For the record, I didn’t watch the whole show. I saw bits and pieces here and there. I’ve heard that there was the usual good matches that you’ve come to expect from some of the featured talent. Someone suggested that I’d give the Kyle Fletcher/Speedball Bailey match a watch and I thought that was pretty fun. So if you’re expecting a full-blown musings on the show as a whole, I’m afraid I’ll have to let you down here.
However, I did watch the main event press conference between Hangman Page and AEW Champion MJF to hype up their Revolution main event because AEW uploaded the clip onto Youtube. And THAT’s the piece of business I want to touch on today.
So this was a pre-taped press conference that saw Bryan Danielson (not Tony Khan? Really? Not even Renee?) introduce our two participants, with the reminder that if Hangman Page fails to win the match or the title or whatever the case may be, he could no longer challenge for the AEW World title… because that worked SO well for the last guy who made that stipulation and he ended up leaving a couple years later. So naturally, we have a bunch of lame duck questions being asked to the two participants. Amazingly, Dave Meltzer was nowhere to be found, even he had attended the show.
MJF calls for a toast, Hangman swats one cup away, which causes MJF to splash the other cup in Hangman’s face, they has a brawl that eventually spills into the arena to an apathetic crowd who had to sit through five minutes of boring pre-tape. And then Hangman hits a Deadeye on MJF, where the camera catches MJF’s head obviously never coming close to touching the floor… you’d think that after the Jericho fall a few years back where they stupidly showed the platform he fell through being made of foam rubber and thus ruining the whole illusion that they would do a better job of hiding the obvious faux pas, but apparently not. Not saying Hangman needed to drive Max’s head in the canvas for real – stop being fucking stupid – but you DO need to sell this as a devasting finish that could end a match and not make it blatantly obvious that his head barely touched the back of Hangman’s legs.
Right, so I hear people ravage this thing quite a bit online and… yeah, it’s laughable to a degree, but I’ve honestly seen worse than this. Not sure I ever want to see a fake press conference close out a wrestling show; it’s almost as dull and boring as the contract signing. But to compare this to stuff like the Shockmaster or the Gobbledy Gooker is about as ridiculous of a claim as it was when used to describe Danhausen’s WWE debut. It’s not even the worst segment that AEW has ever done; this is just a misfire that’s going to get mocked in the short term and then quickly forgotten about a few weeks later. This isn’t the exploding barbed wire death match not exploding segment. It’s ever contract signing style of promo you’ve seen a billion times before.
Also worth noting is that when I watched the clip Thursday afternoon – and using a gimmick that lets you view dislikes – this video only had like 50 dislikes. That number probably jumped up a bit since then, but it’s not the overwhelming disaster that I’ve heard some people make this out to be. I guess more people hated the Cody title win than they did this.
Only way this would have been better is if Dave Meltzer actually asked a question during this segment. The social media monkeys would have a field day with that if it happened.
dtm666 