Author: dtm666

I ramble about things.

AEW/NJPW Forbidden Door (June 2022 PPV)

First off, hope you all had a fine holiday and new year. Second off, I want to give a quick thanks to my old buddy who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, for he was able to put together a sweet little DVD package allowing me to watch the last three AEW PPVs that I missed out on last year, including Full Gear, Forbidden Door, and the highly controversial All Out PPV.

So we’ll be covering these PPVs for the next couple weeks, starting with the AEW/New Japan crossover show, Forbidden Door; which took place a few weeks after AEW’s Double Or Nothing PPV. I wasn’t exactly sold on the concept, plus key people I would’ve liked to have seen on the show were out with injuries, and so my interest waned and I skipped out on the show. It turned out to be the first AEW show that I had missed, though it wouldn’t be the last.

Now that I’ve seen the show, did I miss out or not? Let’s find out.

Chris Jericho, Sammy Guevara & Minoru Suzuki defeated Eddie Kingston, Shota Umino & Wheeler Yuta in a tremendous opening six-man contest.
ROH Tag Champions  FTR defeated IWPG Tag Champions Great O-Khan & Jeff Robb and Roppongi Vice in a Winners Take All 3-way to retain their ROH titles as well as win the IWGP titles, thus beginning a long, long, long, long, long, long, LONG road to FTR going after the AEW titles so they can hold them all. I think they are still waiting for their shots as we speak.
Pac defeated Miro, Malakai Black, & New Japan guy Clark Connors to win the inaugural AEW All-Atlantic International World Western States Heritage championship in a four-way match. Someone else from New Japan was supposed to be here, but he got injured and they slapped in Clark Connors in there. Honestly, they should’ve stuck with a three-way between the AEW guys, but someone had to take the fall and poor Clark was our victim de match.
Sting, Darby Allin & Shingo Takagi defeated The Young Bucks & El Phantasmo in a fun six-man that featured Sting doing a dive off the entrance stage on top of the bucks and that other guy.
AEW Women’s Champion Thunder Rosa defeated Toni Storm to retain the title. We needed a women’s match and New Japan didn’t have a proper women’s division (does STARDOM count? Honest question) so we got this, which looks so out of place that it stands out automatically, which is incredible. The match itself was a thing that happened. Nothing particularly noteworthy.
IWGP United States Champion Will Ospreay defeated Orange Cassidy in a pretty good match to retain the title. This is followed by a beatdown from Ospreay’s mates.
The debuting Claudio Castagnoli defeated New Japan’s Zack Sabre Jr in a good match. This was supposed to be Danielson, but he was hurt, so we got Claudio. Good pop for Claudio.
IWGP World Champion Jay White defeated Adam Cole, Hangman Page, and Kazuchika Okada to retain the title in a four way.
 Jon Moxley defeated Hiroshi Tanahashi to win the AEW Interim World Championship – a.k.a. I’m keeping the belt warm until reigning champ CM Punk comes back so that I can kick his ass on a random episode of Dynamite.
Forbidden Door had great wrestling and was a good showcase of some New Japan guys to the AEW audience who normally wouldn’t watch that stuff – though the crossover is obviously there. This was a show that if all you wanted was great wrestling and a chance to see some New Japan guys outside of New Japan, then this was the show for you. But watching this months after the fact, I never felt that I missed out on anything more than some great wrestling. Despite the hype and the crossover, this didn’t feel like a big deal. It was, for all intents and purposes, an AEW B-Show PPV event similar to the old Fyter Fest and Fight For The Fallen shows from 2019, except those were free.
That said, if they do another one of these next years, maybe I’ll be more inclined to watch it then, but it depends on the context and the matches offered… and no more of this interim garbage, okay?

DTM-Cast – Episode #230

Click here to download the MP3.

If you just want to hear about my live WWE experience last weekend, just skip to the forty-five minute mark and that’ll cover the rest of this 90+ minute show. Otherwise, I’ll touch a bit on Armake21, the recent Nintendo Direct, some quick thoughts on the upcoming DC Universe line up from James Gunn… and yes, we also talk about Picard. Debating on whether that’s going to be a regular thing from here on out, but there you go.

Still no Q&A segment. Maybe next month.

00:00 – Introduction And Quick Armake21 Thoughts

06:00 – Star Trek: Picard 3×01 and 3×02 Thoughts

16:12 – Nintendo Direct Stuff

24:30 – DC Universe Ramblings

35:01 – Thoughts On The Jeff Hardy DUI Case Closing

44:45 – My Live WWE Weekend Experience

FIN

Case Closed On Jeff Hardy’s Latest Drunk Driving Offense

Source: https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/jeff-hardys-license-suspended-for-10-years-dui-case-closed

So once upon a time, there was a guy named Jeff Hardy. He did rasslin’ things. He also did drug things. He apparently got off the drug things… or so his family says. But then he caught drunk driving. And so he was doing the court thing for quite a while until recently, when Jeff pleaded no contest and the case was closed.

Jeff Hardy’s full sentence is as follows (copied and pasted from the F4WOnline article linked above):

– A 38-day county jail sentence with 38 days credit for time served
– Two years probation
– $4586 in fines and court fees
– A 10-year suspension of his license
– Two years with an interlock device and 90-day vehicle impoundment
– Court-mandated DUI school or drug rehab program
– Community service

So now that the case is closed, cue the folks wondering when Jeff Hardy is going to get back to the rasslin’ thing. And if there is any good sense in the world… not for a very long time.

Will get back to this soon…

WWE Elimination Chamber 2023

Second night in a row that I’m attending a WWE show… it’s a PPV, this time around; the Elimination Chamber PPV or whatever they’re calling it. Make no mistake, however; the Elimination Chamber may be the gimmick that the show is named for, but neither Chamber match is the focal point of the main event, as beloved underdog and hometown favorite Sami Zayn challenges the dominant Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship. This was a major turning point in the story of Sami Zayn and the Bloodline and the way I saw it, there were only TWO ideal scenarios that you could go from here… but did they actually go there?

Unlike the Smackdown musings, I did watch the PPV as it aired on the WWE Network and so there’s a little more structure. And honestly, there’s a couple live notes I could toss there, but on a whole, there’s not much too to it. I think the crowd reactions translated well to television. Maybe a couple localized chants from our section didn’t quite make the cut, which is a shame because you had the one guy who constantly chanting for Mami and there were a couple random chants here and there – see the Smackdown musings because they’re the same chants pretty much. But on a whole, no complains on how it was presented on television other than the usual quibbles about the shitty N64-style graphics for the entrances as well as some of the more atrocious camera work during the Men’s chamber match.

Continue reading “WWE Elimination Chamber 2023”

Smackdown (Feb. 17th, 2023) – Live Notes And Curiosities

And so here we are… my first live WWE television taping.

This was a Christmas gift from my older brother, which surprised the heck out of me that he’d go so far as to do that. And I am not going to lie; there was genuine excitement over this. I have never attended a live WWE television taping and I could count on one hand the number of WWE house show/live events I’ve attended over the course of my lifetime. I’ve been watching the past couple weeks worth of Smackdowns, I’ve been getting myself prepped for everything that was going on. And as months turned to weeks and weeks turned to days, I was looking forward to this moment. Even if it was from the cheap seats – and the cheap seats are way up there – but it didn’t matter because the energy of attending a live WWE event could not and would not compare to the energy of a live WWE television taping and especially moreso of the PPVs.

And then a week ago, a member of the family was hospitalized. They had a low oxygen count, they were brought in, they got examined, and we found out that one of the lungs were clogged and they’re going to see if it were possible to operate. This family member is in their 70s, they’ve been taking medication for blood circulation, and so there were a lot of factors that had to be considered. All of a sudden, the weekend draws near, almost as a bit of an afterthought considering the sudden family emergency that had emerged.

We almost didn’t attend the show because we wanted to care for this family member, but to their wisdom, they told us to go because otherwise, it’d be a waste of money and even the cheap seats for those shows are pretty fucking expensive. Now I would’ve fine skipping out on one, but we did attend both shows. We did enjoy the shows, had a fun time over there, and at the end of the day, I’m glad that we went and got this temporary reprieve from this serious situation.

Just as a heads up, I’m going to bouncing around from point to point, so don’t expect a coherent or properly laid out format – at least, compared to the usual output.

Continue reading “Smackdown (Feb. 17th, 2023) – Live Notes And Curiosities”

AEW Dynamite (Feb. 15th, 2023): Anything Interesting Happen?

(Note: Hey, kids. I know people would rather I’d talk about last night’s Smackdown show that I attended live, but I’m saving that for when I’ve got time to digest this stuff… and also, by the time this publishes, I’m still not home yet and I ain’t typing shit on my rinky-dink phone. In the meantime, here’s an AEW Dynamite musings that I wrote a couple days ago and never posted because Picard inspired me to put something else up in its place. Later.)

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve last touched a Dynamite show, hasn’t it? Anything interesting happen while I was away.

To tell the truth, I haven’t been following much of AEW as of late. I do know about a couple ongoing stories, such as Bryan Danielson’s recently successful bid to earn an AEW Championship match contested under 60-minute Ironman rules, which should be interesting to witness in 2023… and also the ongoing Jon Moxley/Hangman Page feud, which may be coming to its conclusion at the upcoming PPV in the form of a Texas Death Match, so that gives ol’ Mox another excuse to bleed.

Continue reading “AEW Dynamite (Feb. 15th, 2023): Anything Interesting Happen?”