Kasz216 said:
Based on your love of japanese and other wrestling stuff and you living in the south (I think) you always struck me as one of thoseNWA Flair over Hogan oldschool tape trading fans.
I think i'd actually get into japanese wrestling if i could watch it week to week... but as random matches on youtube... I'd rather just have my custom Firepro wresetlers have matches.
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Haha, I guess I kind of am. It wasn't always so, though. From the time I was about 6 or 7 until my teens, I strictly watched the WWF. But Hogan always kind of seemed vaguely hokey to me, and Warrior could do everything that was cool about Hogan only at double speed (because he had shit cardio, it turns out) so I liked him better. But once the novelty wore off of that stuff, it was always the Bret Harts and Curt Hennigs who were my favorites.
It wasn't late '95/early '96 that I started following WCW and ECW. I think I was kind of pushed into it by Bret Hart being gradually depushed in favor of Shawn Michaels and then taking a pretty lengthy sabbatical. And I didn't get into Japanese stuff until a few years after that. The funny thing is that I vividly remember catching WCW on TV a few times (probably shortly after it became WCW) but it was always too "hick" for me. After I saw Stan Hansen slobbering tobacky juice all over his big belly one Saturday morning, I felt physically ill and scuttled back to the safety of WWF and its immaculately groomed and tanned and jacked to the gills Superstars™. Little did I know he would become one of my favorites once I did start watching Japanese wrestling.
I think the best way to get into Japanese wrestling is actually to either watch "best of" compilations of individual wrestlers or, preferably, to watch some of the more iconic series like Tenryu/Tsuruta or Misawa/Kawada. Watching week to week doesn't really matter as much because of their longer term approach to booking and the way that they focus on wrestling as a "sport", so you don't have to keep up with who is a face and who is a heel this week. There's a lot more stability, and thus a lot more freedom to drop in and out without being too lost as to what's going on.
And, honestly, Japanese wrestling is about as fucked as American wrestling these days. So you're probably just better off watching old stuff, anyway. I think Mexico is the only region that hasn't taken a huge dive in quality over the last decade.
