Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Pro Wrestling


 * The ladder match. At Wrestlemania X, it was very exciting and revolutionary for its time. Fans who grew up watching TLC matches may find this match boring.
 * The DDT was once a devastating maneuver but it is now a standard move so watching an older match end with one stretches fan's willingness to suspend disbelief.
 * Ditto for moves like the Power Bomb, Superplex, Stampeder (running power slam), and -- going back even further -- the Thez Press.
 * Several wrestlers who do use old-school moves as finishers have their moves hyped up as "special", such as JBL's "Clothesline From Hell', Kevin Nash's Jackknife Powerbomb or Raven's Evenflow DDT.
 * Watching old AWA matches, moves like the Clothesline and Dropkick were also match enders back in the day.
 * Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka famous splashing of Don Muraco from the top of a cage. An iconic Moment of Awesome for wrestling in 1983 and for years afterward. Several wrestlers note it as the moment that inspired them to get into the business. By today's standards, it looks like just another highspot.
 * Also common among lucha libre and cruiserweight wrestlers. As the style becomes more popular, more wrestles add more flippy stuff. At Bash at the Beach '96, Rey Mysterio, Jr.. and Psicosis created the "highspot of the night" when Rey hit a huracarrana on Psic in mid-air. But nowadays, with Jack Evan, Ricochet and PAC and the like on the indy circuit doing double rotation corkscrew shooting star presses, that just fails to impress as it did at the time.
 * Speaking of the '96 Bash at the Beach, that show featured the now-legendary "third man of the Outsiders" angle. (It was Hulk Hogan.) Watching that match today, in retrospect, you can see the supposed Shocking Swerve coming a mile away. This is probably because TNA now stages similar last-minute betrayals on a more or less regular basis.
 * The Dynamite Kid vs Tiger Mask series in the early 80's seems slow-paced and short by modern standards. At the time, those matches more or less established the notion of "high-flying" wrestlers.
 * The brawling-based "Main Event" style used by WWE. While trite and cliche now, when it was first introduced in 1998 (to cover for Stone Cold Steve Austin's neck injury), was seen as revolutionary for allowing 90's style fast-paced action (as defined by wrestlers such as Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels) from sub-par wrestlers.
 * The Brawling Based style akin to WWE's "Main Event Style" can be attributed to Bruiser Brody's then innovative style in the 70s and 80s. Also, at the risk of being informal, how could the style Steve Austin "innovated" help Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart if they were gone (left or were semi-retired) shortly after he debuted it?
 * It didn't. It helped other, slower wrestlers have action-packed matches on par with what Bret and Shawn had done in the preceding years.
 * Back in the 1980s, even title matches were considerably shorter than they are today (Hulk Hogan's famous victory over The Iron Sheik, for example, was barely five minutes long!) and were filmed in long shot, making you feel that you were actually in the arena, thus causing the novelty of watching a wrestling match at home on TV to come off as rather pointless. Add in the general lack of music, pyrotechnics, and so forth, and modern-day fans might think they're watching a Stylistic Suck!
 * This isn't universally true; Hogan title matches were short, but there were many long matches in the early days (especially at the arena shows). One of the WWWF (now WWE)'s early huge gates was a Shea Stadium show headlined by a rare babyface vs. babyface match. Bruno Sammartino and Pedro Morales went to a 75-minute draw. Also most television matches weren't filmed at the arena (WWWF was a rarity in that regard), but rather at local television studios, and featured quite a bit of camera play. Most of the "so forth" associated with modern TV wrestling was actually invented by the von Erich wrestling family in Dallas. In 1982.
 * Unless they go back and watch the 1980s stuff first, today's fans may never truly appreciate how game-changing a figure Undertaker was. Debuting in 1990 right on the heels of a decade in which pro wrestling's style had been almost without exception family-friendly, colorful, and even corny, the sight of a seven-foot-tall, pale-skinned mute all in black who sought not only to defeat his opponents but to kill them (along with Paul Bearer and the "Dark Side" ring entrance theme, which was a lot more minimalist and less elegiac in the beginning, and thus creepier) was genuinely terrifying. Newer fans who may remember 'Taker as a blues-loving biker in the early 2000s might have a hard time picturing 'Taker's original image, and even the most recent fans, after having witnessed the likes of Kane, Edge, Randy Orton, and all the other "dark" WWE Superstars who followed 'Taker's example probably won't find the "Deadman" gimmick all that original.
 * Over the past decade, fans have gotten used to seeing main-event wrestlers - Eddie Guerrero, Edge, CM Punk - who don't have muscles on top of muscles. Shawn Michaels paved the way for all of them. Michaels was not a small man by any means (6-foot-1 and a light heavyweight, which is still bigger than most American males), but he was dwarfed by his opponents more often than not. It's hard to appreciate just how much of a big deal it was for Michaels to become the first back-to-back Royal Rumble Match winner (and from the first-entrant position one of those times, no less!) and to defeat Bret Hart clean for the WWE Championship in one of the longest WrestleMania matches ever at WrestleMania XII. Hard to believe now, but there was a time when people actually doubted the "Heart Break Kid."
 * Trish Stratus was a huge success story during her career - WWE had brought in various models to build its women's division into more about T&A than athleticism (Sable, Terri Runnels, Debra) but Trish herself was the first (in WWE at least) to develop onscreen from an eye candy valet with patchy mic skills to a charasmatic star who is now regarded as one of the best female wrestlers in North America. These days at least 60% of the women's division in WWE (and some of TNA's roster too) is made up of former models brought in and trained to wrestle in the hopes of replicating Trish's success. Due to this and comparison with women's wrestling on the indie circuit and in Japan, many purists label Trish as "overrated" and resent her for not wrestling on the indies. No, she's not as good as Akira Hokuto in her prime was. Maybe 0.5% of women and 5% of guys in wrestling are.
 * At the time of her debut in WWE, Lita's style of wrestling was very innovative for American female wrestlers at the time as moves such as headscissors, hurricanranas, and moonsaults were barely used by women in WWE (there were plenty of high-flying women in Japan, though). These days (see the Trish example above) due to having to work extremely short matches all the time, the models brought in by WWE will often learn flashy moves like hurricanranas to make their matches appear more exciting and cover up their lack of wrestling ability. If the models are former gymnasts this can work fine and they eventually develop into competent wrestlers (Eve Torres, Kelly Kelly) or they can just come across as sloppy spot monkeys (*cough* Ashley Massaro). When watching a WWE divas match, if a girl is doing only flashy moves and throwing weak punches and clotheslines then she hasn't been wrestling that long. If there's proper groundwork and chain work in there, she's a lot more experienced.
 * Also, moves such as moonsaults and hurricanranas are more staples of women's wrestling these days than men's in WWE at least due to the retirement of the Cruiserweight division.
 * Speaking of Lita, she isn't as innovative as she gets credit for. ECW had a female wrestler named The Prodigette who was doing moonsaults and headscissor takedowns and such, and unlike Lita, she rarely messed her moves up (Lita's moonsault was notoriously botch-prone). Unfortunately for Prodigette she was in Simon Diamond's unnamed stable, and TNN didn't like Diamond's misogynist character, so they didn't allow ECW to use him on the TNN show. So Prodigette got almost no exposure and was never picked up by any big name promotion after ECW folded. She's still working the indies under the names Angel Orsini, Angel Riptide, and Riptide.
 * Averted with regards to Natalya and the Sharpshooter. Aside from a one-off Trish Stratus match, fans had never seen a woman do it before and while it's not as amazing now to see her use it, she still gets great reactions whenever she does use it to win matches.
 * Really, you can go ahead and apply this trope to the entire history of women's wrestling. The Fabulous Moolah, a key figure in gaining opportunities for women in the ring, was a Garbage Wrestler by today's standards.
 * Sable gets put down for being a "fake wrestler" and not as tough as today's Divas. Well, you have to understand that when she made her debut in WWE in the mid-1990s, the women's division had almost completely disappeared and it was rare to see females doing anything in the ring. (The most famous Diva of this era, Sunny, was a manager who hardly wrestled at all.) Sable also was a pioneer in proving that female wrestlers could be both blonde sex symbols and physical powerhouses.
 * Compared to most of today's Divas, the in-ring efforts of Stacy Keibler look pretty unimpressive. But she was a graduate, along with her friend Torrie Wilson, of WCW's famously grueling "Power Plant", and she helped pave the way for slightly-built women to be taken seriously as wrestlers. Kelly Kelly and the Bella Twins are arguably her Spiritual Successors.
 * Sabu these days is known more for screwing up his moves all the time despite nearly every major wrestling show of the past 15 years copying them.