Welcome to Ryan’s Reviews!
Good day! Ryan Mac here.
You know, the guy on Twitter who does low-effort wrestling memes and occasionally says stuff about things. A long, long time ago, I used to write wrestling reviews, but…just kinda fell out of doing that. After nearly 20 (!) years, I’m back on the reviewing horse and hope I don't fall off and give myself amnesia like Michelle on “Full House”.
I will typically do long-form projects, like I did with my “Dive into ‘95” series, where I dug into all manner of wrestling for the entire year of 1995. In the future, expect more projects that involve me going through full years, such as “Ryan Navigates ‘90” where I thoroughly examine the year 1990. As well, look forward to a smattering of other articles, such as “Ryan’s One-Offs” where I review single matches, and “The Wrestling Society Xperience”, where I go through each episode of MTV’s short-lived Wrestling Society X promotion.
Most of the content for the year-long projects will be sourced from Goodhelmet's yearbook compilations. I’ll throw bonus content out there, too, for anything I want to cover that isn’t on the compilation. For those readers who aren't ancient, Goodhelmet was a regular on the DVDVR forums who created some ridiculously comprehensive compilations, including several “Yearbooks”. Said Yearbook collections were quite hefty, giving us 120 hours of content spread over thirty 4-hour discs. You get pretty much every essential match (most good, a few bad) as well as a ton of interview segments, promos, vignettes, music videos, and video packages. Pretty much all the major promotions around the world (and some minor promotions) are featured in one way or another.
One thing I do want to get out of the way is that I will inevitably be covering work from truly terrible people. There's going to be some Chris Benoit on here, as well as other people who can be considered problematic to say the very least. I will do my best to limit praise for them as humans (because, really, fuck these people), but I am still going to look at the content in an objective manner. Wrestling, more than a lot of mediums, really tests the whole ‘separate the art from the artists’ mindset. If I'm reviewing old wrestling, especially for a project like this, that's something I'm going to need to do a lot of.
Well, enjoy! And don’t forget to share and subscribe!
