Ryan's Dive in '95 - Coming SOON!

An introduction to my upcoming review series!

Good day!

Ryan Mac here. You know, the guy on Twitter who does the Private Party 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. For the first time in nearly 20 (!) years, I'm gonna get back on the reviewing horse and hope I don't fall off and give myself amnesia like Michelle on “Full House”. I may do random shows here and there, but the ‘Dive Into ‘95’ project will be my main focus.

“So, what is the ‘Dive Into ‘95’”? Great question. I'd love to tell you.

Well, this series of reviews will see me review a relative buttload of wrasslin’ content from the year that was 1995.

“Why 1995, Ryan?”, I can hear you asking with breathless anticipation.

I dunno; I just feel particularly nostalgic for this time period, I guess. Though there were some highlights here and there, the WWF and WCW were absolute toilet water from a creative, in-ring, cultural relevance, and financial standpoint, but back then, I didn't care. Eleven-year old Ryan couldn't get enough of it.

Even now, it has that ‘comfort food’ feeling, like eating Wendy's. Yes, it's bad for you and may result in gastrointestinal distress, but dammit, I still like it.

Outside of the Big Two, the story was much different. ECW, NJPW, AJPW, Joshi, AAA, and several smaller promotions put out some truly exciting stuff, especially in contrast to some of the more tepid offerings from Titan and Turner. Some truly great wrestling happened in 1995. Some of it I've seen before, but a good chunk of it I have not. This project is gonna be fun as hell.

This series will go into 1995, week by week, and the footage will be sourced from Goodhelmet's 1995 Yearbook. 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 (and some minor promotions) are featured in one way or another.

There's a lot of ground to cover, some of which may be out of my depth, but this should be a good time.

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 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.

If you're still reading, what in the hell is wrong with you thank you! Part One is coming soon!