Category: Wrestling PPV Musings

AEW Full Gear 2023

Remember the good ol’ days of Being The Elite, when Full Gear was a running gag referring to Hangman Page roaming about in his gear until someone asked him why the fuck was he in full gear? So he decided to go on the “Full Gear Challenge” to whip himself into shape or something? Those were the days.

What does that have to do with this Full Gear 2023 PPV? Probably nothing. I just needed an excuse to bring that particular image back because it evokes so many warm, fuzzy memories… and let me tell you something; warm, fuzzy feelings is precisely what I’m not feeling with this PPV… which explains why I skipped it… but here we are. Better late than never, I suppose. Or is it?

Let’s find out, shall we?

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AEW Wrestle Dream 2023

There was a WWE PPV this weekend… I didn’t watch it. Had stuff to do.

Instead, you’re getting musings for a bunch of AEW PPVs from last year that I originally skipped out on for reasons. A friend was kind of enough to loan me his DVD recordings of the shows I missed and I ended up doing musings for the shows. That’ll be this month’s output and we’ll see where things pop up in August.

So we begin with the first ever WrestleDream PPV, named in honor of the late Antonio Inoki; of which Tony Khan is such a huge fan of, he dons a similar looking red scarf to the one that Inoki-san used to wear. Aside from that, it is a show that I missed the first time because I did not want to watch more than my fair share of AEW PPVS… or something. I don’t recall. I don’t remember. Most importantly, I don’t care. We’re here and… well… let’s begin…

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WWE Money In The Bank 2018

Yes, I decided to watch a WWE Pay-Per-View event from 2018 over either the latest Double Or Nothing show or WWE’s latest Blood Money venture from the progressive kingdom of Saudi. Truth be told, I almost bit on the DoN replay until I heard it was eleventy-billion hours long… yeah, no thanks. I don’t need to spend three months watching one show.

For what it’s worth, this is probably the only show that I hadn’t seen back in the day… though to be fair, this show was following Backlash, a show that was memorable for the Roman Reigns/Samoa Joe main event that was so thrilling that people were walking out before Roman even got a win. Also, if my old musings on the show are anything to go by, the show itself was pretty dreadful.

So to close out this month before beginning my June-wide wrestling moratorium, I decided to revisit this show for some reason and… you know, some time has passed and one has to wonder if this show is going to be any better now than if I were to have watched it live. I guess we’ll have to see about that.

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AEW Double Or Nothing 2023

Posting this on a Tuesday rather than the usual Wednesday just to get it out of the way and since it was done, there’s no real reason to keep it in the backburner when there’s other stuff coming up.

So, for those who didn’t catch the last Dynamite musings, I’ve decided to skip out on this year’s Double Or Nothing. Current TV isn’t doing it for me, the card itself isn’t getting me excited, and the nWo tribute act that the Elite is playing out… it might be working for some people, but it’s not working for me, brother.

So instead of this year’s show, we’re looking at last year’s show, which I only got around to watching recently. And once July hits, there’ll be weekly musings of all the PPVs I missed this past year. After that… who knows? Maybe I’ll do some TNA stuff until Summerslam hits. But that is then… this is now… or rather this is also then… but the other way…

Never mind… let’s just dive in and see if I missed out on anything by skipping this show last year.

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WWE Backlash 2024

Why, yes… I did watch Backlash… for some reason…  Mainly for the French… crowd… yeah, that’s it.

So yeah, I was doing some stuff during the weekend and I had this in the background. And right off the bat, I’ll say this; this is the absolute best crowd I’ve seen at a WWE show in forever. They were exciting, they kept the noise level up, and they enjoyed every moment of the show. There was never a “dead” period where the crowd was bored. They kept cheering. That’s the kind of audience that helps a wrestling show elevate from a B-level PPV event to something greater than it actually is… and no better example than this show to demonstrate how much of a real difference that hot crowd made.

Anyway, let’s get it on. My notes on this show will be extremely brief.

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TNA Rebellion 2024

So I had a choice between watching TNA’s latest PPV (Rebellion) or AEW’s latest PPV (Dynasty) and ultimately, TNA won out. It also helps that I’ve been following Impact for quite a bit and the shows were compelling enough to merit getting this PPV… but not compelling enough for me to check out the couple TNA+ premium shows in between the two major PPV shows for TNA.

In any event, we’ll touch on the Rebellion PPV rather quickly because, truth be told, outside of some returning faces to the promotion, there’s not much to say about this one. It was largely a pretty good show with some good action and that’s about it, really. But let’s dive in, anyway…

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NWA Samhain 2023

Thank you, Brian Zane, for that wonderful line from your Worst Of 2023.

And yes, it fits.

So, for those who need further context, the above shot is taken from the aforementioned NWA Samhain PPV that took place last October and in case you need further clarification, that is indeed the Sinister Minister himself, Father James Mitchell, doing some of the coke live and in barely living color on Pay-Per-View. It served no real purpose in context to the rest of the show and in a vacuum, it was something that made you go “Why is that even a thing?”

So you’re probably wondering “Why is this even a thing?”

Well, you see, shortly before this PPV took place, Billy Corgan had announced that he reached a deal with the CW Network to air the weekly NWA Power show (as well as another show) onto their TV network, which seemed like a pretty big step forward to them. And then the spot above happened, someone posted it on Twitter, and all of a sudden, the CW were signing a deal to bring NXT over to the channel, while the NWA stuff was relegated to the CW app, which is almost as bad as having to watch two AEW shows on a shitty TSN app.

So yes, because of that spot, the NWA went from going on TV to being stuck on another app that fewer people use… but to label this entire show as god awful because of this one spot is being a bit unfair. After all, this show had plenty of other reasons that it sucked. And the few who did give the show a fair shake even went so far as to call it as bad if not worse than Heroes Of Wrestling from 1999.

That, my friends, is a bold statement.

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TNA Hard To Kill 2024

It’s a bold new era, indeed… so bold that I actually went ahead and made a new banner rather than reuse the same, tired Steven Seagal Hard To Kill banner that I’ve been using for the previous shows.

So yes… we’re doing a brand-spanking new TNA PPV in 2024.

This year’s Hard To Kill event signified the re-branding of Impact Wrestling back to TNA Wrestling, complete with old-but-slightly-newish TNA logo, the old-but-slightly-newest TNA Impact logo for the TV Show that looks like a 3-year old designed it, and they even brought back the old “Cross The Line” song that the hardcore TNA fans liked so much and… well, what do you want me to say? Good to see TNA back after all these years? Why would I say that since I’ve kept calling them TNA even when they didn’t? And while the show has seen a considerable improvement in the years since the first changeover to Impact back in 2017, the show did some very TNA things that still made it TNA.

But that was then and this is… well, it’s still then. But it’s a bold new era for TNA and with Scott D’Amore leading the charge, I’m sure everything will be just fine and el dandy for TNA…

Wait, what’s that?

They fired Scott D’Amore soon after?

Really?

Well… fuck that, then.

Okay, well… let’s dive into Hard To Kill, shall we?

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Ramblemania 40 – WWE Wrestlemania XL

Date: April 6–7, 2024
Venue: Lincoln Financial Field – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Attendance –
Night 1: 72,543
Night 2: 72,755
Combined: 145,298

Yeah, so despite some Network issues and a last minute decision to go watch the new Godzilla X Kong movie this weekend – great popcorn flick, by the way – I was able to watch both nights of Wrestlemania XL and, well, it certainly lived up to the XL part if nothing else.

I actually wanted to hold this off for another week or so before posting

So the show opens with Paul “Triple H” Levesque (who is actually introduced as such – thanks, Paul E!) coming out and welcoming us to a new era in WWE. You can tell that it’s a new era (yes, it is) because there’s a Prime bottle decal in the middle of the ring; something that WWE has never done before. Prime is the energy drink brand of that Logan Paul fellow. I tried some. It’s medicinal, but that’s about it. But more importantly, this is the first Wrestlemania without any involvement from [REDACTED] and that is readily apparently with a lot of the little touches you wouldn’t normally see, like backstage bits with the wrestlers walking to their entrance, unique camera angles, and things of that nature. This is stuff I noticed when watching the last couple PPVs, but seeing it at Wrestlemania really hammered home that a changing of the guard was needed to freshen things up from a production and visual standpoint. I like that personally.

With that in mind, on with the show…

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