Continue reading “Ring Of Honor/NJPW G1 Supercard (April 6th, 2019)”
Expecting something else? That’ll come up next week. In the meantime, enjoy this musings on a “classic” WWE PPV event from 2004.
On August 15th, 2004 – the night of Summerslam – Randy Orton defeated reigning World Heavyweight Champion Chris Benoit to win his first World title at the ripe young age of 24. The next night on RAW, Orton successfully defended the title against Benoit and was soon swarmed by his stablemates in Evolution, with HHH giving his young protege the thumbs up… before giving him the thumbs down and booting young Randy out of the group. This, along with a series of bits designed to make Randy the beloved hero by having him run away a lot, would lead to McSon-In-Law getting a title shot and subsequently beating Randy for the title; please pretend you’re shocked at this development.
The burial had begun.
Fun fact: I have not seen this show back in the day and if my revisits to the olden days of 2002-2003 a few years back are any indication, I’m going to be in for a rough ride with this one. Anyway, let’s get this out of the way and then next week, we can go back to finishing off the last couple WWF ’99 PPVs for the next couple weeks before we hit Double Or Nothing.
So at the moment, I’m somewhat conflicted because I’m not sure whether I should count this as a Ring Of Honor PPV or an All Elite PPV. Because it’s the first ROH PPV since Final Battle in December and the first show since the company went on self-imposed hiatus, but at the same time, it’s also the first show since Tony Khan bought Ring Of Honor and I’m not sure which is which.
See, it looks like an ROH show in terms of the sets. It sounds like an ROH show, with the usual commentary crew doing the honors here. But the whole thing comes across as a thinly-veiled AEW B-show, with some of the underused AEW guys being featured prominenetly while you only had a handful of ROH guys from prior to the hiatus who aren’t signed by AEW.
In any event, it’s billed as a Ring Of Honor show despite now being part of the AEW empire and since I tend to treat NXT as its own thing during the few times I’ve covered their stuff, I suppose I should do the same here. And since I made the leap and jumped on board with an Honor Club subscription – because I might as well while the service is still up to try and take in as much ROH as I possibly could – maybe this will get the ball rolling on revisiting some old stuff from the promotion’s prime years and such.
But that is then. Let’s talk about this Supercard Of Honor show and how awesome it was.
Consider this a bonus musings before the regularly scheduled PPV musings for the day pops up later on. Long story short; I was feeling a bit sick and this popped up, so I figured “why not?”
The good news is that the show was a little under three hours and went by fairly quickly. Not only that, but for the most part, the wrestling was largely good, even if some of the finishes were somewhat weak. If you’re going into this just wanting some good wrestling, this Backlash show (I refuse to call it the full name) covers that bare minimum quite nicely.
With that said, if you’re looking for something a little more worthwhile and worthy of the premium live event moniker that they like to toss around, then this isn’t it. This was a case of a show where nothing of note happened. Yeah, Ronda won the Smackdown title in that I Quit match, but that’s a win that should’ve happened at Mania and other than that, you’ve got a show of rematches where nothing of note happened. Again, there’s good wrestling on here if that’s all you want, but otherwise, you could easily skip this and not miss a beat.
Continue reading “WWE Backlash 2022 (a.k.a. Wrestlemania Rehash)”
Well…
As has been the case for the past couple years, Wrestlemania has been split into a two-night affair and as before, I will be covering both nights under a single post. This is the format that we’re going to follow going forward if they continue like this. Not only that, but because this year’s Wrestlemania – not counting the pre-shows – was a collective EIGHT FUCKING HOURS, I’ve made the decision to watch these shows chunks at a time. And how long did it take for me to finally watch this stuff?
Let’s be real; the fact that you’ve had to wait until MAY to get my thoughts on this year’s Wrestlemania should be an indication that something was not on the level. It took me two weeks to watch EIGHT FUCKING HOURS of Wrestlemania 38. It begins… just as I said it would. Therefore, both nights are covered, as are the points where I’d pause the show to consume on another night… because Wrestlemania these days are too tedious to sit through on a single sitting, much less two.
dtm666 