Backyard Wrestling: Don Amp; 39;t Try This At Home Torrent
Toni Jarels
A backyard wrestler hits an opponent over the head with a fluorescent light bulb, a heavy-set wrestler leaps off a roof on top of his friend, and bodies go flying over the top rope.A backyard audience watches the whole thing. In small towns and suburbia, children inspired by professional wrestling are holding backyard wrestling matches. Some are also making their own home movies and posting the video on the Internet. One Web site alone lists more than 600 backyard wrestling federations, and every week the site hears from about 50 more. A growing underground of teenage boys who just want to stomp the daylights out of each other are swapping videos and logging into chat rooms to brag about taking down their last opponent with professional wrestling moves like the \"killer leg drop.\"It's a movement so disturbing that the World Wrestling Federation has issued a video called Don't Try This At Home.\"Parents and children need to be wary of and leery of what they do to emulate us, because even as pros, sometimes we get hurt,\" said Vince McMahon, owner of the World Wrestling Federation. \"And they need to be very, very careful about what they do.\"Good Morning America's parenting contributor Ann Pleshette Murphy said boys are particularly prone to macho activities like wrestling, and that it is difficult to keep them from roughing each other up. But she disagreed with the backyard wrestlers' claims that their pastime keeps them away from other trouble, such as drugs or alcohol. \"Plenty of research shows that violent, aggressive behavior in kids correlates with other destructive behavior,\" Murphy said. \"And yes, the kids involved in this claim to try and keep from hurting other kids, but the bottom line is this is violent, creepy behavior.\"
Add to this the fact that there just isn't much to do in Backyard Wrestling. The game's main feature is the talk show mode, which basically acts as the game's story or season mode. Here you have to play through a number of survival-type matches against multiple opponents in each level. These matches are interspersed with cutscenes that take place on a fictional talk show called "Today's Topic," where today's topic is, of course, Backyard Wrestling. The show's host interviews a number of different guests, including a billionaire who allows his son to participate in backyard wrestling in his mansion's backyard, and the Insane Clown Posse, who lament about backyard wrestlers inadvertently destroying their tour bus. Unfortunately, none of these interviews are particularly funny, despite being overtly tongue-in-cheek. In fact, nothing about the talk show mode is terribly worthwhile, except that completing it a couple of times will unlock all of the game's hidden wrestlers. The whole mode is only a couple of hours long, so once you've unlocked everybody, there's no real reason to ever go back and play it again.
Also this game featured FMVs that you could unlock by completing certain objectives while fighting in the different venues. Mostly they are taken from the "Backyard Wrestling" DVD series, and they have the different songs of the game playing in the background. The first one on the backyard level was "Backyard Babes 101", which contained the backyard babes near-naked over Bowling For Soups' song "Punk Rock 101", featured on their "Drunk Enough To Dance' album. Mud pools, water pools and sun tan lotion are all featured in this clip. Other FMVs, like "Collateral Damage" and "Kids Today..." are also featured, including 2 clips of ICPs wrestling promotion, JCW, with 2 of their songs playing in the background.
"We are looking for home movies, Super 8's or eight-millimeter films, photos, old programs, any great stories that people might think would be good to include in this," she said. "We would love to be able to digitize whatever they have, give it back to them and use it in the documentary."
NPR's Petra Mayer sends this week's audio postcard from St. Louis, Mo., home of Gateway Championship Wrestling. It's the local version of what has become a national obsession. Watch out for flying chairs.
JPQ is back with part two of his "Snapshot" of the current state of women's wrestling in Japan. This week, he's joined by good pal Parker Klyn (Wrestling Observer/F4WOnline) for a discussion of joshi at home and abroad, with multiple Japanese wrestlers making scheduled appearances this season on American soil. Plus, JPQ & Parker get into the weeds with Ice Ribbon, NOMADS, Color's, and more.
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