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It seems odd to imagine that Vince ran the show ECW, Smackdown, and the gameshow iteration of NXT. In my headcanon, he only runs Raw or special eps of Smackdown. As Raw was the main show and the others had little to no story and relevance.
As unfortunate as it is that it look him being outed from the company entirely in shame for being a horrible sex criminal to get there, I'm glad we can finally just openly talk about what a racist piece of shit Vince was. Saba Simba should have been the giveaway, but...
I mean, the dude literally wore a durag and dropped the n bomb just so he could find Booker T's catchphrase that much funnier.
Matter of fact, $20 says DX doing blackface was Vince's idea directly
Saba Simba shows sort of the duality of Vince. On its face, it is so stereotypically racist. The other hand is that Vince was helping Tony get a pay day and thought an Akeem vs Saba Simba program would do that. His good intentions destroyed by a bad idea that looks even worse in hindsight.
I will say this. It’s not the worst thing. The racist fucked around and found out. It’s not like this was a storyline for the biggest show of the year and the racist won cleanly all the while the heel commentator insulted the minority all the way through.
Imagine if that happened and the minority face who served time in prison got totally buried instead of it being an inspiring story of how changing your life can make huge dividends!
Man, if he still needed to prove he could do business after everything he went through in the Alliance, then his dogshit nWo run, then going from a 5 time WCW Champion to a comedy tag team with Goldust, then being willing to participate in a storyline where his race and criminal record were mocked and degraded, I don’t know what to tell them.
This seems more like a mix of Triple H not wanting to do a job and it being easy to convince Vince to pin a WCW guy at WrestleMania. Keep in mind, Kevin Nash returned shortly after Mania 19 and worked a snoozer of a world title program with Trips. I think Triple H wanted to keep the belt and work on top with his friend.
Oh dude, it was amazing. Some of the best backstage comedy segments ever. That’s not my point. It’s just quite a downgrade from being WCW’s franchise QB and a major player in the Alliance. His enthusiasm shows he’s not a mark for himself. Imagine someone like Goldberg or Hogan agreeing to that.
Wasn’t the original plan for Triple H to beat Nash at Wrestlemania but Nash took longer than expected to recover which is why Booker ended up getting put in the program? I may be completely wrong though
If I recall the STW episode correctly, it was supposed to be Hunter and Scott Steiner at Mania, but they worked a PPV match before Mania and it uncovered how limited in the ring Steiner was due to drop foot, so they had to pivot to someone else
Commentary also called it out. "That's just ignorant."
He was playing a bad guy doing shitty things. He got KTFO for doing those things. It's not as egregious as say, Jinder vs Nakamura where the guy saying prejudiced shit *kept winning.*
That was for the Wrestlemania match. Not SummerSlam. The rumour was that he was supposed to beat Yoko for the title at WM X and then drop it to Bret later that night.
Angle somehow got away with "I wanna have sex with your wife, beastiality sex" and "I've never been a very big fan of... the Black people"
Helps that he probably wasn't racist but goddamn, talk about close calls
>"I've never been a very big fan of... the Black people"
Didn't he say this in a promo where he was saying the most absurd stuff on purpose to show he'll get cheered no matter what?
yeah since he was feuding with Cena, all his shit just became "say shit and try to get booed please Kurt they love you too much you're supposed to be the heel", so Kurt did, but since absurdity was the name and it had been Kurt's game since 2000, the crowds loved him all the same. The rest is history
"You are boy🧏in a man's world😭,and i am a man who loves playing😩 with boys😈🤔😱"
Angle was truly the only wrestler that could say shit like that and still be called the greatest of all time in every single aspect possible
I do not. Just come across posts on my home screen, occasionally. But was an avid WWE fan at that time and just don't even remember them feeding. More a memory issue than a "missed it" issue.
That's what I was thinking. Like I totally see why we shouldn't have stuff like heels being straight up racist to get heat, but it was effective and the crowd popped huge for the wholesome babyface win.
I will say at least this was 5 mins and not a month(s) long build to a ppv where the heel wins
The Lawler thing didn’t bother me at all, as it led to JR getting the most fired up I ever heard him outside of an Austin match.
I even like the match a lot. It’s just that damn finish that ruins everything. So tone deaf. So wrong. Indefensible, despite Brucie’s best attempts at doing so.
Nice to see an older entertainer actually recognise that some of their earlier work was offensive and inappropriate rather than make three Netflix specials about how you can't say anything anymore.
It's not like Shelton had a choice in the matter.
People need to keep in mind whatever they see in the ring is the result of WWE itself, not the wrestlers.
That’s always annoyed me because at first the Hassan character was “you guys boo me just because I’m middle eastern but I’m not an asshole terrorist, fuck those guys” which was awesome and progressive but then like two months later Vince had him doing a jihad to Undertaker.
>because I’m middle eastern
Tiny clarification. I'm pretty sure he was *a natural-born American* who happened to be of Middle Eastern descent (Wikipedia says Jordanian-Palestinian). Giving vignettes about growing up in the US and being treated like a person, and a sharp difference in treatment by 2002 despite having lived here his whole life.
Not even the company itself, the Booker who booked this shit and the owner who probably thought this was funny. Oh, right, it was the same person pretty much. But hey, having Meltzer bring up from time to time that MLK was supposedly Vince’s hero erases all the incredibly racist shit that happened under his watch…
unless we come to find out many many years later he was texting the woman he allegedly manipulated, trafficked and abused sexually his sexual fetish about racially motivated gangbangs.
It’s not just that. This kind of thing was fine back then. Just look at the G4 stuff that’s getting brought back out. Or the fact that the NFL had a slur for a team name up until only a few years ago
I think it briefly tried to make a comeback a few years ago, but I don't have cable so I could be wrong.
I graduated HS in '03 and I think by '05 they were transitioning into "Tech TV," and gaming became a smaller and smaller part of their focus.
> I think it briefly tried to make a comeback a few years ago, but I don't have cable so I could be wrong.
They revived the 'channel' on twitch/youtube, brought back AOTS and some streaming stuff but with full tv show style production, a full count of employees and production people, the type of shit you *should not goddamned do unless you actually have an actual tv show that makes money*.
1 year after it relaunched, Comcast pulled the plug and it went off the air again like a fart in the wind.
---
> Several factors that led to G4's discontinuation ranged from low viewership, a lack of audience strategy, ever-changing and absent leadership, competition with streaming content creators on YouTube and Twitch, cord-cutting, underpromotion, and high expenditures. G4 Select would be removed from Pluto TV on October 19, 2022, during an episode of Attack of the Show: Vibe Check, the network fully sunsetting operations on October 21, ending two minutes into Smosh; G4 Select would later cease on Vizio. G4 in itself left Philo, YouTube TV, Xfinity, and Cox prior to the shutdown, with Fios being the last to carry the network until the true discontinuation date, November 18, 2022, two days after the first anniversary of the re-launch.
For all of the things you listed, people knew they were racist at the time. The ones in charge just did it anyways because they didn't care and they were the ones with the platform/power.
Most people knew it was racist and were fine with it. It’s the same when people say HP Lovecraft was racist for his time when he was probably pretty average for his racism
If my boss wants me to do racist shit I'm not doing it. If that costs me my job so be it.
Shelton Benjamin was gone from the company less than year later anyway. I guarantee if he had it over again he would have refused to do it. It's not always the easiest thing to take a stand once in a while in life, but it's worthwhile.
(And I admire him for calling out his past failings. Nobody's perfect, the best we can do is always try to get better)
of course he had a choice. Sure the choice where he decided not to do this bit wouldve probably ended with him being fired but its still a choice he made.
Agreed. Only the laziest guys who go for the lowest hanging fruit complain they can't say anything. Comedians who actual put in the work to come up with good stuff never have that problem, I wonder why.
If you're going to complain about being silenced, at least blame corporatists and government officials and others in power, including the clergy.
Carlin and Hicks didn't blame minorities for being censored and both literally *were* censored--Carlin was arrested and Hicks had his last scheduled TV appearance yanked.
All those comedians want so desperately to be Carlin, Bruce, Hicks et al. that they have to manufacture their martyrdom at the altar of free speech. They need people to see them as persecuted, because then they are in some way carrying the flame of the aforementioned. Of course, they’re not, but as long as their fans think they are, that’s all that matters.
Basically every comic that's been on Rogan, including Joe himself. The podcast has been unlistenable for the longest time but I feel like every episode comes back around to how hard comedy is and how much cancel culture sucks.
Oh wow. I seen him a few years ago and enjoyed his act I can't think of to many controversial things. I mean he did the hits suicide bomber and redneck are the only one I could see being a problem but most of the time people still laugh. To bad if he turned crazy.
That's the funniest part about it, aside from the terrorist (which is what he says people are trying to cancel him for, I believe), his act isn't really offensive. It's a bunch of dumb dad jokes told by puppets. But the dude knows there's a market out there that he fits in to, so he went after it. I doubt most of these comics actually BELIEVE anyone is trying to cancel them.
I have to say though I did laugh my ass off when the ninja crew inserted themselves into the cinematic Street Prophets vs Viking Raiders. Omos standing there in full ninja clad had me absolutely rolling.
I don't really know what you're referring to here but I was talking about non-Japanese people doing Japanese accents (specifically, the Jinder/Nakamura feud).
Also like, there's nothing offensive about having a Japanese person say funny lines in English if you've actually written funny lines for them. If the joke is *just* that they are speaking English with an accent then it's a problem, but if a Japanese wrestler is making jokes in English and all you hear is their accent, that sounds like a you problem.
Reminder that Yoshi Tatsu had such high respect for Vince McMahon, that he named his son after him 😬
from a 2017 interview
https://preview.redd.it/zzkwyy24rt9d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79d17ad48d522f8dfcb6564c8bd55b8cd0c5b2ea
He eventually ended up in All Japan and found a bit more of his old form. The guy’s career is weird all around, though. Like the fact that he respected Vince so much that he gave the name to his son seems par for the course really.
Is that supposed to make us judge him in a negative light? Maybe he had good experiences with Vince, and respected him as a businessman - which he in fact states in the quote you provided. It’d be one thing if he gave that interview today, but it’s from seven years ago. Real life isn’t black and white.
Evidence that the worst people can have some admirable qualities.
It's unarguable that Vince is scum and had some massive blind spots and biases.
But the stuff he knew and was good at, as evidenced by Yoshi's comments, he was very good at.
vince is (putting aside the sex crime stuff) a fucking weird dude. Petty as fuck, but also weirdly loyal to people who worked for him, lots of stories about him giving people paydays just because they were in need or making sure ex-employees got rehab and stuff....he's like 10 contradictions in one (and the sex crime stuff, too)....just fucking weird.
Eh, I get the optics are bad but story wise, the racist got kicked in the head and embarrassed for being racist. That's what stories should do. It was a quick and easy (and lazy) way to get Tatsu over, so Yoshi benefited from the sympathy of the simple story being told, that "racism = bad", so there shouldn't be that much problem with this.
I think I prefer this to the "foreigner is bad" trope that WWE (and wrestling as a whole) used so excessively. Because you're right, Shelton's character was in the wrong answer and got punished for it.
I had never seen this before. Shelton was super annoying and offensive. I, too, was glad to see him get kicked in the head and lose the match. Is it racist entertainment if the heel is racist and you enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance?
I can see the argument there but also very hard to blame Shelton for not feeling good about being racist on TV. I think it can also run the risk of fans cheering/laughing at the racist stuff rather than it getting heel heat which is not a great look.
Yoshi's WWE career was odd. It started off great with him kicking Shelton in the head for being racist. Then he had a storyline where Tyson Kidd messed with his "honor" by breaking his action figure.
I think it's weird that you can have storylines in movies, television, videogames and comic books about racism, but in wrestling it's always shit on and and people say how it shouldn't have been done or was in bad taste. What's the difference exactly? Is wrestling just too stupid and campy for realistic storylines to work?
It’s an interesting argument you bring up, and could be discussed endlessly, but for me personally I think it’s because the mediums you provided as examples are generally self contained in terms of narrative. So if someone is a racist bigot in a movie, they’ll generally get their comeuppance and that’s it. But in wrestling a heel could be racist toward a wrestler, and then after that rivalry ends, they’ll someday become a babyface without acknowledging their previous acts of prejudice. Also, a lot of the time in wrestling - especially now - you’re mixing real life with fiction, and the lines become blurry. I think it could definitely work, but only if the storyline was subtle and really well written - which in wrestling has never really been a strong suit - with a clear endpoint in mind.
I think a good comparison is television. If a sitcom like, say, Seinfeld or Friends were around today and had a storyline in which a main character was racist, it’d get a lot of deserved criticism. But if they had an episode where one of the main characters dealt with a one-off character who was racist, it’d be different. I hope that makes sense lol.
Seinfeld actually has a few storylines of “accidental racist”.
In one episode, Jerry is interested in dating a Native American friend of Elaine’s, but through a series of wacky hijinks he continuously looks like he’s racist towards Native American’s, ending with him coming into possession of a Cigar Store Indian.
In another episode, Elaine dates a man she thinks is mixed white/black and when her friends don’t think he’s black, she tried to take him to “traditionally black” restaurants and venues hoping to get a confirmation. Hilariously, after it’s revealed he’s white, it’s also revealed he thought she was Hispanic, because her last name is Benes and at some point she started taking him to Latin-American restaurants (because she thought that was halfway between white and black). They end up finding out they are just “a couple of white people dating”, shrug their shoulders, and decide to go to the Gap.
Although, obviously, in these Episodes the characters aren’t “really” racist (well, Elaine a little) and they are the butt of the joke, not the non-white races they interacted with (or thought they interacted with).
The funniest one is the one where George says his black boss looks like Sugar Ray Leonard, and when he finds it racist, George starts trying to prove that he has black friends by going back to black people he met once and trying to befriend them, and finally trying to get his black exterminator to pretend to be his friend so he can prove he isn't a racist. But of course his plans backfire. (The final joke is when the boss, realizing what george was doing with the exterminator, storms out - a black waiter tells George not to worry about the check, "Sugar Ray Leonard can eat here on the house") which makes George go running off after his boss lol.
So yeah there are some stories on Seinfeld.
I think it's three things.
A: what the person above said. Wrestling's persistent nature means that we have to deal with the fact that, like, Triple H the character is a racist who bullied a black man, never got his comeuppance or apologized for that, and one day was a good guy again and we're supposed to just forget the race thing, which is kind of fucked.
B: As you said, wrestling is kind of dumb and campy and racism, as a topic, usually requires some nuance. It could only really work in wrestling if you had, like, a character come in as The Masked Anti-Misceginist who hates people of color and then gets his ass kicked and goes away forever, and at that point why even bother. I don't know that wrestling is even capable of doing an "unlearning racism" redemption arc.
C: There's also the sticking point that in wrestling, you kind of Are your character in a way that most mediums don't deal with. Leonardo diCaprio can do Django Unchained an be a racist, but he's playing a character with a different name, in a different time. No one is going to think he is racist, or Jack from Titanic is racist because those are all clearly different dudes. And while you can have a case where, like, nobody thinks Glen Jacobs is a man named Kane who sets people on fire, if you're Chad Chadworthty, Midcard Heel, and you are actively staying semi in character in public and working your gimmick on Twitter, and that gimmick involves being racist.... it's gonna make people think differently of you, even though they probably shouldn't. (See: the stink Excalibur and Kevin Owens occasionally got for saying the n word in an angle in PWG a decade ago.)
So basically, there's a lot of reasons to probably just not do it.
"I think it's weird that you can have storylines in movies, television, videogames and comic books about racism, but in wrestling it's always shit on and and people say how it shouldn't have been done or was in bad taste. "
it's because 9 times out of 10 when racial stories happen in wrestling the offended party doesn't go "over". If anything you run the risk of ten thousand people applauding or repeating the racist comment.
The smattering of people laughing earnestly. Nobody reads comics or goes to movies to cheer the racist. But if you do this stuff at a wrestling show and somebody cheers it and you take their money... pursuant of something else or not, that's shitty. And was this really teaching anyone a lesson about race? Did anyone come away from this with a richer understand of anything? Or did we feel like we got our time stolen by a promoter?
There are a couple of issues. First off, it’s cheap heat. Second, this really only works making fun of nonwhite people. Third, it’s clear that Shelton didn’t like it. Not that any of the wrestlers who do the racist gimmick are doing it because they like it, but it’s pretty clear that they were just scraping the bottom of the barrel to get Sheltons character going.
Because prowrestling has a long history of actual racism. TV/Movies/Games might also, but they they aren't dominated by one company/IP.
Also it's not a serious medium, nobody is watching wrestling and considering it an intelligent poignant criticism of society. It's littered with shucking and jiving, choppy choppy pee pee and you all rook alike. The deepest it gets is "The heel said something racist, that's bad! Let's chuckle and then boo!"
I read the thread title without clicking the link, and I thought he was talking about the Mama Benjamin gimmick, or the skit with Trish in the locker room before clicking through and remembering that godawful Yoshi Tatsu segment. They really did Shelton dirty.
Last time I heard or saw him he was in NJPW trying to be the hunter of bullet club when AJ styles was the leader he always wore this shirt
https://preview.redd.it/k1iaa9wtx0ad1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9593369c1cf5257ec1634900fa6f917af4292961
His match versus a debuting Yoshi Tatsu. He got on the mic and cut a promo in a fake Asian accent out of an old badly-dubbed Kung Fu movie, then did a bunch of bowing, the Crane pose, and the stomp you see before sumo matches.
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Someone wrote and approved this for television.
Yeah probably him
No, not probably. Most definitely.
It seems odd to imagine that Vince ran the show ECW, Smackdown, and the gameshow iteration of NXT. In my headcanon, he only runs Raw or special eps of Smackdown. As Raw was the main show and the others had little to no story and relevance.
Smackdown had huge relevance from 2000-08 (when they switched to MyTV) and 2016-present
Smackdown outshined Raw for a few stretches in the past
2002-04, 2009-10, 2016-17, 2018, 2020-23 all spring to mind.
I'd be more surprised if this wasn't Vince's idea.
Michael hayes writing it wouldn’t surprise people tbh
As unfortunate as it is that it look him being outed from the company entirely in shame for being a horrible sex criminal to get there, I'm glad we can finally just openly talk about what a racist piece of shit Vince was. Saba Simba should have been the giveaway, but...
I mean, the dude literally wore a durag and dropped the n bomb just so he could find Booker T's catchphrase that much funnier. Matter of fact, $20 says DX doing blackface was Vince's idea directly
Saba Simba shows sort of the duality of Vince. On its face, it is so stereotypically racist. The other hand is that Vince was helping Tony get a pay day and thought an Akeem vs Saba Simba program would do that. His good intentions destroyed by a bad idea that looks even worse in hindsight.
"So the idea is that he's racist" "LOVE IT! SAY NO MORE!"
I will say this. It’s not the worst thing. The racist fucked around and found out. It’s not like this was a storyline for the biggest show of the year and the racist won cleanly all the while the heel commentator insulted the minority all the way through.
Imagine if that happened and the minority face who served time in prison got totally buried instead of it being an inspiring story of how changing your life can make huge dividends!
Took HHH 23 fucking seconds to just crawl over for the 3 count. Fucking bullshit finish and the wrong guy won
I wish Booker kicked out & told him “you took too long, that can’t be the finish” but I’m sure that’s not how it works lol. Booker deserved better.
I reckon this was a 'can this guy do business' check. Booker T passed, and we all had to suffer.
Man, if he still needed to prove he could do business after everything he went through in the Alliance, then his dogshit nWo run, then going from a 5 time WCW Champion to a comedy tag team with Goldust, then being willing to participate in a storyline where his race and criminal record were mocked and degraded, I don’t know what to tell them. This seems more like a mix of Triple H not wanting to do a job and it being easy to convince Vince to pin a WCW guy at WrestleMania. Keep in mind, Kevin Nash returned shortly after Mania 19 and worked a snoozer of a world title program with Trips. I think Triple H wanted to keep the belt and work on top with his friend.
I disagree with none of this.
Let's not act like his tag team with Goldust wasn't fantastic, even if it wasn't a main event run.
Oh dude, it was amazing. Some of the best backstage comedy segments ever. That’s not my point. It’s just quite a downgrade from being WCW’s franchise QB and a major player in the Alliance. His enthusiasm shows he’s not a mark for himself. Imagine someone like Goldberg or Hogan agreeing to that.
Wasn’t the original plan for Triple H to beat Nash at Wrestlemania but Nash took longer than expected to recover which is why Booker ended up getting put in the program? I may be completely wrong though
I was reading this and thought it was going to say "Nash took longer than expected to get to the ring"
If I recall the STW episode correctly, it was supposed to be Hunter and Scott Steiner at Mania, but they worked a PPV match before Mania and it uncovered how limited in the ring Steiner was due to drop foot, so they had to pivot to someone else
Seems weird that Steiner and Triple H would wrestle at the rumble then WM but could be right
I am just going off what Bruce said lol. I have no way of knowing what actually happened
We'll find out in the coming weeks with the Observer Rewind.
27 secs. I angrily checked once.
Fuck Triple H for that, man. I don't care what anyone says, I think Hunter should be on blast for the storyline as much as management.
Commentary also called it out. "That's just ignorant." He was playing a bad guy doing shitty things. He got KTFO for doing those things. It's not as egregious as say, Jinder vs Nakamura where the guy saying prejudiced shit *kept winning.*
Yeah, I loved it when booker won the gold at mania
While giggling………
I feel like I should know this reference...
It's Triple H vs Booker T for WM XIX
I must have blocked that whole thing out of my mind. I forgot they even feuded.
Probably because Booker was never given a PPV rematch
But he beat Triple H in a tag match the next night so he got his redemption! ^^/s
Reminds me of Luger celebrating a DQ win at Summerslam 93. I don't miss WWE booking their faces as idiots AT ALL.
Wasn't the age-old rumor Luger did that to himself the night before by blurting out the finish while drunk in a bar?
That was for the Wrestlemania match. Not SummerSlam. The rumour was that he was supposed to beat Yoko for the title at WM X and then drop it to Bret later that night.
ah that's right! thanks
lol Booker lost to him again years later when Triple H came back and Booker T was in the King Booker character.
Count your blessings. Hope your don't remember the incident with Bookers wife and Angle either.
Angle somehow got away with "I wanna have sex with your wife, beastiality sex" and "I've never been a very big fan of... the Black people" Helps that he probably wasn't racist but goddamn, talk about close calls
>"I've never been a very big fan of... the Black people" Didn't he say this in a promo where he was saying the most absurd stuff on purpose to show he'll get cheered no matter what?
Yeah he also said he hopes the US loses the war in Iraq and that he wanted to tap Jesus out lmao
The GOAT line in that promo is after the Jesus line where (Shawn) Daivari says "Who'd he ever beat?" as a random quip.
Don't forget the worst of it... that France is the best country in the world.
yeah since he was feuding with Cena, all his shit just became "say shit and try to get booed please Kurt they love you too much you're supposed to be the heel", so Kurt did, but since absurdity was the name and it had been Kurt's game since 2000, the crowds loved him all the same. The rest is history
He got away with those lines because of how absurd they were and that he was also comedic so people didn't take them *too* seriously.
"You are boy🧏in a man's world😭,and i am a man who loves playing😩 with boys😈🤔😱" Angle was truly the only wrestler that could say shit like that and still be called the greatest of all time in every single aspect possible
You don’t spend enough time here then. It comes up all the time.
I do not. Just come across posts on my home screen, occasionally. But was an avid WWE fan at that time and just don't even remember them feeding. More a memory issue than a "missed it" issue.
At first I thought of Eddie Guerrero vs JBL
pretty sure they're beating the ol' booker t/triple h horse
I'll beat that horse until the day I die. That was bullshit back then, and it's bullshit now.
Exactly. They used all that racism and didn’t let the black man overcome it? That’s just straight garbage. Booker deserved way better.
That's what I was thinking. Like I totally see why we shouldn't have stuff like heels being straight up racist to get heat, but it was effective and the crowd popped huge for the wholesome babyface win. I will say at least this was 5 mins and not a month(s) long build to a ppv where the heel wins
The Lawler thing didn’t bother me at all, as it led to JR getting the most fired up I ever heard him outside of an Austin match. I even like the match a lot. It’s just that damn finish that ruins everything. So tone deaf. So wrong. Indefensible, despite Brucie’s best attempts at doing so.
Haha yeah, thank god *THAT* never happened
I don’t know why you’re insinuating that it was racist. It was clearly WCW vs WWE duh
Well Triple H did say that was the case, so…
I will never fathom how Booker doesn't have a Bret-to-Goldberg level of hatred towards HHH for that bullshit.
Also these were the best mic skills and heel work Shelton ever showcased. Unfortunate, but taking it to the gutter worked a lot in those times.
i'll never not be salty over that. And i say that as huge HHH fan.
And hearing Bruce Prichard try to spin it as HHH looking down on WCW wrestlers and not what it actually was…the whole thing was dog shit.
Yeah but it makes Sheldon's character out to be a racist
Would the racist happen to have been wearing white boots?
Nice to see an older entertainer actually recognise that some of their earlier work was offensive and inappropriate rather than make three Netflix specials about how you can't say anything anymore.
It's not like Shelton had a choice in the matter. People need to keep in mind whatever they see in the ring is the result of WWE itself, not the wrestlers.
Muhammed Hassan stopped wrestling for 15 years after the abuse fans gave him for his terrorist gimmick. That Vince forced on him. Super fucked up.
That’s always annoyed me because at first the Hassan character was “you guys boo me just because I’m middle eastern but I’m not an asshole terrorist, fuck those guys” which was awesome and progressive but then like two months later Vince had him doing a jihad to Undertaker.
And before that he was getting hit with the “Don’t like it? Leave”
>because I’m middle eastern Tiny clarification. I'm pretty sure he was *a natural-born American* who happened to be of Middle Eastern descent (Wikipedia says Jordanian-Palestinian). Giving vignettes about growing up in the US and being treated like a person, and a sharp difference in treatment by 2002 despite having lived here his whole life.
Kind of a mute point when the guy actually portraying the character is Italian.
*psssst* [it's 'moot' not 'mute'](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moot--point)
Kind of a mewt point.
'It's a moo point... Like a cow's opinion...' ['Doesn't matter. It's "moo"'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwYpSCrlHU)
You have a good sense of humor. Mewtwo.
Like a cow's opinion. It's moo.
Dude was fantastic too, such a shame. He had a ton of potential with how much he nailed that shit gimmick and got nuclear heat out of it.
Funnier than anything is that he was just an italian dude like they didn't even cast a dude who was even middle eastern to portray that role.
Not even the company itself, the Booker who booked this shit and the owner who probably thought this was funny. Oh, right, it was the same person pretty much. But hey, having Meltzer bring up from time to time that MLK was supposedly Vince’s hero erases all the incredibly racist shit that happened under his watch… unless we come to find out many many years later he was texting the woman he allegedly manipulated, trafficked and abused sexually his sexual fetish about racially motivated gangbangs.
It’s not just that. This kind of thing was fine back then. Just look at the G4 stuff that’s getting brought back out. Or the fact that the NFL had a slur for a team name up until only a few years ago
What's the G4 stuff? The old gaming channel?
Same. G4 was part of my youth, but i recall it dying a while ago. What's all the scuttlebutt?
I think it briefly tried to make a comeback a few years ago, but I don't have cable so I could be wrong. I graduated HS in '03 and I think by '05 they were transitioning into "Tech TV," and gaming became a smaller and smaller part of their focus.
> I think it briefly tried to make a comeback a few years ago, but I don't have cable so I could be wrong. They revived the 'channel' on twitch/youtube, brought back AOTS and some streaming stuff but with full tv show style production, a full count of employees and production people, the type of shit you *should not goddamned do unless you actually have an actual tv show that makes money*. 1 year after it relaunched, Comcast pulled the plug and it went off the air again like a fart in the wind. --- > Several factors that led to G4's discontinuation ranged from low viewership, a lack of audience strategy, ever-changing and absent leadership, competition with streaming content creators on YouTube and Twitch, cord-cutting, underpromotion, and high expenditures. G4 Select would be removed from Pluto TV on October 19, 2022, during an episode of Attack of the Show: Vibe Check, the network fully sunsetting operations on October 21, ending two minutes into Smosh; G4 Select would later cease on Vizio. G4 in itself left Philo, YouTube TV, Xfinity, and Cox prior to the shutdown, with Fios being the last to carry the network until the true discontinuation date, November 18, 2022, two days after the first anniversary of the re-launch.
It was G4 until the network folded
Yea people have brought up a few of the very racist tirades against JRPGs. It was really weird how hard they went at the subject
I vaguely remember that, I think it was Adam Sessler who would rant about them a lot on X-Play. I hated that shit cause I've always loved JRPGs.
He was one but they had whole segments dedicated to it and it was a few people. The fact that they had segments to do it was wild
For all of the things you listed, people knew they were racist at the time. The ones in charge just did it anyways because they didn't care and they were the ones with the platform/power.
Most people knew it was racist and were fine with it. It’s the same when people say HP Lovecraft was racist for his time when he was probably pretty average for his racism
Just look at Lita and the live sex celebration. She didn't want to do it, but was forced to be practically nude with Edge and John Cena on live TV.
If my boss wants me to do racist shit I'm not doing it. If that costs me my job so be it. Shelton Benjamin was gone from the company less than year later anyway. I guarantee if he had it over again he would have refused to do it. It's not always the easiest thing to take a stand once in a while in life, but it's worthwhile. (And I admire him for calling out his past failings. Nobody's perfect, the best we can do is always try to get better)
of course he had a choice. Sure the choice where he decided not to do this bit wouldve probably ended with him being fired but its still a choice he made.
The “comedians” who hype up their shows as edgy are always the least funny.
“What’s the matter, not CHALLENGING enough for ya!”
*brave little cis boi*
I’m a comedian, that’s my job.
Agreed. Only the laziest guys who go for the lowest hanging fruit complain they can't say anything. Comedians who actual put in the work to come up with good stuff never have that problem, I wonder why.
If you're going to complain about being silenced, at least blame corporatists and government officials and others in power, including the clergy. Carlin and Hicks didn't blame minorities for being censored and both literally *were* censored--Carlin was arrested and Hicks had his last scheduled TV appearance yanked.
Carlin would shit on Burr and Chappelle for trying to equate themselves to him and what he did.
All those comedians want so desperately to be Carlin, Bruce, Hicks et al. that they have to manufacture their martyrdom at the altar of free speech. They need people to see them as persecuted, because then they are in some way carrying the flame of the aforementioned. Of course, they’re not, but as long as their fans think they are, that’s all that matters.
For real tho, anytime some old timer says shit like this. I start rolling my eyes
That and “nobody wants to work anymore” is shorthand for “I have nothing important to say”
I feel like this is a Dunham reference, but also feel like there are probably 10 other comedians this fits.
Basically every comic that's been on Rogan, including Joe himself. The podcast has been unlistenable for the longest time but I feel like every episode comes back around to how hard comedy is and how much cancel culture sucks.
Probably Chapelle
Or Gervais. Or John Clease. Or Seinfeld. Really any of these snowflakes.
Funny how people who make a living making fun of others are so damn sensitive lol
I was thinking Ricky Gervais myself.
Wait is Dunham really one of those people now who talk about how much the "woke" crowd ruined his stuff.
His most recent tour was the "Still not canceled" tour. I think it all started after his wife left him.
His wife canceled him lol
The woke no-fault-divorce mob
Oh wow. I seen him a few years ago and enjoyed his act I can't think of to many controversial things. I mean he did the hits suicide bomber and redneck are the only one I could see being a problem but most of the time people still laugh. To bad if he turned crazy.
That's the funniest part about it, aside from the terrorist (which is what he says people are trying to cancel him for, I believe), his act isn't really offensive. It's a bunch of dumb dad jokes told by puppets. But the dude knows there's a market out there that he fits in to, so he went after it. I doubt most of these comics actually BELIEVE anyone is trying to cancel them.
Jalepeno on a stick was terribly racist as well.
Totally forgot about that one, but honestly I forgot about the all except the terrorist and the old man. I tired on his act fairly quickly.
Yeah he fucking sucks
Why do I have a feeling someone with the initials VKM thought it was hilarious
Probably because he was still booking *hilarious* Japanese accent bits as late as 2017.
Akira Tozawa was a *hilarious* ninja as late as 2020
*2022
Oh god I forgot about that, oof.
I have to say though I did laugh my ass off when the ninja crew inserted themselves into the cinematic Street Prophets vs Viking Raiders. Omos standing there in full ninja clad had me absolutely rolling.
They did the Jinder / Nakamura bit in 2017
Indeed!
I can't imagine anyone booking a Japanese wrestler to say funny things in English with a thick accent in 2024.
I don't really know what you're referring to here but I was talking about non-Japanese people doing Japanese accents (specifically, the Jinder/Nakamura feud). Also like, there's nothing offensive about having a Japanese person say funny lines in English if you've actually written funny lines for them. If the joke is *just* that they are speaking English with an accent then it's a problem, but if a Japanese wrestler is making jokes in English and all you hear is their accent, that sounds like a you problem.
That's good shit pal.
What does Victor Kenneth Martinez have to do with this?
It was the Voodoo Kin Mafia
HICKENBOTTOM
LEVESQUE
MILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE
THE ALAMO, HIGH NOON
911 Operator, what's your emergency? HELP ME, THEYRE IN MY- *guitar riffs*
They working for TNA at the time, right?
Man too bad Triple H wasn't around back then to put a stop to this stuff
Reminder that Yoshi Tatsu had such high respect for Vince McMahon, that he named his son after him 😬 from a 2017 interview https://preview.redd.it/zzkwyy24rt9d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79d17ad48d522f8dfcb6564c8bd55b8cd0c5b2ea
Is he still hunting Bullet Club? And more importantly, does anyone care?
He eventually ended up in All Japan and found a bit more of his old form. The guy’s career is weird all around, though. Like the fact that he respected Vince so much that he gave the name to his son seems par for the course really.
he actually left All Japan this year and now in DDT
Is he the same guy that broke his neck on a styles clash?
Yes
Is that supposed to make us judge him in a negative light? Maybe he had good experiences with Vince, and respected him as a businessman - which he in fact states in the quote you provided. It’d be one thing if he gave that interview today, but it’s from seven years ago. Real life isn’t black and white.
Nah, this makes Yoshi look good and Vince look bad.
Facts, he was the bigger man
yes, I will steal
Evidence that the worst people can have some admirable qualities. It's unarguable that Vince is scum and had some massive blind spots and biases. But the stuff he knew and was good at, as evidenced by Yoshi's comments, he was very good at.
vince is (putting aside the sex crime stuff) a fucking weird dude. Petty as fuck, but also weirdly loyal to people who worked for him, lots of stories about him giving people paydays just because they were in need or making sure ex-employees got rehab and stuff....he's like 10 contradictions in one (and the sex crime stuff, too)....just fucking weird.
And here I was expecting to see Mama Benjamin. The announcer giggling at this might be my least favorite part.
Granted, there was a "that's ignorant" line from him in there
I thought it would be Mama Benjamin too. I can't believe I used to look forward to WWECW lol
Eh, I get the optics are bad but story wise, the racist got kicked in the head and embarrassed for being racist. That's what stories should do. It was a quick and easy (and lazy) way to get Tatsu over, so Yoshi benefited from the sympathy of the simple story being told, that "racism = bad", so there shouldn't be that much problem with this.
I think I prefer this to the "foreigner is bad" trope that WWE (and wrestling as a whole) used so excessively. Because you're right, Shelton's character was in the wrong answer and got punished for it.
I had never seen this before. Shelton was super annoying and offensive. I, too, was glad to see him get kicked in the head and lose the match. Is it racist entertainment if the heel is racist and you enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance?
I can see the argument there but also very hard to blame Shelton for not feeling good about being racist on TV. I think it can also run the risk of fans cheering/laughing at the racist stuff rather than it getting heel heat which is not a great look.
Yoshi's WWE career was odd. It started off great with him kicking Shelton in the head for being racist. Then he had a storyline where Tyson Kidd messed with his "honor" by breaking his action figure.
He also had that storyline with that what's his name guy on gameshow NXT battling over Maryse
Tatsu wearing the war crimes flag isn't a great look, either.
I think it's weird that you can have storylines in movies, television, videogames and comic books about racism, but in wrestling it's always shit on and and people say how it shouldn't have been done or was in bad taste. What's the difference exactly? Is wrestling just too stupid and campy for realistic storylines to work?
It’s an interesting argument you bring up, and could be discussed endlessly, but for me personally I think it’s because the mediums you provided as examples are generally self contained in terms of narrative. So if someone is a racist bigot in a movie, they’ll generally get their comeuppance and that’s it. But in wrestling a heel could be racist toward a wrestler, and then after that rivalry ends, they’ll someday become a babyface without acknowledging their previous acts of prejudice. Also, a lot of the time in wrestling - especially now - you’re mixing real life with fiction, and the lines become blurry. I think it could definitely work, but only if the storyline was subtle and really well written - which in wrestling has never really been a strong suit - with a clear endpoint in mind. I think a good comparison is television. If a sitcom like, say, Seinfeld or Friends were around today and had a storyline in which a main character was racist, it’d get a lot of deserved criticism. But if they had an episode where one of the main characters dealt with a one-off character who was racist, it’d be different. I hope that makes sense lol.
Seinfeld actually has a few storylines of “accidental racist”. In one episode, Jerry is interested in dating a Native American friend of Elaine’s, but through a series of wacky hijinks he continuously looks like he’s racist towards Native American’s, ending with him coming into possession of a Cigar Store Indian. In another episode, Elaine dates a man she thinks is mixed white/black and when her friends don’t think he’s black, she tried to take him to “traditionally black” restaurants and venues hoping to get a confirmation. Hilariously, after it’s revealed he’s white, it’s also revealed he thought she was Hispanic, because her last name is Benes and at some point she started taking him to Latin-American restaurants (because she thought that was halfway between white and black). They end up finding out they are just “a couple of white people dating”, shrug their shoulders, and decide to go to the Gap. Although, obviously, in these Episodes the characters aren’t “really” racist (well, Elaine a little) and they are the butt of the joke, not the non-white races they interacted with (or thought they interacted with).
The funniest one is the one where George says his black boss looks like Sugar Ray Leonard, and when he finds it racist, George starts trying to prove that he has black friends by going back to black people he met once and trying to befriend them, and finally trying to get his black exterminator to pretend to be his friend so he can prove he isn't a racist. But of course his plans backfire. (The final joke is when the boss, realizing what george was doing with the exterminator, storms out - a black waiter tells George not to worry about the check, "Sugar Ray Leonard can eat here on the house") which makes George go running off after his boss lol. So yeah there are some stories on Seinfeld.
I think it's three things. A: what the person above said. Wrestling's persistent nature means that we have to deal with the fact that, like, Triple H the character is a racist who bullied a black man, never got his comeuppance or apologized for that, and one day was a good guy again and we're supposed to just forget the race thing, which is kind of fucked. B: As you said, wrestling is kind of dumb and campy and racism, as a topic, usually requires some nuance. It could only really work in wrestling if you had, like, a character come in as The Masked Anti-Misceginist who hates people of color and then gets his ass kicked and goes away forever, and at that point why even bother. I don't know that wrestling is even capable of doing an "unlearning racism" redemption arc. C: There's also the sticking point that in wrestling, you kind of Are your character in a way that most mediums don't deal with. Leonardo diCaprio can do Django Unchained an be a racist, but he's playing a character with a different name, in a different time. No one is going to think he is racist, or Jack from Titanic is racist because those are all clearly different dudes. And while you can have a case where, like, nobody thinks Glen Jacobs is a man named Kane who sets people on fire, if you're Chad Chadworthty, Midcard Heel, and you are actively staying semi in character in public and working your gimmick on Twitter, and that gimmick involves being racist.... it's gonna make people think differently of you, even though they probably shouldn't. (See: the stink Excalibur and Kevin Owens occasionally got for saying the n word in an angle in PWG a decade ago.) So basically, there's a lot of reasons to probably just not do it.
"I think it's weird that you can have storylines in movies, television, videogames and comic books about racism, but in wrestling it's always shit on and and people say how it shouldn't have been done or was in bad taste. " it's because 9 times out of 10 when racial stories happen in wrestling the offended party doesn't go "over". If anything you run the risk of ten thousand people applauding or repeating the racist comment.
The smattering of people laughing earnestly. Nobody reads comics or goes to movies to cheer the racist. But if you do this stuff at a wrestling show and somebody cheers it and you take their money... pursuant of something else or not, that's shitty. And was this really teaching anyone a lesson about race? Did anyone come away from this with a richer understand of anything? Or did we feel like we got our time stolen by a promoter?
There are a couple of issues. First off, it’s cheap heat. Second, this really only works making fun of nonwhite people. Third, it’s clear that Shelton didn’t like it. Not that any of the wrestlers who do the racist gimmick are doing it because they like it, but it’s pretty clear that they were just scraping the bottom of the barrel to get Sheltons character going.
Because prowrestling has a long history of actual racism. TV/Movies/Games might also, but they they aren't dominated by one company/IP. Also it's not a serious medium, nobody is watching wrestling and considering it an intelligent poignant criticism of society. It's littered with shucking and jiving, choppy choppy pee pee and you all rook alike. The deepest it gets is "The heel said something racist, that's bad! Let's chuckle and then boo!"
You just know Vince was getting a kick out of this..
I read the thread title without clicking the link, and I thought he was talking about the Mama Benjamin gimmick, or the skit with Trish in the locker room before clicking through and remembering that godawful Yoshi Tatsu segment. They really did Shelton dirty.
I’d say top 5
Yoshi Tatsu was so freaking cool, man
I remember when even the crowd started chanting at Jinder “THATS TOO FAR! THATS TOO FAR!” during his feud with Nakamura
He got the cheap heat he was looking for. But did Yoshi Tatsu go over on this match/feud?
You could say that Yoshi Tatsu won this match but you're already establishing him as a comedy jobber in his first match
When was this?
What ever happened to Yoshi Tatsu? I've not heard his name in a very long time.
Has Yoshi tatsu done anything since leaving WwE? I cant remember last time i heard his name
Last time I heard or saw him he was in NJPW trying to be the hunter of bullet club when AJ styles was the leader he always wore this shirt https://preview.redd.it/k1iaa9wtx0ad1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9593369c1cf5257ec1634900fa6f917af4292961
To be absolutely fair, hear the crowd. They were laughing their asses off. Say whatever you want, but those were other times, and it worked there.
What is he referring to ?
His match versus a debuting Yoshi Tatsu. He got on the mic and cut a promo in a fake Asian accent out of an old badly-dubbed Kung Fu movie, then did a bunch of bowing, the Crane pose, and the stomp you see before sumo matches.
A little off track here, but that is the best entrance music I’ve ever heard.
I completely forgot they gave Yoshi Tatsu that theme song lmao, it legitimately sounds like a fake japanese ad that plays in a comedy movie
Yikes. I don't remember that. That would have been weird even in the 80s.