Welcome to the results of the 2020 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards –

HOLD UP HOLD UP. It’s been like three months since the voting deadline! Where the hell have you been?

*sigh*

About a week and half after voting closed, my wife got Covid-19. She was sick into mid-March and had to stay in hospital for a while. She’s since made a full recovery (thank god), but between caregiving and sheer worry I didn’t have time to do anything else for all that time, and once she was better I had to spend the next six weeks catching up on work. Hence the massive delay. Covid-19: it hasn’t just fucked with wrestling, but also wrestling fans. Wear your damn masks and get your damn shots, everybody.

…okay, we retract the question. Please continue.

No worries.

This year we had 212 voters participating. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Award results can be found here.

The “Worst” Award results can be found here.

Finally, full ballot results for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for voting, and we’ll see you next year!

(Sorry for the delay: we had a record number of nominations to plow through – over 250 in most categories!)

This is the Call for Votes for the 2020 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2020.

The deadline for entering votes is February 14, 2021. Have fun!

This is the Call for Votes for the 2019 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2019.

The deadline for entering votes is February 8, 2020. Have fun!

UPDATE: Unfortunately there was a tech snafu almost immediately on our end as a result of an accidental Limesurvey mis-save, which was causing the survey to crash on the third page (it was trying to load data that was slightly different than what existed). We’ve fixed the problem by rebooting into a fresh survey, but those of you who had already begun your ballots have unfortunately lost your progress so far and will have to restart the essay (we have updated all links to the survey in this post to reflect the new survey). We apologize for the inconvenience.

This is the Call for Votes for the 2015 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable (we applied a max nominee count of 30 to most categories). Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2016.

Changes this year: No new categories! No deleted categories! For the first time in years, the category count is stable! Hooray!

There is one minor change, however: due to the Cruiserweight Classic as well as New Japan becoming much easier to stream, we have decided to treat televised/streamed multi-night tournaments lasting longer than three nights (such as the Classic or the G1 Climax) as “regular shows” rather than “major shows” for the sake of category classification. Individual nights within said tournaments (such as the Cruiserweight Classic Finale) still qualify as “major shows.”

The deadline for entering votes is February 10, 2017. Have fun!

Welcome to the results of the 2015 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 753 voters participating – less than last year, but that was largely because last year we had a large flood of voters from With Spandex and this year WS felt that they didn’t want to campaign overly for the Awards so they limited their linkage to one post. Which meant less voters from them – but more voters coming in from other sites. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Awards can be found here.

The “Worst” Awards can be found here.

And finally, full ballot counts for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for playing, and we’ll see you next year!

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back!

Right now, they’ve got the funding to make three new episodes, which will probably feature Jonah Ray from the Nerdist as “Jonah Heston”, the guy who gets shot up into space and forced to watch cheesy movies by Felicia Day’s Kinga Forrester, daughter of Clayton Forrester and grand-daughter of Pearl. (People have asked who the mother was; in my headcanon, she’s the Resusci-Annie from ‘Teenagers From Outer Space’.) Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount will be Tom and Crow, respectively, and there’s still at least one casting announcement to come (for the henchperson role). They’re about $125K from funding episodes 4-6, and with twelve days to go that’s pretty much guaranteed, and we may see as many as six more beyond that although I would be surprised if they fund the full $5.5 million.

But I don’t care. The point is, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back!

I have immensely fond memories of this show. I remember channel surfing one Sunday afternoon in junior high and coming across a science-fiction movie on one of the UHF stations. I stopped, because in those pre-Netflix years living in a household where cable simply wasn’t an option (my father remains philosophically opposed to it to this day) you took any sci-fi you could get. And I remember thinking, “What’s that across the bottom of the screen? Are those supposed to be theater seats? Who are those people in the corner of the screen? What’s going on here?”

And then they made a joke. And I instantly thought to myself, “This is the most brilliant idea ever.”

Because we all make fun of bad movies. It’s a natural human instinct, like breathing or sleeping or finding Donald Trump repugnant. So to see it done by actual comedians, really funny guys who also did sketches with these weird and goofy puppets, well…it was instantly charming. I’ve gone back and watched those early episodes, and they are definitely rough drafts for the concept, but I can’t tell you how impressive they were at the time. I was instantly hooked.

Then they went to cable, and I couldn’t watch them. Luckily, a few years later my dad came home with some videotapes that one of his students gave him, saying he thought they would be right up my dad’s alley. It was an off-air copy of one of the Turkey Day marathons, with ‘Viking Women vs the Sea Serpent’ and ‘Teenagers From Outer Space’, and I fell in love all over again. For several years afterward, I would beg my way into the home of a friend or family member for Thanksgiving with a stack of blank tapes, recording as much as I could stay awake for and watching those episodes over and over again in between Thanksgivings. (I practically have ‘Manos’ memorized.) I eventually moved out and got my own cable subscription, in time for the Sci-Fi Channel years, and I never missed recording an episode until the show’s eventual cancellation. (I was also finally able to settle a long-running debate between my mom and my aunt over which was worse: ‘The Day the Earth Froze’ or ‘Plan Nine From Outer Space’. The obvious answer was, of course, ‘Manos’.)

Ever since, I’ve greeted every spin-off effort with the greatest of joy, from ‘The Film Crew’ to ‘Rifftrax’ to ‘Cinematic Titanic’. There’s just a simple, uncomplicated happiness to this kind of comedy; they take a movie that you probably wouldn’t watch on your own, and walk you through it with entertaining comedic comments. You get a chance to see something that’s not always a classic, but frequently has its own unique charms–and where the movie fails, the riffing is entertaining. It’s fun at the expense of those old movies, but there’s also a little bit of love to it; I sometimes describe it as a celebrity roast for people who would otherwise be forgotten.

And it’s coming back. It’s a different cast, but ‘Diabolik’ featured absolutely none of the same people in front of the camera as ‘The Crawling Eye’. It’s a new writing crowd, but that’s only to be expected; one of the great things about the old show is that the people who worked on it went on to have long comedy careers of their own. It may not last beyond this run of 3-12 episodes, but that’s how the future works. You can never tell what it’s going to be like until it happens. The only thing we know right now is this: Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back. I have no snark, no reservations, nothing but uncomplicated happiness for this effort, and I don’t care who knows it.

UPDATE: OMG THEY ANNOUNCED THE HENCHMAN AND IT’S PATTON OSWALT HOW COULD THIS BE ANY BETTER?!?!?!

Andrew Jeanes pointed this out to me:

The twerking gets all the play because white people think it’s a funny word, but it’s that unison at 1:13 that just kills me: until that moment I didn’t realize that there was an ideal to which “group hip-hop choreo for people in Stormtrooper outfits” could aspire, but yeah, that unison is: the use of unison animation-style to reflect machinelike fascism, that’s it right there.

The rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards are the oldest public-vote wrestling awards on the internet. Dating back to 1990 (when Curt Hennig won Best Wrestler, Scott Steiner’s Frankensteiner won Best Move, and Hulk Hogan versus Earthquake won Worst Feud), the RSPW Awards now span over two decades and are far and away the most comprehensive wrestling awards in wrestling fandom. They are the oldest awards and the best awards. You can see the results of the 2012 Awards (which also contain the entire history of winners in all categories) for the “best of year” awards here and the “worst of year” awards here.

This is the Call to Nominations for the 2013 RSPW Awards. The Nominations phase is not a strict rule of eventual award nominees – if nobody nominates CM Punk for Best Wrestler, for example (let’s say that an apocalypse happens and we’re all too busy for the next month, because that is the only way that will happen on the internet), come time for voting, people can still vote for CM Punk as Best Wrestler. The Nominations are intended, instead, to present voters with a list of suggested candidates to consider when assigning their votes (as voters will vote for a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in each category).

Maybe when voting for Best Tag Team, you will forget about how great Christopher Daniels and Kazarian have been this year (or maybe you don’t watch TNA often enough to know). Maybe you weren’t aware of how much fun Wrestling is Fun! is as a promotion (despite it being in their name – maybe you are illiterate or something? If so, how are you reading this?), and seeing them nominated causes you to check them out. That’s the point of the nominations: to expose wrestling fans to the wider wrestling universe. Just like the Awards themselves, when you think about it. You can nominate candidates for awards here.

Nominees are due by December 28, 2012; we will update this post with a list of all current nominations on December 21. Awards voting proper will begin on January 1, 2013. A list of current nominees can be found here.

Literally coughing myself hoarse, I am laughing so hard.

As a sidenote, this is as good a time as any to point out that I now have a Tumblr precisely for things like this which I want to link to but which are not really, most of the time, post-worthy in and of themselves or which I don’t feel like discussing at length. (I just really happened to like this.)

Okay, he’s forgiven for somehow getting people to think Dr. Horrible was brilliant.

Unless he is using his mind-rays again! OH LORD WHAT IF HE IS USING HIS TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE MIND-RAYS AGAIN

Dancing Matt’s fourth go-around: