cero2k wrote: ↑Jan 27th, '19, 06:57
Big Red Machine wrote: ↑Jan 27th, '19, 00:12
KILLdozer wrote: ↑Jan 26th, '19, 23:32
Everything I've heard about these guys is they're all shitasses though...so why would they be so "well liked"?
Dude... where have you been the past few years? Kitsch and catchphrases have replaced substance as the necessary quality for popularity in pro wrestling.
Are we now pretending that the Bucks/Omega/Scurll/Page/SCU are not a group of the most talented wrestlers in the business?
We're not pretending that at all (well.. I'd feel more comfortable saying it if you replaced SCU with just Christopher Daniels. The other two are good in the ring but not close to the level of the others and really don't bring much on promos).
But the thing that makes Bullet Club take off in the US is the Bucks turning it into a D-X/nWo nostalgia-fest. I'd also argue that while Sucrll- who was already over enough on his own- got even more over when he joined Bullet Club, the amount of his talent that he actually displayed in most of his matches went down because he realized that fans would pop louder for a longer, cartoonish chickenwing dance than for him working an armlock to actually set it up, or that fans would laugh and cheer at seeing him claim to be a heavyweight and try to pick up a big dude than they would at him taking a non-comedic route at doing something to establish the affect of the size difference.
Page definitely got more over for being with the group, as he has really only blossomed into someone who can be placed in the same group as Omega, Marty, and the Bucks in the past eighteen months or so, and was certainly getting cheered well beyond the level of both his skill and push just because of his Bullet Club shirt.
SCU turned into default babyfaces this summer because the crowd would cheer them so much despite being heels when the only difference between what they did before and what they did after was that fans decided they liked their heel catchphrase of claiming that "this is the worst town we've ever been to." This came about a year after Kaz and Daniels had been turned heel by default even though their opponents kept cheating them simply because they were feuding with Bullet Club.
Also, I couldn't help but notice that you left someone off of your list there.
When Cody hit the indies/non-WWE scene, his matches were panned by most people as boring. it didn't matter if it was EVOLVE, ROH, TNA, PWG or some indy without much name value at all. It took a world-class talent like Scurll, Zack, Lethal or Hero or get something great out of him (really only the former two were able to get something that people wouldn't have still found disappointing as a main event), and the cheers he got for mostly for who his father was. And just oin case anyone might be about to forget, he would bring it up every five minutes.
Then he put on his magical Bullet Club t-shirt and all of a sudden everyone likes him, even as his matches get worse and worse. He went on to have sh*t match after sh*t match with some world-class workers like Minoru Suzuki and Sanada (in PPV main events, and for the ROH World Title no less) and the Bullet Club fans (led by their fan club president, Dave from San Jose) kept cheering for him and cheering for him and insisting that he was great. When Bully Ray stalls these people hate it, but when Cody does- even in a main event or a world title match- they all love it.
Cody is the most egregious case (because he's the one where the bullsh*t is most apparent), but that segment of the fanbase reacts to everything these guys do in the worst most unthinking "how may we help you, master?" way. It's not a normal babyface or heel reaction. He sets up the most obvious heel traps and they all willingly and happily walk into them and play along until he gets bored, then boo when he doesn't give them what they want in the end even though they all saw it coming.. and it's not even an angry booing. It's like they're all happy that they got to play Cody's "do you all want to see Brandi tonight?" game with him.
I know we've discussed this ad nauseam, but I find the lack of critical analysis of the storytelling in the "Bullet Club Civil War" to be a rather glaring sign that people have given this Bullet Club crew (and, to a lesser extent, their home promotions) an amount of latitude that they would never have given anyone else, and often praise them for the exact same type of thing they would criticize WWE or TNA for.
It's very much like the ECW crowd. It was fans who were looking for something because they were unhappy with the big promotions of the time (not that I'm saying that New Japan isn't a big promotion, but this Bullet Club phenomenon is mostly a gaijin thing) and so they found something that was marketed to them as an alternative and they latched onto it, and the powers that be realized that if they positioned themselves the right away (as the little guy fighting against WWE, for example) they could get their fanbase to buy in to more and more of what they wanted, and they could monetize it with a million different t-shirts and eventually become the ones controlling the narrative that their fans believed (Dave helped with this, obviously. Coverage of ROH's creative flaws in the Observer and the Torch is SHOCKINGLY different), and while it's fun at first, by 1999 the cult mentality gets exposed when instead of the wrestling the fans just want to see their signature ECW spots and a guy like Sid who they used to make fun of for being a bad worker comes into ECW and is massively over as a babyface.
Just because there is a cult mentality doesn't mean that (most of) the guys there aren't tremendously talented. But it's not something that should be ignored, either.