Old school - new school blog i thought was a great read.. Thoughts?

this was a blog written by Mike Quakenbush of Chikara...



They don't call me the "patriarch of the CHIKARA family" for nothing. You take a swipe at my kid, expect a palm upside the head.

Today, I checked out an interview in which the subject said this of CHIKARA (pardon the language): "Chikara, I've never seen, don't want to see. Those that know me, tell me, 'No, please don't watch it.' I don't want to see Worker Ants, I don't give a damn....well, if it entertains someone, it may be, but you're making a mockery of the business I busted my ass in all my life...choreographed spot after spot after spot, I can see better dance routines on Dancing with the Stars - and prettier women."

First up, if you haven't seen...you should probably keep your trap shut, right?

CHIKARA is more than your run of the mill pro-wrestling company. We challenge the pro-wrestling performance genre and we challenge our fans every time we do what we do. We are not out there to con the "dumb marks" out of their money or pretend we're MMA. Those ideals are obsolete. And quite often at CHIKARA, we like to make a mockery of those stale tenets that sometimes still creep into the world of pro-wrestling. If you look back over the last 110+ years of pro-wrestling history, you'll see how our genre has evolved from sport to entertainment. What will pro-wrestling evolve into next? I'm not entirely certain, but I hope we're the ones making it happen - not watching it occur from a safe distance, or one of the legion of imitators that quickly fall into line behind any trailblazer.

To survive, to thrive, to remain relevant in increasingly complex times, any industry must evolve. Like any industry though, there will always be those who do not evolve. I love hearing these veterans of the biz that bemoan the death of the territory system. A few years from now, there will be a new wave of similarly disgruntled wrestling types wondering how they lost their key demographics to programs like UFC. Many of these plaintiffs fall into the same category. I have something to say to those people.

The pro-wrestling you grew up with does not exist any more. The pro-wrestling I grew up with doesn't exist either. No amount of wistful nostalgia or stories about how things were "back in the day" will resurrect it. And the longer you cling to that, the less relevant you become. We need to learn from our past - as there are myriad valuable lessons there - so that we can form a better, slicker, smarter future for our industry. People aren't talking about John Cena they way they talk about Brock Lesnar these days. If we keep pro-wrestling on cruise control, we're likely to go the way of the dinosaur. It'll happen so fast, you'll miss it if you blink. It'll probably happen right in the middle of a story that contains the words "we'd lay on the mat in a headlock for 45 minutes and the crowd believed every second of it!"

Pro-wrestling can't afford to live in the 1950's or the 1970's or even in 2008. Times change, whether that suits your personal tastes or not. People change, tastes change. You want to remain relevant? You better be ready to change with them. And if those changes are such an affront to your personal sensibilities, then it's probably time to punch your card and head home.

As it pertains to the comments from the interview. Comic relief serves an important function in all drama. That's why, for decades, pro-wrestling has featured comedy sequences, comical performers, and even entire comedy matches. Why must that comedy be limited to slapstick? Is it because that's all you know, or all you've seen previously? Isn't satire every bit as valid as slapstick? Isn't farce or parody? Why is the only valid kind of comedy within the wrestling genre the kind you know? Is a tongue-in-cheek reflection of our bizarrely-beautiful business so hideous that you can't bare to gaze upon it?

Furthermore, if the idea of a wrestling ant makes a mockery of "your" business, I probably shouldn't tell you that Martin Karadagian's Titanes en el Ring - a program that first aired 47 years ago - had wrestling ants in it. And his shows drew crowds that would make any Ohio wrestling promoter weep.

The game has changed, guys. Blame the internet, blame Vince, blame those kids that don't know how to work, blame the death of the territories, blame the death of kayfabe...it doesn't matter. It happened. Get over it. Accept it for the opportunity it presents. What's important now - is what comes next. Can pro-wrestling, as performance art, reinvent itself before it becomes extinct?

I believe that it can. Because I founded a company that isn't content to accept the status quo. One fan at a time, we're showing people that there's new, interesting ways to interpret the pro-wrestling performance genre. And I suppose, if we're serious about establishing a fresh take on this aging industry of ours, we're going to have to piss off some people in the process. Even if those people haven't actually watched us.

Today, the pro-wrestling landscape is littered with people essentially content to regurgitate their own take on the Vince McMahon "sports-entertainment" model of the genre. Not so at CHIKARA. What we're making, pretentious as this might sound, is less like the WWE and more like art. Paul Gauguin once said "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." We relentlessly aspire to be the latter of those two. Certainly that goal is a bit loftier than anything to be found on Dancing with the Stars.

-MIKE

P.S. To quell any rumors. The interview quote is from Les Thatcher. About 11 years ago, Les and I had a misunderstanding of sorts. On a message forum, someone with a user name "Quackenbush" wrote nasty things about Les' family. These things were inappropriate and downright crude. For a while, Les and other members of that forum thought the comments came from me - even though I have never met Les or his family. About three years later, it was discovered that these comments were written by a waste-of-oxygen called "Tower of Doom" that had some beef with Les. He chose the name "Quackenbush" because he thought it sounded funny. The matter was cleared up. Tower of Doom eventually went to jail, the exact nature of his offenses escape me at the moment.