AEW Dynamite (April 20th, 2022) – Amazingly, RVD Is Not #AllElite

Amazingly, Rob Van Dam did not make his supposed AEW debut, because what better time to make waves in the new promotion than on the 4/20 edition of Dynamite.
So now that we got the obvious deadhorse joke out of the way, the major announcement hyped up by Tony Khan turned out to be the official announcement of Forbidden Door, a joint AEW/New Japan PPV event from Chicago taking place in late-June… so another PPV event for me to sample, yippee. The way they handled this was fine; as TK came out and introduced the president of New Japan, only for Adam Cole to pop up on screen and make the announcement himself, which was the right move because Adam Cole is a good promo and TK often comes across as awkward. And then of course, this brings out Jay White of Bullet Club fame, who is… not the least bit amazing. By the way, him saying that he sold out MSG is cute and what a heel in taking credit for other people’s hard work.
I may have to go back and watch that MSG show, actually. One of these days.
(By the way, to any of those hardcore WWE fanatics who are writing this off as a nothing deal, I remind you that last year, WWE was in discussions with New Japan regarding a partnership of sorts and if that deal had gone through, you folks would have gotten the biggest hard-ons in the world. Don’t believe me? How many of you cheering Cody now shat on him in AEW? Just saying.)
Meanwhile, there was some good wrestling on here. CM Punk vs. Dustin Rhodes opened the show and that was a good match. Wardlow and the Butcher had a good ol’ fashioned hoss fight and after Wardlow won, MJF cut a promo to pay off Jake The Snake to cut one of his classic Jake The Snake promos before ol’ Murderhawk himself Lance Archer goes “Fuck all that. EVERY BODY FUCKING DIES!” Excellent. Trios between the Blackpool Combat Club and three geeks is always fun for a lark. Kyle O’Reilly beating Jungle Boy to advance in the Owen Hart tournament was NOT a surprise as it should’ve been, because we needz some genuine CANADIANS in this tournament showcasing this CANADIAN rassler. And the coffin match between Andrade and Darby was an entertaining spectacle if nothing else.
Points must be docked for one of the Private Party guys ripping a Sting sign from a guy in a Sting mask, who pulls the mask off to reveal himself to be… Sting. I could’ve sworn I’ve seen this bit in TNA ages ago. I must stress; I don’t mind it. It’s funny.
Oh, and Sting does another dive… and I was worried about Steve Austin having another match.
All in all, a perfectly fine edition of Dynamite. Summon the bots to hate this show.

Moar MMM Stuff Coming Soon-ish

It’s been a while since my last MMM level… about five months.

For anyone wanting more of this stuff, I’ve got some semblance of good news. I’ll be uploading a couple levels to my account if you want to sample them. And I’ve got something else in the works that I’ll be posting on this here blog soon enough. If I had a community tab on the archive channel, I would post this there, but I don’t because nobody uses the damn thing.
Time to change that, I suppose.

AEW Dynamite (Apr. 13, 2022) – Joe Deserved Better Than The Second Coming Of Giant Gonzales

Note to future wrestling promoters; if you’re going to have an overrun on your weekly television show, make it worth your audience’s while. Don’t blow it on something that nobody is going to care about.
Case in point; last night’s episode of Dynamite, which was another fine episode in a series of fine episodes and I’ve little to say in general. Jurassic Express beating O’Reilly & Fish to retain the tag titles was a nice surprise to an otherwise fine piece of tag wrestling, Captain Shawn Dean scoring another big win over MJF (albeit via countout after MJF was scared off by Wardlow because… whatever, don’t kill the Cap’n’s big moment, pal!), a fun six-man with Jericho’s crew beating up Eddie’s crew, and finally Team Taz’s best stars whose name is not HOOK get a big win over the NXT rejects of Swerve and Keith Lee. The women’s match was kinda trash, though. That’s what we get for saying Britt/Rosa didn’t live up to expectations, I suppose.
Samoa Joe vs. Minoru Suzuki was a good main event… didn’t quite live up to the physicality of Joe Vs. Kobashi (not that I would’ve expected it) and the match felt more like a tease of something bigger and more brutal, but it was fine and seeing Joe win the ROH TV Title from Suzuki was a nice little surprise. What wasn’t so nice was the follow-up, which saw Jay Lethal and Sonjay Dutt beat up Joe for a bit before the lights went out – another gimmick we need to kill off if the end result is another diminishing return – and when they turn back on, we get this big tall dude whose name I’m not even going to try and spell out because I might butcher it… I’ll look it up later, I promise.
I’d imagine this is a TBS deal or something… probably to try and get a big Indian name over… I wish nothing but the best for this guy, but my hopes are not high, as past experience has proven. It also doesn’t help that first impressions for this guy is that of a big, lumbering oaf that killed a previously hot crowd, who were probably expecting a name with some weight to it. Perhaps a certain Swiss superhuman or some guy named Johnny, not some failed basketball player who’s reminding me of another failed basketball player who was marketed as a giant among men and nobody bought into because he was just tall and lanky. Poor bastard has a long way to go to wipe the stencth of this first impression of the minds of the audience.
One thing is certain; this was definitely NOT WORTH the extra few minutes of overrun that had been hyped and was a downer ending on an otherwise fine edition of Dynamite. But I’m sure any negative reaction that this garners will be blamed on bots… because that’s Tony’s schtick these days.
And no, that’s not going away any time soon…

ECW Barely Legal (April 1997)

Ramblemania has been delayed again… because I still haven’t got around to seeing the entirety of the four-night “buy one, get one free at the buffet line” or whatever Punk called it months ago. However, I did see the first ECW PPV from 1997. Yeah, Barely Legal turns 25 this year and to celebrate the occasion for a show that I have no personal nostalgia for, I’d figure it’d be appropriate to give it a PPV musings of sorts.

Just so we’re clear on where this is coming from: my exposure to ECW was largely relegated to the occasion mentions in wrestling magazines and such until they started airing ECW PPVs in Canada in around 1999. By the point, ECW had a show on TNN, but most of its big stars were jumping ship to greener pastures in the WWF and WCW. Even during the twilight years of the promotion, I was fascinated by the more rough-around-the-edges style of production and wrestling that I made it a point to try and expose myself to as much ECW as possible, whether it’d be on the stray ECW VHS tape I’d find in stores or some of the later DVD compilations that WWE would put out.

So long story short; I wasn’t an ECW fan during its prime years, but I have a weird fascination with this promotion that I got some of their DVDs and stuff. So now I’m watching the first PPV they put out in 1997, which had its own interesting backstory.. that I’m not going to tell here because it’s been told better elsewhere.

Let’s just get this over with before I start rambling about other shit.

Continue reading “ECW Barely Legal (April 1997)”

Old Tommy Interview Ages Poorly (And It's Not JDF!)

Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/interviews/intellivision-amico/

Came across this old interview that Tommy Tallarico did when he was still the head of Intellivision. Naturally, he was talking about the Amico and bringing up points about family and such. One thing I noticed he did was slag on Stadia and Atari. With Stadia, he brought up that Google had a multi-million dollar campaign that failed to get people interested in Stadia… of course, it should be mentioned that Stadia was a largely worthless piece of shit, but we’ll let that slide.
He also brought Atari’s various attempts to bring Ataribox to life, calling out their stumbling efforts at crowdfunding and pointing out that Amico has more pre-orders than Ataribox. I’ll admit that Ataribox got off to a rough start and we all mocked the thing as it kept getting delayed and news about people leaving the project got out. But here’s the thing; Ataribox did eventually make its way into the hands of those who ordered the thing. It may not be the new hot thing on store shelves, but there are videos of people actually in possession of the machine and have showcased the machine to be fully functional PC boxes.
Amico, on the other hand? All that’s come out is an unboxing video to show that it exists and talks that it might not even see the light of day because Intellivision doesn’t have any money and could be on the verge of bankruptcy. It seems almost humorous that years ago, everyone thought Atari was the big joke and Amico was going to be the more likely to materialize.
Not trying to rail on Tommy or anything; I just find it funny that he would bring up shit about Atari and Stadia and yet both products are out on the market while Amico’s future is uncertain. Hopefully, things turn around for them and they’ll get Amico out sooner or later.