Psyched

[Mike Holmes]

So I'm watching BBC America as I tend to do on Sunday nights (big Coupling fan), and I slide into watching a show called Faking It. The premise of this reality TV show is to take somebody and put them into a profession that they know nothing about, and see if they can learn enough in a short time (a month) to Fake their way through actually doing a the job well enough to fool people. I think that they win a reward if they do or something.

Anyhow, what does this have to do with anything? Well, tonight's episode was an english ballet dancer who had a month to become a wrestler. I'd never seen wrestling from the side of the performers before; the only experience that I'd had with it was from playing Kayfabe. Well, it was intensely interesting. If the episode comes back on, I can only recommend seeing it.

Anyway, it left me psyched to see what if anything of what I've learned will be in the new material. I really want to play some of the stuff that occurs outside the performances.

Oh, BTW, the ballet dancer fooled three experienced judges at his final test. Just had to mention it. :-)

Mike

[Matt Gwinn]

I've seen that show before, they did an american version on TLC for about half a season.  I wish I had seen the wrestling episode though.

What kind of stuff did they talk about?

,Matt

[Mike Holmes]

What kind of stuff did they talk about?

All sorts of stuff. It was the terminology use that really got me thinking about Kayfabe. They had to enlighten this guy as to what it all meant so that he could get their lingo. So there's this moment where they're describing what it means to be a heel. Then later the trainers describe how he's starting out with a heel move choking his opponent on the ropes. I'd be interested to see what differences there were in the English version of the lexicon if any (but I was only good enough to catch the few that I remembered from the game).

It was also cool hearing about how they'd arranged matches for him.

In his first match, there was this great moment where one of his trainiers talks to the opponent before hand, a guy who's wrestled for like 20 years, and the trainer asks him to take it easy on his guy. The opponent agrees, but when they get into the ring, he doesn't take it easy at all, and really beats our guy up pretty bad. Bad enough that he's disqualified for some illegal move, and our guy wins.

Kinda hilarious, that. Later he's in his confessional and showing all his bruises from the match and complaining how beat up he is. But he's really happy. Not so much because he won, but because nothing got broken, and he gave the crowd a decent show. Basically the kind of pathos that really gets you thinking about playing your game, Matt.

Mike

[hardcoremoose]

Mike,

About the pathos, I think you hit it on the head.

It's the out-of-the-ring stuff that always made the in-ring stuff fun for me.  Knowing who the wrestlers are, how hard they've worked to perfect their craft, and how they approach wrestling as a profession simply informed my appreciation of their matches and in-character work.  Throw in backstage shenanigans, politics, inter-promotional wars, and the struggle for status and appreciation, and you've got high drama.

It's unbelievable to me that someone didn't catch on to its roleplaying potential before Matt.

- Scott