

Speaker 44 thing. So it's not like he's working like he's a heel and saying, I'm the greatest ever.
He really believes, or he's trying to tell people that it was.

Speaker 44 It was a stink bomb. He talked like it worked.

Speaker 44 He's becoming this version of it was the most gratifying thing I've ever done.

Speaker 44 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 44 Then Nick Kahn put him over.

Speaker 44 Or we saw after WrestleMania 2024, there was huge fan demand to see The Rock again.

Speaker 44 And they started trying to tell the,

Speaker 44 as we pointed it out months ago, the story, which is what it is. Well, Elimination Chamber in Toronto, it was a tough Canadian economy.
How do we over-deliver?

Speaker 44 The fucking show was almost sold out before anybody knew The Rock was around, as we went back and looked. Remember?

Speaker 29 yeah i mean i'm sure they got a boost for the show but well yes it doesn't justify everything else

Speaker 44 the it they're trying to nick con is trying to tell a story oh and also we would get travis scott how'd that work for you right

Speaker 44 but so

Speaker 44 they're trying to tell a story elimination chamber was soft

Speaker 44 and that they had to do something to spice it up with the rock that wasn't true it was selling just like all the other shows were selling, maybe better, whatever.

Speaker 44 And I don't know if the Canadian economy was tough, but it didn't seem to be hampering the people that were there.

Speaker 44 They over-delivered by fucking up the booking when Rock made Cody the offer for his soul and that whole rotten pitch.

Speaker 29 That's the thing. Listening to the Rock and Gewerts admit the stuff, this is the stuff they're admitting to on camera.
Yeah. They're creative and their ideas were.

Speaker 29 You know, there's a difference between Bob Dylan and Benny King.

Speaker 29 Benny King's a fantastic singer. He needed Doc Thomas or someone else to write the words and he would knock it out of the park.
Bob Dylan was a singer-songwriter, wrote his own words.

Speaker 29 Sometimes the wrong person thinks he's.

Speaker 44 He actually wrote better than he sang, too.

Speaker 29 But I think the problem is The Rock

Speaker 29 believes he's a creative force.

Speaker 29 And the reality is The Rock is an incredibly talented wrestling actor.

Speaker 29 And

Speaker 29 he needs someone else to do the creative, not him and Brian Gewartz. When you say I was the head writer from 2002 to 2015,

Speaker 44 those were legendary years.

Speaker 29 The people who discovered wrestling during those years probably really loved some of those years.

Speaker 29 For those of us who have been watching wrestling for a while, The shows were juvenile and awful for a long time. And he's admitting he was the head head writer during that period of time.

Speaker 29 The period of time that led people to saying, I wish there was another billionaire who would just start a wrestling company. It was all of that period of time that led to people hating WWE.

Speaker 29 So this is the creative force behind this rock stuff, which

Speaker 29 look at where we are today and the scene of Babyface Turn and the lack of the rock other than commercials for his movies on these programs. And that's not even getting into the disaster.

Speaker 29 That's Travis Scott. And why WWE, other than the fact that Ari Emmanuel may be representing him, why would WWE bend over backwards for Travis Scott? He meant nothing to the business.

Speaker 29 This wasn't Cindy Lauper appearing with Hulk Hogan and their picture in every paper, and people kept talking about it.

Speaker 29 They may have gotten a picture of Travis Scott and the rock and John Cena in the paper. No one focused on Travis Scott.
And then he hurt, or then he smacked Cody in the ear.

Speaker 44 So if somebody saw a picture of Travis Scott, would they know what the who the fuck it was?

Speaker 44 Besides that, to begin with, and and and yeah they they enabled a celebrity come in and give their top guy hearing damage and then get away with and emerge unscathed

Speaker 44 but yeah zakoski called this seismic when rock asked for cody's soul rock he wanted cody to that's how bad it was from what we can put together they really wanted rock and who's he what's he

Speaker 44 wanted Cody to turn heel and be subservient to the final boss. And when Cody was like, nah, no,

Speaker 44 then

Speaker 44 Cena said, well, I'll do it.

Speaker 44 I thought it's because he wanted to do it. Maybe now he was just like, try to be a team player, but

Speaker 29 yeah, and you know, people have been wanting a Cody. Some people, especially in AEW, had wanted a Cody Rhodes turn for a while.
Maybe right now, some people are even starting to think about it.

Speaker 29 If the reason it finally happened was The Rock. And then he had the same schedule and he never appeared on any show ever again, that wouldn't have helped Cody.
Yeah, it wouldn't have helped him. No.

Speaker 44 Well, anyway, everybody tried to explain what a heel was and how to be one. Michael Hayes, I think, did the best job of explaining it somewhat and had some free bird highlights.

Speaker 44 But the new day, they talked about,

Speaker 44 remember that was a great deal where they turned on Big E and

Speaker 44 then they ended up wearing the same kind of shit and doing the same kind of thing in the same kind of spot. I thought they were going to be like a top tag team.

Speaker 29 And if you listen to Xavier Woods, there, he's saying, you know, we are without a doubt the greatest tag team of ever of all time. And we did this and that.

Speaker 29 And they show the clips, and it's like, man, this is exactly the kind of shit I started hating on this show. Just childish nonsense for an audience of Vince.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 29 And then they did that heel turn with Big E, and it was brilliant. And they showed the clips again.
Big E, those facial reactions while that was going down were amazing.

Speaker 29 And then the next time we saw him, he was just hosting the pre-show

Speaker 29 and they were were a heel tag confuding with the LWO or whatever. So, yeah, completely dropped that ball to the point where no one cares about the new day again.

Speaker 44 Again.

Speaker 44 And Triple H said the hardest thing to do in this day and age is to keep a secret.

Speaker 44 Because everybody agrees that the audience wants to be surprised. Nobody knows what's going to happen.
That's the, you know, but

Speaker 44 they're not keeping any secrets here.

Speaker 44 They acted like there was a big call for John Cena to turn heel.

Speaker 44 For years, there was maybe long ago, but not recently. But then, Bruce, of course.

Speaker 44 Bruce is like,

Speaker 44 how in the world are we going to feature John Cena? Do it the easy way with the babyface matches or

Speaker 44 Nick Kahn again. Well, we had to spruce up Toronto and called The Rock.
And

Speaker 44 Greasy Gerwitz thought that Cody versus Cena babyface match felt dry.

Speaker 44 So this was a quote, myself and Rock got together and pitched a few things.

Speaker 29 Well, you see, that's the thing, too. He's saying like, we thought it was dry.
He's not saying that as a member of the writing team that are in these Paul Levesque-led meetings.

Speaker 29 He's saying that as The Rock's outside creative person, that according to what they said here and what we've already known, they just drop in

Speaker 29 when the rock's ready to come back. That's a monkey wrench is what that is.

Speaker 44 And then did you hear the pit? They wanted Cody to turn rock down, then at Elimination Chamber and then Rock make a match and have Owens beat Cody for the title.

Speaker 44 And again,

Speaker 44 I'm not even disrespecting Kevin Owens, but no, they really wanted to fuck with Cody from the start of this thing.

Speaker 29 And by the way, that would have been a disaster because his neck went out right around that period of time yeah there you go

Speaker 44 and then

Speaker 44 so now who did it actually who actually said

Speaker 44 you know uh

Speaker 44 triple h doesn't remember bruce says that it was him triple h and cosky were challenged with an idea Cosky said rock and his team made the original offer what we could do with the chamber

Speaker 44 Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 29 And nobody remembers. The only thing they could agree on, it happened a couple months ago, but no one could remember.

Speaker 44 And so Cosky said,

Speaker 44 Well, what if Cody accepts and drops Cena and sells out to the Rock?

Speaker 44 He admitted pitching that as a thing. And this fucking guy,

Speaker 44 what is the matter with you?

Speaker 44 And then Bruce says, Well, what if we turn Cena?

Speaker 44 And Triple H loves it, and Cosky blesses it. So all these people

Speaker 44 are either had these ideas for real and are stupid

Speaker 44 or are having to take the heat for having these ideas because The Rock and Greasy Gerwitz are stupid.

Speaker 44 But to protect The Rock from people knowing that he's a glory hound and fucked up all the booking,

Speaker 44 they all act like it was their idea and it was good.

Speaker 29 Again,

Speaker 29 The Rock began this by saying his final boss character, which had one match, I think, and a handful, to maybe two handful of appearances over two years, was the greatest heel in wrestling history and the most rewarding thing he's ever done in wrestling.

Speaker 44 And that's why he didn't bother to fucking continue any of it. It was that they shot it all down and nobody liked it.

Speaker 29 What I thought was interesting about this, and again, even though this is reality or a docuseries, whatever you want to say,

Speaker 29 there are certainly things that are set up for the camera and things like

Speaker 29 that for the camera. With that said, watching Triple H, the diplomat have to deal with the rock was fascinating

Speaker 29 because those are two guys doing everything they can to be respectful to each other, knowing what reality is.

Speaker 44 And of course, they said they kept the knowledge of the turn on Cody

Speaker 44 into the circle of trust. Triple H, Rock, John Cena, Nick Con, and Travis Scott.

Speaker 44 Again, who the fuck is this fucking guy that he should be consulted on any of this and that they were including him in his and he's lucky to even be there? And what the fuck?

Speaker 29 And by the way, considering the way all this went down and the fact that wrestlers are now openly ripping on him because they're allowed to,

Speaker 29 should they drop his music as the raw theme song?

Speaker 44 I didn't know that's what that was.

Speaker 29 That's what they announced when he went to Netflix. It was Travis Scott's music.

Speaker 44 I've tuned the music out because it's all unlistenable, all the shit that they use. I've just tuned it all out.
But

Speaker 44 anyway, then John Cena's reactions, well, if you believe it, I'm in. And Triple H is like, no, really.
And Cena, I like it.

Speaker 29 I like it so much that I'm going to turn back babyface in one night on a whim for no reason right before the pay-per-view.

Speaker 44 Cody's quote was, this is the most confused the fans have ever been, you think?

Speaker 44 And so anyway, Hayes said he didn't know till the day of the show, but they showed him going over the elimination chamber with the talent.

Speaker 44 I don't like, again, that part of it where even if it's Michael Hayes,

Speaker 44 they're going over move for move, what's going to happen ahead of time, all sitting there chiming in ideas like you would do when you're talking about a match. But that don't need to be on camera.

Speaker 44 And I wrote Triple H's and Rock's talk seem strained. Yeah.

Speaker 44 Did you like the way the Triple H kind of manipulated Rock into at least letting Cena do all the physical stuff to Cody

Speaker 44 and let Rock giving the signals? Because

Speaker 44 that at least kept that part of it on Cena, who they knew they could count on if The Rock decided to fucking fly off to Hollywood again.

Speaker 29 I thought it was great just the way he agreed with The Rock while also giving himself an out because he knew he had to, again, be a diplomat where he hears what The Rock said. He goes, Oh, I like it.

Speaker 29 It's good. Why don't we get everyone together, see if we can get everyone on the same page?

Speaker 29 Yeah. That way, someone could say, That's not my page.

Speaker 44 We need to turn the page.

Speaker 44 But anyway, and then they recap the chamber match, which was a long recap, but better than seeing some of this other stuff.

Speaker 44 And they had even k-faved the truck, but they showed Triple H calling the entire turn

Speaker 44 for the truck,

Speaker 44 which again,

Speaker 44 step by step, it just takes some of the magic out of what you see

Speaker 44 and then obviously everybody congratulated themselves afterwards and patted each other on the penis

Speaker 44 but now we know it didn't work it didn't make any sense travis got bailed rock didn't come back cena apologized and cody never got to

Speaker 29 potato that fuck went back Cody came out again looking worse than everyone else not not as a person but the way he was booked yes

Speaker 29 What's Rock going to do this year for WrestleMania? When he shows up around Royal Rumble this year, what's my God? It's going to happen again. You know what's going to happen?

Speaker 44 No, I'm telling you, if he does it three years in a row, somebody in the office is going to take a stick to him.

Speaker 29 That movie comes out in a few months. The Rock is going to reappear on this show.
And again, in his mind, admittedly, he thinks this is the best heel character of all time, and it's his.

Speaker 44 There's no way he's not going to immediately fuck everything up again if he shows up again and fucks up their booking leading into wrestlemania a third straight year i guarantee instead of going postal people will start saying that he went stamford on a guy

Speaker 44 some one of those fucking because look at them the the the the pussy whipped guys in the suits and the sweaters sitting there all meek and everything on their laptops they're the ones that fucking can't take the pressure and they're one of these days, they're going to fucking go off.

Speaker 44 Goddamn, set the whole building on fire or whatever.

Speaker 44 Too much pressure.

Speaker 29 Well, that was WWE Unreal Episode 4.

Speaker 44 Awful tight end here.

Speaker 29 Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.

Speaker 29 All right. Well, those are the words of

Speaker 29 Anoki. Antonio Anoki.

Speaker 29 Jesus Christ, what are you doing over there?

Speaker 44 I'm in your head.

Speaker 29 Well, you sure are. I can't talk at all today.

Speaker 29 Any closing thoughts on Unreal? We'll do episode five next time. I think that's the last episode.

Speaker 44 Next time here on the experience or the drive-thru or whatever this is.

Speaker 44 But yeah,

Speaker 44 I mean, it's programming to

Speaker 44 glorify their new creative leader and get paid hundreds of millions of dollars from Netflix. I'm not a fan.

Speaker 44 I wouldn't have a camera sitting in my production or my finish meeting if I was one of the talent and I was me.

Speaker 29 All right. Well, that was WWE Unreal.
And who shows? This is my show. Hold on.
With that, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 29 We are done, but why don't we get a song?

Speaker 44 Why don't you ever just run me over with that bicycle at the end of the show?

Speaker 29 Oh, you know, I already closed the bicycle. Hold on, give me some of this.

Speaker 29 I don't want any of that.

Speaker 29 All right. Well, that's not nice.
Hold on, let's get a song or a song.

Speaker 44 We got a song?

Speaker 29 We got a song, and of course, you could send in your submissions.

Speaker 44 We got a song and we got to sing it.

Speaker 29 Corny DriveThru at gmail.com. We're looking for original songs or parody songs, something that actually talks about what we do here on the show.

Speaker 29 Not, I I wrote a song, so I want to send it in, and it has nothing to do with anything.

Speaker 44 I wrote a song that the whole world hates.

Speaker 44 I wrote a song while I masturbate.

Speaker 29 This one was sent to Corney DriveThru at gmail.com from Jerry,

Speaker 29 aka J Diddy.

Speaker 29 Let's go to this. The name of the song is No More Monet.

Speaker 29 Here she comes now.

Speaker 29 That is AI.

Speaker 44 I was about to say either that or we got the greatest undiscovered fucking musicians ever in history of the Jerry.

Speaker 29 You're being disqualified. That is AI.
So we cannot.

Speaker 44 There's no way. Now, if he wants to send us video of him playing all that shit from scratch, go ahead.

Speaker 29 Well, let's go to another song, Jerry. Sorry.
That's automatic disqualification. We follow the rules here.
Ding, ding, ding. This one was sent to corneydrivethroughgmail.com from Aaron D.

Speaker 29 Donato, aka Captain Corum. It's been a while since

Speaker 29 Captain Scrotum sent in a song. Let's go to this.
This is entitled,

Speaker 29 well, I won't even say it. Let's just play this song right now.

Speaker 29 Now a surgeon who takes out a wrestler's brain is the kind of thing Uncle Dave studies. And a surgeon who puts back a wrestler's brain is Uncle Dave's kind of story.

Speaker 29 But a wrestler on Jim's TV set, wearing sweatpants, paid by Tony's dad. He's the one who makes Jim Cornette mad.
He's Jim's shapoopy, shapoopy, shapoopy, shapoopy, the one who lost his brain.

Speaker 29 Shapoopy, shapoopy, shapoopy. Jim learned from Uncle Dave.

Speaker 29 Take a brain out, and then what happens? Put a brain in, was it someone else's? Cause you had having empty knock-in. Dave said he's this stuff, so you believe him.

Speaker 29 Take a brain out, and then what happens? Put a brain in, was it someone else's? The ship would be having empty knock-in. Dave studies this stuff, soldier believes him.

Speaker 29 Now, Uncle Dave's a real journalist, he has a journalism degree.

Speaker 29 But on the day they talk about retractions, where was he?

Speaker 29 Take a brain out and then what happens? Put a brain in, was it someone else's? Does Shippo be have an empty knocking? Dave studies this stuff, so Jim believes him.

Speaker 29 Shupper bee, shop a bee, shapo-bee, the one who lost his brain.

Speaker 29 Shipper bee, shop,

Speaker 29 shupper-bee. Jim learned from Uncle Dave.
Shupper bee, shop a bee,

Speaker 29 the one who lost his brain. Shuppa bee, shopie, shapoo bee, Jim learned from

Speaker 29 D. Donato, Captain Quorum, another winner here.

Speaker 29 The line that got me was, take one out, see what happens, put one in. Is it someone else's?

Speaker 29 All right, well, thank you again. Courtney drivethrough gmail.com.
Great job from Aaron. Please send in more again in the future.
Send in your submissions. Once again, Courtney DriveThru at gmail.com.

Speaker 44 I don't have it in my thumbs today.

Speaker 29 Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back in a few days on the experience. And of course, next week here on the drive-thru, go through the archive, patreon.com slash cornet, $5 a month.

Speaker 29 Get you access to the archive going back to 2013.

Speaker 29 All right.

Speaker 29 I just want this music to play once.

Speaker 29 So annoying.

Speaker 29 Of course, the official Jim Cornette YouTube channel. Go there and check out all the videos, full episodes, clips of the episodes, omnibus collections, the official Jim Cornette.

Speaker 29 All that type of thing all that type of thing just go to youtube what about cornettes collectibles well just go to youtube and search for jim cornet it'll come right up what about cornettes collectibles at jimcornet.com

Speaker 29 well we're selling them look at them all i just wanted to play the music once but once again cornettes collectibles jimcornet.com jim the drive-through is brought to you by the loves of steven pinu anything you want to say about steven pinu Yes, there is.

Speaker 44 If you don't like the drive-through, blame him because he's the one that brings it to you. And he gets up early in the morning, too.

Speaker 44 Every morning, he'll get in his car and he'll drive around before dawn, putting the drive-through in everybody's mailbox, and nobody appreciates it. Stephen P.
New, new lawoffice.com, 87750 Steve.

Speaker 29 That's right. Get even with Stephen, newlawoffice.com.
And with that, we are out of here. Let's give it one more chance.

Speaker 29 Come on.

Speaker 29 I'm going to break this.

Speaker 44 Just don't, don't hit it.

Speaker 44 You're abusing the thing. We'll be back in a few days on the extra.

Speaker 29 We'll be beating up Antonio Noki. Take a ball.
Whatever the hell he's saying there. Next week here on the drive-thru for Jim Cornette.
I'm the great Ryan last.

Speaker 29 Talio.