AEW Dynamite (January 15th, 2025) – Minimum Carnage

Welcome back, neckbrace Tony. You’ve been missed.

Tonight’s themed show is brought to you by Maximum Carnage – which apparently has nothing to do with the Spider-Man comic book event from the 90s or the hit video game that spawned from it. Instead, it’s just a name of a random Dynamite show from a smaller theater house, which is actually quite a nice setting. One thing I will credit AEW on is finally reading the room that maybe half-filled arenas is a bad look and opting for smaller, more intimate locations. Some might see this as a step down – and certainly the stragglers will declare AEW DED BY NATIONAL DILDO DAY or something like that – but a smaller setting with a hotter crowd always makes for a good atmosphere and if you can make the smaller setting seem much better – TNA used to have a knack for this back in their prime years – all the merrier.

As for the show itself…

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RAW (January 13th, 2025) – I Only Stayed For Penta

So last night was the WWE RAW debut of Penta (formerly Pentagon Jr. and Penta El Cero Miedo of TNA and AEW fame), where he defeated Chad Gable in a nice little showcase for the new signee and not much more than that. The idea of Michael Cole opening mentioning TNA and Lucha Underground by name will always be weird to me. For what it was – show off the new guy and prop him up a bit – I thought it was fine and I wish Penta nothing but the best in his new home. (Not sold on him cutting a promo afterwards, but his English was fine and his thanking his family and fans for the journey was nice and wholesome.)

Other than that, I didn’t see much of the show, but apparently, we have a new IC Women’s champion in Lyra Valkyria, Damien Priest beat up Finn Balor in a main event street fight, more names were announced for the Rumble, and Jey Uso is challenging GUNTHER for the World title at Saturday Night’s Main Event. My thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Jey Uso before his eventual mauling at the hands of the Ring General.

That’s all I have to say on that. Next Wednesday, PPV Musings will be making a return and will cover the only Royal Rumble event not to get the Royal Ramble treatment. I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you…

Should be a fun one to revisit, kids.

Later.

RAW (January 6th, 2025) – Playing The Role Of Vince McMahon… NETFLIX!

It’s the first RAW on Netflix… a new era in WWE programming.

And it was… a show…

Not sure what you were expecting me to say. Not sure what you were expecting out of this show. It was a big show, sure… but it wasn’t FUCKING BIG SHOW or anything like that. He’s signed with AEW at the moment.

Anyway, some notes on this three-hour show… because RAW is back to three hours again… so one less show for me to watch per week.

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Smackdown (January 3rd, 2025) – XL Sized

Welp, it’s finally happened. Smackdown has moved to three hours.

That’s one less show for me to watch on a weekly (or is it weakly) basis, but let’s give the first SD of the year a shot before we completely abandon it. I betcha it’s going to have lots of fun stuff involving Diet Bloodline and wondering when Dwayne is showing up?

Or maybe we’re just using this show to hype up tonight’s RAW, which will be the first Netflix episode.

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TNA Impact (January 2nd, 2025) – Filling In The Slots Left Behind By WWE

Yes, we’re doing the first episode of Impact in 2025… but this one is a little more significant in that it’s the first new Impact to air on Sportsnet 360, the Canadian sports channel that, up until recently, was home to WWE programming and with that having gone to Netflix, that left an opening for programming that could have been filled with MOAR CANADIAN CONTENT… but I guess because TNA is now owned by Anthem Sports (a Canadian group – yes, TNA is owned by Canadians, which would made one-time heel faction Team Canada the rulers of TNA until they shitcanned Scott D’Amore), that makes them Canadian content and thus slots were filled.

So, yeah, while the title might sound like a bit of a joke, it’s not technically wrong. And honestly, it’s a big deal for TNA. Sportsnet has much greater visibility in Canada than the Fight Network does. And apparently, TNA programming was all over Sportsnet on New Year’s Day, which would’ve been nice to had known beforehand, but… whatever. What’s important is that we have a new year of Impact to check out and it’s… another episode of Impact.

See, the move to Sportsnet is a big deal in Canada to a degree, but not so much in America, where it’s business as usual, I suppose.

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AEW Dynamite (January 1st, 2025) – Fight For The Fallen

Happy New Year from your friends at All Elite Wrestling. Celebrate the occasion with a special “Fight For The Fallen” edition of AEW Dynamite from Asheville, to help support those recovering the hurricane last year. Well, that’s a rather nice gesture for them to do. I’ll give them that much.

Besides that, this is the first Dynamite show to be simucast on both TBS and the MAX Streaming Service as part of the new AEW/WBD TV deal that will let them do more of these things. Admittedly, I have been down on AEW as of late, but you know what? It’s a new year (yes, it is) and since I’m making a point to watch all the first shows of the year and doing musings on them, I might as well kick things off with Dynamite.

For those wondering, Impact will be up tomorrow. Smackdown will be up on Sunday. If I have the channel that Collision is airing on (a former Discovery channel redubbed USA Network – no relation), there will be that going up on Monday. And of course, the first RAW of the Netflix era will be covered on Tuesday… and then Wednesday will be stuff. Don’t expect regular weekly write-ups on these things or anything like that unless I happen to like the shows and dub them worth the effort; this is just a one off to see which of these shows kicks off the new year with a strong effort. Dynamite, of course, is the first one up… so it’ll have to be a real “banger” of a show (as the kids say) if it’s going to maintain its crown or something.

Anyhoo, here are some observations I’ve made during the show – not a blow for blow show recap because that requires a commitment that is well above my non-existent paygrade, but just notes on some stuff that I noticed or something. The usual output for this blog.

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The Rest Of Saturday Night’s Main Event

On Sunday morning, I posted my reaction to the complete justified actions of one Kevin Owens to the American person, Cody Rhodes. I won’t repeat those here and will instead direct you to said post if you want to read on those again. I will add that if Armed Anderson had been around, there’d be some justice ’round these parts.

However, this is more show to talk about and I did watch the rest of the show, which was a bunch of matches within a throwback setting.

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TNA Impact (Oct. 24th, 2024) – The Final Push To Bound For Glory

It’s the Go Home show for tonight’s Bound For Glory PPV, which I’ll be watching and musing about… though don’t expect said musings for another week or so. Also, don’t expect any more Impact musings on a regular basis after this. Maybe once in a while, but that’s about the extent of it. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to catch up on, including prep for next week.

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TNA Impact (Oct. 17th, 2024) – Not Exactly Their Strongest Effort

Show opens with a memorial graphic of Joe Koff, former Ring Of Honor head during the Sinclair years. I know nothing about the guy other than he was a well-liked dude. Thoughts and prayers to his friends and family.

In the opening match, PCO defeated Rhino in a hardcore match to retain both his belts – because even though the Lutte Internationale title isn’t an official TNA title, we’re defending it like a TNA title. I thought that I was watching Impact, not Dynamite. This is followed by a promo from Nic Nemeth hyping up his match against Matt Cardona… oh great, just what we need; a rehashing of the Dolph Ziggler/Zack Ryder rivalry from a decade ago.

Speaking of old WWE gimmicks, Ash By Elegance – the former Dana Brooke – made short work of some NXT girl whose name I don’t recall, but Xia Brookside comes along to keep Ash from doing anything questionable. This is followed by a pretty good match between Speedball Bailey and some dude who is quickly disposed of by Bailey to retain his X-Division title.

Main event sees Nic Nemeth retaining his TNA title over Matt Cardona… no Z True Island Story success to be found here, but this was a pretty good match. You look at the match they had at one of the old WWE PPVs from 2011 compared to this and they’re night and day.

Oh and Kazarian puts on a ref shirt to announce that he’ll be the special ref for the Nemeth/Hendry title match at Bound For Glory. Isn’t it enough we have the specter of John Layfield hovering over this title match already? Do we really need another heel ref to color this thing even further?

I’m at a point where I’m not really feeling the build up for Bound For Glory. There’s some good stuff here and there – I’m liking Mike Santana’s war on the System, going through each one before getting to Moose – but it seems like there’s a lack of anticipation in this show that’s supposed to be the biggest show of the TNA calendar. I wouldn’t necessarily call this Impact a bad show; it remains an easy two hours of wrestling for me to watch, but as a show building up to a PPV… it’s not exactly hitting that sweet spot.

IMPACT (Oct. 10th, 2024) – This Was Better Than Bound For Glory 2010

I’m a little lagging in these Impact things, so rather than talk about the AEW PPV that I didn’t watch or the AEW Dynamite show that I also didn’t watch, I’m going to talk about the Impact show from last week that I did watch.

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