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KB Answers Wrestling Questions

Kofi as a heel: terrible idea, horrible idea, or God awful idea?

I was watching some old SmackDown stuff from 2011, specifically the street fight between Orton and Cody in November when Cody was doing the masked gimmick. I know Ryder is #1, but how far up the list of people WWE dropped the ball on would Cody be?
 
So, is it a better solution to try to reestablish kayfabe and keep the gimmick leashes strong or to let the characters loosen up and have them behave in more natural ways, thus allowing actions that would typically go against the nature of a traditional face / heel?

The problem I see with the traditional way in a world with weak kayfabe is that we have heels getting cheered for their actions and gimmicks (or, although in rarer cases like Cena vice versa) and in consequence bring turned. That, however, also turns their behaviour around, forces them into certain directions and may take away the features that let the wrestlers get over in the first place, leaving them with broken gimmicks that don't appeal to anyone that much.
I don't really see mixed reactions as that much of a problem. You could easily cash in on the controversy and have feuds between characters that complement each other, not necessarily in a face-heel way, like seen in a lot of classic rivalries (Shawn-Hart, Kane-Taker, Rock-Austin, Punk-Cena to new some big ones).
Of course that would also require different, more situational and possibly fragile booking and make established, good-bad booking patterns and feud concepts useless for the most part. However, in the age of Reality TV and widespread information availability with wrestlers' real characters being more and more known I don't see much of a chance of kayfabe becoming stronger again anyway.
 
Out of every promotion you have seen, which, in your opinion has the best looking title belt?

Top 5 wwe wrestlers in 2003?

Best/worst In your house PPVs?
 
You can't put the kayfabe genie back inside the bottle but it wouldn't hurt to try a little bit.

What would help more than anything else would be to have heels act like heels. By that i mean be irrational, liars, cheaters, scum etc. I remember a line from Lance Storm which was something like "heels that have the match of the night aren't going to be heels for that long." Look at Punk for an example: he constantly had great matches, so why would fans boo him? At the end of the day, a lot of fans appreciate good wrestling.

Look back at Hogan in the 90s: his matches were bare bones at best, he lied, he cheated, he blew himself up to beyond ridiculous in his own mind and he was LOATHED.

Another thing that would help is giving us a reason to care about these people. That would involve having actual CHARACTERS instead of just people you throw out there with signs around their necks listing off their characteristics. Look at someone like Mark Henry. He didn't say he was a monster. he WAS a monster, and the character was completely fresh all of a sudden.

Kayfabe can work if the WWE would get out of its way and let it work. Also, lie to us. Seriously, it's almost that simple: stop being so freaking realistic with everything and be over the top and lie some times.
 
How big of a brick will Gelgarin shit if Goldberg goes over Gagne in this tournament?

Will we ever see Scott Steiner back in the WWE?
 
klunderbunker said:
What would help more than anything else would be to have heels act like heels. By that i mean be irrational, liars, cheaters, scum etc. I remember a line from Lance Storm which was something like "heels that have the match of the night aren't going to be heels for that long." Look at Punk for an example: he constantly had great matches, so why would fans boo him? At the end of the day, a lot of fans appreciate good wrestling.
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Isn't that already a sign of a post-kayfabe era? In the "Golden Era" of wrestling and kayfabe match quality (by today's standards) wasn't really a factor in being liked or not, at least in the WWF.
Wrestlers were judged (cheered) by being good in their characters, what they represented, not good in the ring and of course presence played a larger role. Hogan in his 80's self would have problems today and could most probably not be the mega face he was. That's not to say that Hogan was bad in the ring. He did what he was supposed to do and what worked in that era. It's just that the standards have changed, in multiple ways.

Drawing by being larger than life doesn't work anymore like it did back then, the superhero mystique of the past is gone. Cena is molded to represent it, but the result is a split crowd (not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but in a strict good-evil environment it is pretty much).

Heat for having bad matches would be more like "X-Pac heat". Heat for cheating would be legitimate of course, but can just as well be achieved in good matches. 80's Flair may be a good comparison.

Look back at Hogan in the 90s: his matches were bare bones at best, he lied, he cheated, he blew himself up to beyond ridiculous in his own mind and he was LOATHED.
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I'd say his matches were always bare bones at best, however that was totally acceptable in 80's mainstream, so no complaints.
But wasn't heat for that in the 90's a consequence of his style being outdated rather than the other way around? Bret and Shawn among others in WCW like Pillman or Liger brought a new norm of how matches were supposed to look and Hogan couldn't catch up. He used this heat along with his great presence and name value to create a mega heel. His matches, then, were indeed bad on a good and horrible on an average day, but I wouldn't say that this helped much to improve WCW's quality. Bret in 97 and later Triple H for example were great heels while having good matches.

I think we agree that a dirty win is as good as a clean one and that a heel should usually cheat, but in my opinion the bad guy doesn't have to take away from the quality of the match to be more effective.

Another thing that would help is giving us a reason to care about these people. That would involve having actual CHARACTERS instead of just people you throw out there with signs around their necks listing off their characteristics. Look at someone like Mark Henry. He didn't say he was a monster. he WAS a monster, and the character was completely fresh all of a sudden.
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Totally agree here.

Also, lie to us. Seriously, it's almost that simple: stop being so freaking realistic with everything and be over the top and lie some times.
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Could you give an example for such a lie? Something like Goldberg's record, Kane's cognation or rather Fandango's dancing background?

In my mind, getting away with a blatant lie is much harder than it was and could very well backfire if too exaggerated, but background claims are pretty much accepted as long as the concept of gimmicks are.
 
Vega said:
Isn't that already a sign of a post-kayfabe era? In the "Golden Era" of wrestling and kayfabe match quality (by today's standards) wasn't really a factor in being liked or not, at least in the WWF.
Wrestlers were judged (cheered) by being good in their characters, what they represented, not good in the ring and of course presence played a larger role. Hogan in his 80's self would have problems today and could most probably not be the mega face he was. That's not to say that Hogan was bad in the ring. He did what he was supposed to do and what worked in that era. It's just that the standards have changed, in multiple ways.

Drawing by being larger than life doesn't work anymore like it did back then, the superhero mystique of the past is gone. Cena is molded to represent it, but the result is a split crowd (not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but in a strict good-evil environment it is pretty much).

Heat for having bad matches would be more like "X-Pac heat". Heat for cheating would be legitimate of course, but can just as well be achieved in good matches. 80's Flair may be a good comparison.
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Well there's also the fact that Hogan and AUstin and Rock already did this. Cena isn't quite as good as them and having to live in the world they created makes him seem inferior.

Also it helped Hogan that he was only on TV once in a blue moon, as opposed to today with an average of an hour of TV a week. It's hard to wrestle a style that keeps the fans happy.

I'd say his matches were always bare bones at best, however that was totally acceptable in 80's mainstream, so no complaints.
But wasn't heat for that in the 90's a consequence of his style being outdated rather than the other way around? Bret and Shawn among others in WCW like Pillman or Liger brought a new norm of how matches were supposed to look and Hogan couldn't catch up. He used this heat along with his great presence and name value to create a mega heel. His matches, then, were indeed bad on a good and horrible on an average day, but I wouldn't say that this helped much to improve WCW's quality. Bret in 97 and later Triple H for example were great heels while having good matches.

I think we agree that a dirty win is as good as a clean one and that a heel should usually cheat, but in my opinion the bad guy doesn't have to take away from the quality of the match to be more effective.
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Yeah they were, but again they had the characters to back them up, just like Hogan. Hogan in 97 was also more successful than Bret and arguably HHH in 2000.

Could you give an example for such a lie? Something like Goldberg's record, Kane's cognation or rather Fandango's dancing background?

In my mind, getting away with a blatant lie is much harder than it was and could very well backfire if too exaggerated, but background claims are pretty much accepted as long as the concept of gimmicks are.
Click to expand...

Rick Martel had to miss the show because he was modeling in Paris.

Jim Neidhart played in the NFL.

The Undertaker burned down the funeral parlor where Paul Bearer worked, killing his parents and burning his brother's face in the process.

Make stuff up and then insist that it's real. When it's called out, ignore it. We know that Harrison Ford isn't an archaeology professor who goes on missions to steal priceless historical artifacts or an intergalactic smuggler with a 7'4 furball for a best friend. They're incredibly entertaining though and the fans accept it. Instead of trying to make characters as realistic as possible, make them unrealistic.

But no, that wouldn't work. Those characters like Rock and Austin and Hogan who were all completely over the top never worked at all.
 
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