Category: Wrestling Television Musings

If you love battle royales, the first hour was for you. Otherwise, the show blew. Apparently, Lashley/Umaga for fifty bucks wasn’t bad enough, so we have to suffer through it for free. Fuck you, McMahon. Fuck you and your disproportionately tinny weeny peaball-sized bald head.

Shithead.

(2019 Update: You know, something like this normally wouldn’t make the cut or would just be stuffed away in a compilation post. But this gave me a good, hard laugh. So, for that, it gets its own post.)

As a bonus, I’ll toss in some quick thoughts on Mania 23. Despite the promising card, the show really didn’t do much for me. The Lashley/Umaga match was unsurprisingly shitty and the main event (Cena/Michaels) left me a bit deflated. On the bright side of things, Batista/Taker was a fairly good match for what it was and Money In The Bank was also pretty good.

All in all, it’s a better show than what was given to us last year, but hardly a show worth writing home about. I’ll have a more detailed review later tonight.

While you Americans get the dog show, we get RAW. And for the most part, it was fairly enjoyable… certainly a lot better than the crap it usually shoots out. So here are some important notes: Continue reading “RAW (Feb. 12th, 2007) – We Get RAW. You Get SPOILED.”

So I’m watching RAW and I see a Great Khali mumble his way through an interview. Oh great. Just what RAW needed: another tall worthless fuck. As if that’s bad enough, they have these fake impersonators doing the Donald and the Rosie. And they’re having a match and it’s about as entertaining as playing with dog feces.

Want to be entertained? Check out the greatest spectacle on Earth… JR’s Ass. *

Later.

* Link leads to a rap video made by a YouTuber and does not contain any pictures of JR’s ass. This is a semi-family site, boy. Mind your manners.

Of course, just to reiterate, WWE put out a great PPV this past Sunday in Armageddon, featuring a sick ladder match and a man being set on fire. Can’t get any better than that.

But then comes the three-hour RAW, which is as pointless as you can get. I mean, really, what’s the point of going three hours? It’s an hour more of the same old monotonous shit that we’ve been seeing for years now. It’s starting to get a bit predictable seeing the same guys feud for the title. It almost makes you long for the days when people were complaining about Hunter’s long title reigns, because at least the wrestling was good, if not consistent.

Sorry, Vince. You had a good thing going with your PPV, but then you have to throw in your three-hour snorefest which did nothing but put me to sleep faster than the Undertaker match.

Later.

So a quick recap of RAW for those who missed it… nothing happened other than Chris Masters tapping out to his own hold, a crappy match dedicated to Roddy Piper (get well, Rod), and of course, attempts at making Cena INTENSE and EXTREME failing miserably. In other words, you didn’t miss much.

Paul Heyman is apparently gone from ECW. Wish I could say I cared, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference whether he had been there or not considering how the show is being run anyway.

So Lashley is a World champ now? Big surprise… another big, talentless lug is carrying a world championship. And Vince says Paul E. is living in the past too much. Apparently the new vision for ECW is to show the same repetitive nonsense that’s on the other two WWE shows. Just great.

Okay, I’m outta here.

Having been bored with what has happened on RAW (not to mention it was past my bedtime), I left the show to tape overnight and had just finished watching the rest of it. Final thoughts is that for a show building towards a PPV, it was rather lackluster and from a purely entertainment standpoint, I maintain my earlier “dry paint” statement. Ironic that they’d use that as a joke when it says so much about the show right now. But like I said, the PPV is shaping up to be a fairly decent card.

High Points: A bunch of Scots slapping the crap out of each other never seems to get old. Also, Jeff Hardy, no longer content with covering himself with paint, now has to cover other people with paint. Still doesn’t make it any more fun but it’s cute. Only decent match was the Trish/Mickie match…

Low Points: The main event sucked. Let’s not kid ourselves here: there’s nothing historical about McMahon wrestling in MSG since it’s not THAT big a deal. Certainly, Hunter tried to get something watchable out of Vince, but it ain’t happening.

Other than that, not much happened on the show that stood out. There were a couple decent matches buried within a couple crappy matches, but nothing that stands and says memorable. So if you missed the show, you didn’t miss much.

So yeah… I’m watching RAW right now and… good god, this show sucks.

Let’s have the so-called hardcore match that was heavily hyped feature 80% promo and 20% lame beatdown. BRILLIANT IDEA!

Let’s have Foley turning heel by having him and Edge beat on Tommy Dreamer, a guy who, other than a PPV last year, hasn’t wrestled a full-time schedule since 2002. BRILLIANT IDEA!

Let’s have a 5-on-2 handicap main event match with absolutely nothing happening. BRILLIANT IDEA!

On top of that, let’s NOT mention Joey Styles, who gave such a great promo last week that for one brief second, I almost thought I was watching another wrestling program instead of the usual sports-entertainment drivel that I’ve being widely ignoring. BRILLIANT IDEA!

I mean, come on, guys. You’re not even applying the usual half-assed effort here. And bringing back Jim Ross isn’t doing much for me. There is nothing remotely appealing or good about tonight’s broadcast and that’s sad because of the hype jobs you’ve been doing for a couple matches that could have been great masterpieces but ended up being lame TV matches nobody gives a shit about.

Not exactly an encouraging notion for me to watch the shows now that I’m home in the evenings.

On the bright side, I got some story done and slipped in a movie review. All of these items will see the light of day soon enough. But for now, I’m calling it a night because I’m tired and have to go to work [study].

Now there’s a BRILLIANT IDEA right there! Better get to it so the ratings might go up.

Later.

So last night, I watch RAW and I see Joey Styles tells it like it is. For those who missed it, here’s a transcript courtesy of SLAM! Sports:

“You want to apologize? Like nothing happened. Like you didn’t knock me on my ass in front of millions of people worldwide, and I’m gonna come down there and work with you. I’m not coming back, and now thanks to the magic of live television I’m gonna show the whole world, why for seven years in ECW I was the unscripted, uncensored, loose cannon of commentary.

“Six months ago, WWE called me, I didn’t call this company because I was looking for a job. I didn’t need a job. WWE called me because they had humiliated and fired… again, Jim Ross. So I get JR’s spot, and from week one, week after week I’ve got an ongoing lecture about the differences in professional wrestling and sports entertainment. I’m not allowed to say ‘pro wrestling’, I’m not allowed to say ‘wrestler’. I have to say ‘sports entertainment’ and refer to the wrestlers as ‘superstars’. I’m told to deliberately ignore the moves and the holds during the matches so I can tell stories. Well ignoring the moves and the holds is damn insulting to the athletes, the ‘wrestlers’, not the entertainers who leave their families three hundred days a year to ply their craft in that ring.

“Here’s the best part, because I’m not a sports entertainment storyteller I get pulled from Wrestlemania, and the reason I’m given is, is because I don’t sound like Jim Ross who’s the guy they fired in the first place. That makes sense, right?

“So I swallow the bitter pill, I’m a company guy. I get bumped from Wrestlemania. Then I get bumped from Backlash? I’m not good enough to call Backlash!? In ECW, I called live pay-per-views on my own, solo, no color commentators dragging me down. Wasn’t done before me, hasn’t been done since. But I’m not good enough to call Backlash because I’m not a sports entertainment storyteller.

“Well you know what? I am sick of sports entertainment. I am sick of male cheerleaders. I am sick of boogers and bathroom humor and semen and I am sick of our chairman, who likes to talk about his own semen, he mocks God… he mocks God!!!!! And makes out with the divas all to feed his own insatiable ego. I am sick of sports entertainment, and most of all I am sick of you fans who actually buy into that crap! This sports entertainment circus! I never needed this job, and I don’t want this job anymore. I quit!”

And so we return you to your regularly scheduled bingo hall life.

Later.

So yeah, the recent episode of RAW has left me offended. No, it’s not due to the Photoshop pictures of McMahon in famous religious works of art (although to be honest, I don’t think they’re trying anymore). Nor is it the starting up of his own religion (which will last for a few weeks when people realize there won’t be a martyr involved to legitimize the whole thing – nice try, Vince, but if your bodybuilding fed and your football league went down the crapper, a new religion isn’t going to be any more successful.) So what offended me on RAW?

The cheap pyro-effects… because if God doesn’t give you a sign, you make one up. Unfortunately, the effects used were so un-God like. If you really wanted God-like effects, I would dare you to blow up the ring (not shoot a few bolts and have it collapse… I mean have it really EXPLODE!). But you won’t do that and for that… well, actually, that’d be really, really stupid. So good on the sane folks who opted not to do this.

Besides that piece of business… gee, I don’t know. That’s probably the only thing that was noteworthy about that last RAW. It’s not a terrible show or anything, but really nothing that memorable… which would make it a bad show, right?

Right?

Okay, I did my completely random rant of the morning.