State Of The Blog – November 2024

What was supposed to be following an entirely cromulent October-wide marathon turned out to be a month curtailed by illness, disease, and family emergencies galore. I suppose I should happy that three out of five weeks ain’t bad. Will do better next year… maybe.

There’s a lot of things that I’d like to do better next year, but I’ll save that for the next State Of The Blog, which I hope will be more timelier than this one has been. Sadly, things behind the scenes haven’t been too cozy and I haven’t had as much time keeping up with things around here. Hence the general lack of quality control (posts with wrong video embeds or descriptors, incomplete posts published out of nowhere, etc.).

I wouldn’t expect much out of this month. The usual batch of video reviews and PPV musings… maybe a comic review or two, but I’m most focusing on getting this last batch of stuff out of the way so that I can focus on material for next year… which I hope will run more smoothly. For the moment, I just want something a little more stable and manageable for the closing months of 2024,  which is all I could ever ask for… or at least, scratch off the “Would Be Nice” list.

This is the part where I would segue into a brief touch on the need for stability down south, but there’s already a Bite commentary that covers my feelings just fine… and then I recorded about fifteen minutes of audio for the next DTM-Cast to talk about this further. Fortunately, it’ll be the first fifteen minutes of the show that you can easily skip if you just want to hear the fun stuff.

In any event, click the break for the planned but subject to change schedule of videos and PPV musings. Anything else that pops up along the way for the next six weeks is considered a bonus.

Continue reading “State Of The Blog – November 2024”

TNA Turning Point 2006

Turning Point 2006 was the final TNA PPV of the year and featured the (not) long-awaited (enough) rematch between Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe, which was pretty much the hottest thing they had going at the time. Kurt Angle, of course, gave Samoa Joe his first real defeat (that wasn’t a 3-way loss where someone else took the fall) and kicked off a career renaissance of sorts. Conventional wisdom would suggest holding off the rematch for later down the road, but sometimes, wrestling promotions rarely follow conventional wisdom. And I don’t say that as a knock on Vince Russo, who was hired back by TNA earlier that year. WWE has been guilty of the same thing as well over the years.

Anyway, it’s Joe vs. Angle II. Something they could’ve held off a couple months until their next big tentpole event, but I guess TNA felt threatened by that ECW PPV taking place the same month with a week’s worth of build. I wonder how that show turned out.

Continue reading “TNA Turning Point 2006”

THE BITE COMMENTARY #07 – The Four Year Wait

The following post is a post about politics on a blog that normally does not discuss politics because it’s something that this blog does not like to talk about, but I guess we need to talk about this because sometimes I need to let out that borderline misanthropic side that absolutely hates humanity for its constant stupidity. If you would rather not read about such things, then skip this post and move on to… just about anything else on this blog. There’s going to be a new review up later today on an old Atari game that’s more entertaining and happy than this post. Otherwise, please bare with me as I ramble about a recent political event.

So… I guess that’s in the books, huh?

Continue reading “THE BITE COMMENTARY #07 – The Four Year Wait”

WWE Bad Blood 2024

So… this was going to be the musings for the Bound For Glory show that took place a couple weeks ago… but TNA doesn’t believe in Joe Hendry and thus I changed my mind.

Instead, we’re looking at WWE’s October PPV offering, Bad Blood 2024, which is the first time that we’ve had a Bad Blood PPV event since 2004, which was headlined by a horrible HBK/McSon-In-Law cell match. This show is bookended by an opening Cell match between CM Punk and Drew McIntyre and the main event tag-team match that saw Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns teaming up against that Solo guy and other Fatu guy… and the Rock shows up after to steal everyone’s thunder and remind us that he exists.

I don’t typically watch the WWE PLEs that aren’t the major shows. The last one I saw was Backlash and that’s about as far as I went. The shows were great, but nothing really grabbed me. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a strictly WWE problem, as even other wrestling shows have trouble producing content that interests me… or in one case, fail to provide a satisfying pay off to months of viewership and re-investment in a promotion that has let me down on so many occasions… but I digress. Let’s get into this Bad Blood show and see if it’s worth it.

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Five Years Ago… The AEW Promo That Changed Things

From the November 6th, 2019 episode of AEW Dynamite, Cody (not yet Rhodes again) cuts a promo for his upcoming Full Gear 2019 match with then-AEW Champion Chris Jericho stipulating that if he doesn’t win the title, then he will never challenge for said title again. For those who don’t know, Cody would lose said match against Jericho and would never get another shot at the AEW World title ever again.

It’d be a stretch to say that this promo “changed things.” At the time, Cody was simply trying to avoid the pitfalls of management putting themselves in hot angles. Jeff Jarrett as NWA Champion in TNA when he owned the company comes to mind. HHH as multiple time WWE Champion and getting favorable treatment after marrying into the family. Just about any mom-and-pop promotion who opts to book family as the top stars because you know they’re never leaving… allegedly. So this is Cody eliminating himself from that discussion and he’d go on to have a decent TNT title run before things fell off the wayside for a variety of reasons.

Cut to a few years later and Cody Rhodes left AEW for WWE. And despite a couple hiccups here or there, Cody’s WWE run FAR eclipsed anything he was doing in AEW. He even got to win the WWE title and finish that story.

Would any of this have been possible had Cody not cut this promo? Perhaps… perhaps things would’ve turned out the same and Cody still would’ve left for WWE to bring about a new era to that promotion (among other factors, of course.) But considering that the Young Bucks have had multiple tag-team runs and even Kenny Omega got a decent AEW World title run to his credit… maybe Cody jumped the gun in this case.

Rewatching this promo after everything that has happened… one of the comments said it best; this does hit differently now with hindsight in mind.