Little things that make a BIG difference

[Radical]

There are some little things that are done in WWE that may not seem like a big deal but to me, and maybe others, they make a BIG difference in the overall presentation of the show.

What really bugs me is wrestlers not selling the impact of the finisher done to them after they get pinned!

There's some bad selling in general but it really breaks the illusion for me when, for example, someone gets KO punched, gets pinned and then because the show calls for someone else to run in or something else to happen in the ring that the guy who just got apparently KNOCKED OUT is able to roll himself quickly out of the ring just one second after he was KNOCKED OUT!

Man, that really bugs me. It's like, okay, do WHY did that guy get pinned since he clearly wasn't knocked out because he was conscious 1 second after.

And it's just a attention to detail thing. I don't mind it so much if the finisher is a move where the guy gets hit in the body and then gets pinned and rolls away (as long as it's relatively SLOW rolling) because I can believe that a move like a spear or a chokeslam would be more of a temporary shock and once the opponent rolls off of you then you can start to move again.

I certainly don't mind it when the win comes from a roll-up or a submission. I understand the logic behind that where if you lose to a roll-up you are usually fully conscious but just got 'caught' in a pin or if you get submitted you just couldn't take the locational pain and once the opponent lets go you can at least move out of the way.

But I can't stand seeing someone getting KO punched, kneed in the face, RKO'd, Brogue Kicked, DDT'd or any move where we are supposed to believe the blow is to the head ... have them get pinned in 3 seconds and then be fully conscious and able to roll 1 second later.

I want to see those people SELLING the fact that they should be unaware of their surroundings or knocked out almost cold. They could move their arms a bit and the have the referee, a trainer or a teammate/manager have to roll them or drag them out of the way. Or AT LEAST they need 5-10 seconds to get oriented again. Not 1 second later, not 2 or 3.


What do you guys think? Agree with me or are you fine with how this is done?

I doubt WWE will change this. They do it right sometimes but in Elimination matches is where it's the worst because they want to jump from one thing to another but forget to have the previous guy SELL what just happened to him.


And do you have any other small things that make a big difference to share?

 

[D_Feds]

Totally agree with this. This would be the first thing I would go up to the hierarchy with in the WWE. It is just so lazy because there are miles of different things you can do to get someone out the way for a following segment and have match end in more realistic ways. The worst for me was at Survivor Series last year where Seth Rollins was down for an age to something that didn't have much impact throughout the whole of Sting's first appearance that seem to last in excess of 5 minutes and he just gets pinned

 

[Woodstuff]

Problem is, WWE is a choreographed stage performance and has a schedule to adhere to. They can't hold up the show for 5 minutes because the Internet fans don't 'believe' Dolph was just KO'd. You know he wasn't really knocked out, don't you?
As a fully developed, grown adult human being, you're supposed to turn a blind eye to the stuff you didn't notice as a kid, 'cause... well... you're not a kid anymore.

 

[Mustang Sally]

But I can't stand seeing someone getting KO punched, kneed in the face, RKO'd, Brogue Kicked, DDT'd or any move where we are supposed to believe the blow is to the head ... have them get pinned in 3 seconds and then be fully conscious and able to roll 1 second later.

Reading that brings me to the "Been doing this in pro wrestling since dinosaurs walked the Earth" practice of watching a guy in a tag team match get beaten up..... then launching an improbable, high impact move to temporarily disable his opponent.....then collapsing in a heap at ring center, accenting his subsequent struggle to crawl on his belly, with one hand extended, in an effort to tag his partner.

Hell, if he just delivered that great move to free himself from his tormentor, how did he suddenly get so feeble he can't crawl the last few feet to make the tag?

Some of the time, this creeping effort ends with the competitor (usually a good guy, do you notice?) unable to reach his corner before the other team gets to him, beating him up some more. But the rest of the time, the good guy's laborious crawl winds up with him getting close enough to the corner that he can execute a sudden leap through the air to make the tag. Glory be!

But, hell.......as stupid as the "crawling" scene looks and annoying as it might be, it's a time-honored part of professional wrestling, designed (I suppose) to show us the heroic qualities of these brave competitors, the resolve of the intrepid warrior to salvage even the most dire situation!



Golly gosh, now I feel bad for having mentioned it at all.

 

[Pay Per Ghost]

There is a fine line pro wrestling has to walk. It has to be logical and at the same time, it can't pretend to be TOO logical because it is all scripted. There shall always be moments when your suspension of disbelief will break and that is sad. But the E, especially with Hunter's reigns do give attention to the small details. Again if you wanna be a little extra realistic, you're just overdoing it.

You can poke a lot of holes in every match but we don't. We tend to get swept away and enjoy the moment. Atleast we should. True sometimes they are too erroneous and deserve their online IWC bitching. But these days they have been fine.

Let me give you a small thing that'll put a smile on your face and add a tad bit of positivity . Remember when Orton and H screwed Bryan at SS and then Orton came out and hesitated shaking Steph's hand and the announce team sold their history brilliantly in the little time they had and then they hugged. Well done, good ode to a past, blood-thirsty over the top feud, and way to bring closure.

The anonymous GM however...

 

[allketchupisnotthesame]

I also agree. There is a lot of little things like that. For instance,when someone can kick out of three finishers in a one on one match, but then in a tag/multiple person match they get laid out for half the match from a sling to the guard rail, allowing the double team or whatever other storyline to unfold.

As a fully developed, grown adult human being, you're supposed to turn a blind eye to the stuff you didn't notice as a kid, 'cause... well... you're not a kid anymore.

They didnt do that when I was a kid. If they did I would have noticed. Not all kids are dumb.

 

[THTRobtaylor]

The problem is there is no hard and fast "rule" for selling like this and no way to know what a move is actually gonna do at the time it's delivered. Look at Mania with Taker, the moves he took were not particularly "bad" but the effects were devastating to him, while to many it seemed he was "just selling more than he had" in reality, he was in medical danger.

Suspension of disbelief is crucial, yesterday during the Six Nations game, one of the England players took a shoulder to the head... was down for 10 minutes and backboarded out of there... We're expected to believe that wrestling moves are MORE devastating than that, yet they stay down for mere seconds.

If guys "oversell" moves then every match is over in seconds, it becomes UFC where a Big Show WMD would legit knock someone cold or a German Suplex is intended to put you down with just the first one.

They overuse "finishers" badly, indeed the whole concept of "known signature moves" is where it began to go wrong. Bret Hart always used his 5 moves of doom... Reverse Atomic Drop, Russion Legsweep, Backbreaker and later Ringpost Figure Four, Second Rope Elbow, Sharpshooter... but you never noticed that those were his "spots", just as you never noticed Shawn would always skin the cat, kip up etc. Some like Jake were very obvious, each match was the same and based around stomp punch, short clothesline, DDT because he worked with a range of sizes and didn't have much strength of his own...

Today you know everyone's spots a mile away, you can predict where a match goes 9 out of 10 times and thus they have to use the finishers for the false finishes, when in the past they didn't. Even the NXT stuff is built around spots and you can tell them in advance.

That is more the problem, the over-reliance on set movesets for each guy rather than being allowed to go out and "use the best arsenal for the match" as the older style WWE did. Look at a Bret match like Survivor Series 90 or Summerslam 92 compared to Summerslam 97... chalk and cheese, and the cheese has gotten mouldier over time as guys have to be pigeonholed into moves that can go into a game and so kids can follow the A, B, C of a match.

Other stuff like this that irks me is in Tag Wrestling for example, the whole concept changed from the cutting off the ring/isolationg opponent with quick tags, exploiting the 5 count and the hot tag to what we get today which is almost a free for all/tornado singles match most of the time. I was very happy with Murphy and Blake at Rival, for the first time in a LONG time it looked like a REAL tag match was going on with a proper "specialist team". I am really hoping this becomes the norm again.

 

[Nick Vibe]

I absoluteyly HATED on past Raw, when Bryan and Reigns were about to kick each other's ass, out comes Rollins with his music interupting them. Why would any heel ever do that??? It just bugs me so much. You're a heel, let them tear each other apart, don't come out and interrupt them ffs.

 

[John McCass]

You caught the point. Yes,these are the small things which make big difference IF noticed. Very few people notice these things because these are very common in pro wrestling. We have been watching these type of shits till the very begining of pro wrestling.

 

[Wald]

Selling, or the lack of it, has been a major problem for years in the WWE. For all the unwarranted criticism Cena gets he still does need to be held to account for how utterly atrocious he is at selling moves for more than a minute. That idea seems to have bled down the roster as more and more of them either oversell or undersell moves.

One of the reasons I didn't rate HBK v Taker at those Manias as high as most is because I hated the precedent it set for main events where people just kick out of finishers four or five times. It's a very lazy way of storytelling and building excitement and is being overused to the point that it's actually hurting the business

 

[Wrestlingaholic]

My little bugbear is one that doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it destroys the credibility of the match: when wrestlers don't even try to kick out of 'surprise' pinfalls. Most recently evidenced by whichever Bella twin refused to even shake her legs when getting schoolgirled by I think Natalya prior to the Royal Rumble - she just lay motionless then acted shocked she had been pinned.

Second to this, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, is the STF as applied by John Cena. Literally all you have to do is slide his arms over your forehead and you're free. I actually appreciate Cena quite a lot, but can't believe in 10 years no one has told him to tighten up the move. I much prefer it when he uses pinfall finishers as they look way more believable.

In fact, an over reliance on submission holds full stop. Too many now have a submission finisher and a standard finisher. One or the other please, WWE.

 

[Wrestlingaholic]

THTRob Taylor: Bret's sequence was definitely noticeable. Not just that, but there were certain non-finish spots several wrestlers used in almost every one of their matches.

My brother and I used to joke as far back as the early '90s that Bret's special moves were his chest-first collision with the turnbuckle pads, his shoulder into the post and his limp, just as Mr Perfect's was being catapulted over the ropes back into the ring, and Flair's was being body slammed off the top rope!

 

[FightOwensFight]

My favorite example of this is when I guy takes a shot and goes down near the corner, doesn't land in quite the correct spot and then, clearly and laughably, positions themselves better to take whatever move off the ropes is coming next.

I think part of the issues could be the style of wrestling some of the current generation of superstars grew up watching. Moving from one "spot" to the next, with little thought on believable transition or telling a story. As Sally said, it has always been part of the business and always will be; it just seems more obvious now.

 

[allketchupisnotthesame]

but can't believe in 10 years no one has told him to tighten up the move. I much prefer it when he uses pinfall finishers as they look way more believable.

In fact, an over reliance on submission holds full stop. Too many now have a submission finisher and a standard finisher. One or the other please, WWE.

I cant believe youre acting like the articles about stone colds podcast,when he told him to tighten up that move,werent all over this site.

I also have to ask, why wouldnt a well rounded fighter have a "knockout" move AND a submission hold? how is that a bad thing?

 

[Kris Benwa]

My little bugbear is one that doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it destroys the credibility of the match: when wrestlers don't even try to kick out of 'surprise' pinfalls. Most recently evidenced by whichever Bella twin refused to even shake her legs when getting schoolgirled by I think Natalya prior to the Royal Rumble - she just lay motionless then acted shocked she had been pinned.

Second to this, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, is the STF as applied by John Cena. Literally all you have to do is slide his arms over your forehead and you're free. I actually appreciate Cena quite a lot, but can't believe in 10 years no one has told him to tighten up the move. I much prefer it when he uses pinfall finishers as they look way more believable.

In fact, an over reliance on submission holds full stop. Too many now have a submission finisher and a standard finisher. One or the other please, WWE.

He never used to do it like that all the time though. At first he had his arms in like a cross face position then around 08-2009 he started having them in like a choke. Around 2010 or 11 is when he started doing the way he does it which leads me to believe he's been told to do it that way because he obviously knows how to do it correctly. It seems like people seem to forget the first 5 or so years he did the move it was in a way that looked harmful.

There's not a match I've seen where you can't point out something illogical or something that wouldn't happen in real life. Where's the fun in that though?

 

[Deoxyribonucleic A.C.I.D.]

I remember during the Orton vs Cena Hell in a Cell match, Orton punt kicked Cena for the win. But Cena gets up like 2 minutes later, in order to show his stupid-looking "full in desperation after a loss" face, for the 5763rd time.

That move was used back then in order to knock people out. It cost 4 & 2 months of Batista & HHH's careers, but no, Cena couldn't stay down for at least one night.

Same thing happened again with Cena & Lesnar in 2012. When Cena gave that meaningless speech, post-match..

Sometimes I don't notice it, but it really bothers me when it happens at such moments.

 

[L@RISANO]

My little bugbear is one that doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it destroys the credibility of the match: when wrestlers don't even try to kick out of 'surprise' pinfalls. Most recently evidenced by whichever Bella twin refused to even shake her legs when getting schoolgirled by I think Natalya prior to the Royal Rumble - she just lay motionless then acted shocked she had been pinned.

Second to this, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, is the STF as applied by John Cena. Literally all you have to do is slide his arms over your forehead and you're free. I actually appreciate Cena quite a lot, but can't believe in 10 years no one has told him to tighten up the move. I much prefer it when he uses pinfall finishers as they look way more believable.

In fact, an over reliance on submission holds full stop. Too many now have a submission finisher and a standard finisher. One or the other please, WWE.

Stone Cold Steve Austin repeatedly advised him as much regarding the STF when Cena appeared as guest on the former's podcast, I think at some point last year.