Spot Monkey

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A "spot", in Professional Wrestling lingo, is a move as scripted into a match, including the reaction by the opponent. Some (particularly younger) wrestlers know a lot of great spots, which look absolutely brutal and require a great degree of athleticism, and yet they still don't really know how to wrestle; they have no idea how to tell a story in their matches, or even the basics of acting like something really hurt. They're the type of wrestlers who will do a Triple-Tope-Quebradora-Con-Queso through three flaming tables onto a bed of thumbtacks and ground glass wired with explosives, and then get up like nothing happened, only to perform an even more spectacular spot later in the match. These wrestlers are referred to as Spot Monkeys by fans, and their matches are often Spotfests (in other words, spot after spot with little or no rhyme or reason to them).

Interestingly, the term "Spot Monkey" is being used quite similarly to "Mary Sue" in its overuse. It's quickly losing its definition and becoming shorthand for "wrestler I don't like."

Examples of Spot Monkey include:

Professional Wrestling

• Most of the roster of Wrestling Society X.
• WWE's Jeff Hardy went through a severe Spot Monkey phase before his departure from the company, but got somewhat better after his return; while he's still known for his tendency to dive off high things, he is at least much better about using such spots as part of a match's story.
• Former ECW and WWE (and current TNA) wrestler Rob Van Dam often gets accused of being a Spot Monkey, but he shows more awareness of the "story" factor in his matches than most Spot Monkeys do, making him a borderline case at best.
  • Van Dam's is more about his lack of selling a story rather than lack of selling an attack. A case in point would be his match with Abyss at Bound For Glory. Abyss had tried to kill RVD with a block of wood covered with huge nails and forced RVD to vacate the belt. During the match, RVD played to the crowd and generally acted like this was just another match rather than a high-level blood feud. Spot Monkey may not be the correct term to describe this though.
• Some of the members of TNA's X Division, including Sonjay Dutt and Jay Lethal. Others, like AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels, employ a wrestling style with just as many impressive spots, but manage to actually chain them together with decent wrestling, and thus avoid being tarred with the Spot Monkey brush.
• Averted with Shawn Michaels. He is a great practitioner of high-level spots and was a major influence on today's spot monkeys. However, he also happens to be one of the greatest wrestlers of all time and one of the absolute best at telling a story through a match, thus completely averting the stigma of a spot monkey.
• John Morrison gets painted with this brush. Mostly since he's a former gymnast who now practices Le Parkour and Capoeira, his spots can be spectacular when he does do them. As far as everything in between them, he's improved since his debut, but many of his TV matches boil down to him doing three spots, followed by his finisher, with the other guy doing most of the work.
• A non high-flying example would be Gail Kim from her first WWE run, who used complicated, nasty looking submission holds with no rhyme, reason or buildup. Ironically whenever she wrestles with her high flying moveset, she shows full awareness of how to tell a story with her moves.
• Some indy wrestlers could be called "stiffness spotmonkeys". Stiffness is a wrestling term to describe how hard the fake strikes are - the harder they are, the stiffer they are. William Regal and Fit Finlay are two good mainstream examples of stiff workers, and two examples of good ones. But on the indy scene, some guys just wail on each other as hard as they can for no particular reason. Raven actually ranted about this phenomenon on his blog. This is due to the influence of Japanese wrestling on the indy scene, and the popularity of super-stiff Japanese wrestlers like Kenta Kobashi. But Kobashi, like Finlay and Regal, can work stiff responsibly, and the Japanese touring schedule is much more relaxed, allowing the wrestlers more time off to recover and thus allowing them to take more punishment in the ring.
• Lucha Libre can often seem like this to a casual viewer, in that the rules for trios matches don't allow for American-style heat building and the harder rings make traditional "bumps" all but impossible.
  • Also in Lucha Libre it's somewhat common for the tecnicos (faces) to be Spot Monkeys and provide the high spots, and for the rudos (heels) to be more grounded and responsible for telling the story. Watch pretty much any Rey Mysterio vs Psicosis match from the 90s, and how Psicosis controls the pace and sets Mysterio up for his high spots.
• A good portion of the Ring of Honor roster in the early days could be accused of this; most notable is the group Special K, who almost served as a Lampshading of the wrestling style. All of the members were rich kid ravers who were on so much drugs that they could pretty much kill themselves doing ridiculous moves with no rhyme or reason to it (conveniently sidestepping the question of how they actually had the motor coordination to actually pull these spots off in Kayfabe), and they flaunted their lack of storytelling and "respect for the business" for heel heat.
  • Special K was negatively contrasted with Low Ki, a "shoot-style" pro wrestler who relied more on stiff kicks. It didn't help Special K's reputation (or them in kayfabe) that Low Ki was one of ROH's top stars and kayfabe threats at the time.
• A particularly infamous example is indy primadonna Teddy Hart. In addition to being a royal pain backstage and having delusions about his own popularity, Teddy was well known for no-selling within seconds of a match's finish just so that he could show off with more athletic moves. The height of this was Teddy performing several unplanned spots off the top of a cage following a Ring of Honor cage match. The spots made no sense, diminished the story of the match by having Teddy be energetic enough to perform them, were a blatant attempt at drawing attention to himself, and put the other wrestlers in danger because they had to catch him with no preparation. ROH blackballed him, and future WWE Heavyweight Champion CM Punk publicly lambasted Teddy for his actions. This single incident is probably the most extreme example of everything that is wrong with the Spot Monkey style.

CM Punk: There is no god, and the cage wasn't 30 feet.

• • Not to mention that both Punk AND Hart got blackballed (at least from that company) for a fight that they had while both employed by TNA.
• Jack Evans in a big bad way. Practically every single move he does involves at least one flip. The worst part, he's sloppy as hell and has landed on his head countless times.
• Kelly Kelly used to have a big problem with this around 2009. As a former gymnast she would often pull out all kinds of headscissors, hurricanranas and complicated flips in every match with little rhyme or reason. When she was moved to Smack Down she worked to improve and has averted this now.
• Dragon Gate was described by Vince Verhei (of Figure Four Weekly) as "two guys/teams come out, they do 75,000 moves as fast as they can in a 10 minute span, and then at a random point, one of them is pinned."

Non Wrestling Examples

• Roller derby used to involves entire teams of spot monkeys back in the 70s, where every score, every block, every fall, and every fight was scripted beforehand, though the players obviously denied this. Modern teams occasionally pull some spectacular trick skating out to gain popularity with the audience before the match or during half time, but these days matches are totally unscripted and often about ten times more brutal as a result.
• Curiously-related Non-Wrestling Example: Opera. In what is meant to be a sung story, a lot of the more spectacular singers ignore the acting element, in favor of scene-stealing vocal performances (i.e., not making eye contact with someone you're meant to be 'acting' with in a duet, opting to sing for technique and not for emotion, etc). The phenomenon is strikingly similar enough to call them Spot Monkeys.
  • Even MORE curiously related, this behavior contributed to the downfall of the Castrati - men who'd been gelded at a young age so that the high pitches and clarity of tone from their pre-pubescent voices never faded, but were instead added to by the power of adult male lungs and a more flexible ribcage. Many, many Castrati, shamelessly self-satisfied, embellished and improvised the arias they were given to make themselves look as magnificent as possible, with no regards to what the opera was about or what that aria itself was even trying to say. Fed up, one of the most influential opera composers of the time announced he was sick of this bullshit and that he was no longer writing any parts for Castrati in his operas. This caught on as many composers were equally done with having their carefully crafted art chewed up and spat out with gaudy, vocal acrobatics and as a result, the Castrati vogue - which had gone on for quite some time and produced a number of bonafide superstars - began to subside. The Church finally capped it by forbidding the practice entirely. Ball-less Spot Monkeys.
    • To be fair, these guys did give up their manhoods for the art...
    • Actually, the church had banned creating castrati for musical purposes decades before they fell out of use- all later boys had just 'happened' to 'need' their testicles removed or destroyed at about 13 for some 'medical' reason (surgeons in those days not having any sort of regulation, and child abuse only being regarded if it were liable to actually kill the child...) France managed to stop the craze first by banning them performing- everywhere else, the change in fashion came at about the same time as changes in medical practice (with surgery done by doctors) and a change in social attitudes to children's rights.
  • There's another musical version of Spot Monkeys. There are several singers who can achieve very high notes in a range known as the Whistle Register. Minnie Riperton was one of the first, and others such as Mariah Carey and Debelah Morgan have been able to achieve it more recently. Possibly because it's difficult to make your voice jump up and down your range (or because listening to it for long periods can get frustrating), but any time a singer uses the Whistle Register, it's never used for the purpose of the song, or even during a song. It's usually added on to the end of it, almost just to say "Listen to what I can do."
• Melismatic Vocals in general can be considered a musical Spot Monkey, since many cases result in the song getting thrown by the wayside in favor of letting the singer show off (depending on who you ask, you can thank/blame either Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera for this getting really out of hand.) It's not so bad when it's a solo singer since lung capacity will usually keep it under check, but if it's a group, the melisma never seems to really stop. ("Where My Girls At?" by 702 seems to always have someone warbling in the background.)
• This can happen in piano too, most often in styles such as Ragtime where the player is allowed and sometimes even expected to improvise. So they decide to show off their speed and technical ability, oftentimes at the expense of the music. Compare this version of The Chevy Chase by Eubie Blake, which is fairly close to the way it looks on sheet music, to this one played so fast and altered so much that there's almost no trace of the actual song left.
• Because of the way the game is played, basketball players can become Spot Monkeys by choosing to go for the highlight reel dunk shot instead of simply scoring, sometimes to the point of refusing to make passes to teammates who have wide open shots.