I'm not sure how newsworthy this really is but I thought it was pretty cool. Customatix, a place that lets you design and buy your own shoe, sells shoes named: The Giant, Dusty Roads, Black Magic (Norman Smiley in Mexico), The Patriot, Chiquita (she's a Nitro Girl if you didn't know), and The Juice. Someone gets inspiration from wrestling? Nah.P.S. Speaking of shoes, I just saw an ad for Aldo Shoes.com and thought for sure that it said Aldo's Hoes.com.
Long live Aldo!
Bill, I don't think you get Turner South up in your area so here's a quick rundown of the premiere of WCW Classics, which aired last Saturday, if you're at all interested.Hosted by Dusty Rhodes, the show took place from the WCW Power Plant. It had three different segments.
The first segment was Dory Funk, Jr. defeating "Dirty" Dick Slater.
The second segment was a collage of Andre the Giant matches from the mid-'80s. Ironically, some of the matches were commentated by none other than Vince McMahon when he was still mainly a broadcaster and not an on-camera face. Keep in mind that this is more a Turner show and not a WCW show, so WCW themselves don't have much input on what is shown. All the matches were basically total squashes. One even saw "Classy" Freddy Blassie get into the action.
The final segment and the "main event" was a TV title match between champ Tully Blanchard (w/ Baby Doll) vs. Buzz Sawyer. Sawyer won by either DQ or count-out when Magnum TA came out to help Tully. A part of the match that seemed funny was when Baby Doll handed Blanchard the "deadly" elbow pad.
Overall, it was a pretty good show. I'm only a fairly recent wrestling fan (since '96), but even only being a new fan, it was still real interesting.
Thanks to the ascendancy of WWF during the '80's and '90's, we wrestling fans have been treated to plenty of gimmicks informed by pop culture. There's one, however, that's been executed with such skill and subtlety that nobody has even noticed it yet: Sting's character from 1998 on has been based on the old Saturday Night Live skit "Mr. Bill".For those not familiar with it, Mr. Bill was a mean-spirited skit featuring a naive little clay figure who would be taken advantage of and subjected to various abuses (burning, dismemberment etc.) Of course, Mr. Bill would always come right back for the next show, get duped yet again, and, to the delight of the audience, get mauled in some kind of misadventure.
And from this SNL segment, we have the inspiration for the current incarnation of Sting! It begins in 1998 when Sting gets beaten to a pulp with his own bat by Bret "Hitman" Hart. Sting was stretchered out only to reappear that Spring. During the Summer, our unsuspecting Sting was mauled by a pack of wild dogs thanks to the twisted machinations of Rick Steiner. Of course, our Mr. Bill returned, and even captured the world title that fall. But, in keeping with his gimmick, Sting gets taken out yet again by being beaten with a baseball bat courtesy of Miss Elizabeth in early '00. Our hapless hero returns, only to be stretchered out AGAIN thanks to being burnt to a crisp and falling off the stage setup at the hands of the wily, uppity mid-carder Vampiro. Then, on his re-debut, he lasts a total of 30 seconds in the arena before getting a good clobbering by the recently heel-turned Goldberg, making it a hat trick of ambulance rides for the Stinger in 2000.
Rumor has it, Sting will appear with a new face paint scheme, blue and white. The Stinger howl will, of course, changed to a long cry of "Oh Nooooooooooooo!". Look for this one some time in the fall, to set up Sting getting taken out for six-months at the hands of a yet to be named mid-carder.
Laugh if you must...but I've got to tell you...the idea of entertaining people during a demo with a sock puppet while we're fixing the software was a big hit with everyone.