It just came across the wire that TNA is moving back to Wednesday nights.
I am literally trying to stop myself from cracking up laughing at this point. Either Billy Corgan thinks his name recognition in and of itself is enough to repair The House That Dixie Built’s reputation to the point that it could compete with NXT and LU, or he’s just planning on tanking the promotion altogether so he can use it as a tax writeoff.
Sigh…poor TNA…
Why not move to Fridays? Wrestling fans are used to having something and if you make it early enough you can get people to watch BEFORE they go out for the night…
They were on Friday since they switched to their new channel (which I’m not even sure if I get on my subscription and haven’t bothered to look). I’d say this would be their biggest boondoggle since they moved to Mondays in 2010 and tried to compete with Raw, but at least they had Hogan and Sting on the payroll back then.
I’m really not sure how they’re even still in business right now - Bob Carter’s pockets must be deeper than any of us suspected.
Judging from this app-exclusive promo, the Axel/Sandow team is now called “the Meta Powers”.
And they are now officially my favorite thing ever.
They probably explained that name to Vince about a dozen times and he still doesn’t get the joke.
TNA used to have their own identity before WCW poisoners like Hogan, Bischoff and Russo signed up with them. Now that those rats have left the sinking ship, TNA is running on fumes. When all else fails, they copy WWE. After Daniel Bryan won the WWE title, they had Eric Young, their own short guy with a beard, win their title. Stephanie McMahon went over as owner/dominatrix of the WWE, so they tried the same thing with Dixie Carter. James Storm became Bray Wyatt lite. It’s like they’re incapable of understanding that nobody wants to watch copycats.
Their stars’ entrance music are reconfigured classics. Kurt Angle enters to a version of Red Rider’s Lunatic Fringe with a couple of different notes. Awesome Kong’s is a variation of Beethoven’s Fifth. DADADA DAAAA DADADA DAAAA… Abyss has a version of Revenge of the Gladiators transcribed for 5th graders.
TNA used to have absolutely fucking unreal tag team feuds, like the Motor City Machine Guns vs Beer Money. Each team would alternate destructive finishing moves on each other like perfectly shuffled cards. Now they just have their guys yell at each other on the mikes for 15 minutes, take a commercial break, then start a match. Don’t know what Billy Corrigan has brought to the table yet, but they’re still rats in a cage with no rage to despite.
Coming up on two years (I think) since I gave up on TNA for the same reasons. I had previously stopped watching for periods of time, coming back when they made a change, only to see slightly different fecal matter.
Wait, what? WHAT???
Bray Wyatt WON a PPV match? Against Ryback?
CLEAN???
Did I miss something? Did Vince die before the show?
Oi, this is Mel Gibson. I was in the original Payback in 1999, so I invented the word. The WWE version was pretty tame compared to my last custody hearing with Oksana Grigorieva and her Kyke attorneys. She should have been the one reported to bloody Child Protective Services instead of me. She kept putting our kid in front of her when I was slapping her around.
OK Mel, fade back into obscurity. Here’s my rundown of Payback.
Preshow, R Troof vs Star “Don’t call me Cody” Dust: Troof was the taunter, SD was the exasperated foil. This was the seat-filler match, and even the announcers were tired of Cody’s gimmick. Troof manages not to take up half the match with repeated What’s Ups and wins.
The Ascension vs the Why Oh God Why? I was actually pulling for the Ascension this time around. Curtis Axle can’t get over as being the son of Mr. Perfect, so he dyes his beard hair blond and epoxies a yellow doo rag to his dome. Damian breaks from imitating Miz to imitating a jobber for realz. They were clowns for the kiddies to laugh at. What’s next, Damian Yesdow?
Main show, Sheamus vs Dolph Ziggler: Great opening match. Sheamus demonstrates how aggressive Irishmen can get when there’s not enough sheep around. Zig gets the revenge of the butt cheek, Rikishi style. The bloodshedding between these two continues when Zig’s face becomes the Crimson Mask after his head contacts Sheamus’s Cro-Magnon brow. Sheamus wins with the Brogue Kickue.
Noo-hoo Day-hee vs Kidd & Cesaro, best 2 out of 3: Great match series. Cesaro looked like Superman out there. Xavier Woods hardly wrestles, but he’s got the mouth to make up for it. I can’t decide if Kofi’s pigtails are racist, but I’ll settle for intentionally goofy. Lots of fun spots. Powah of Positiviteh wins the final round when Xavier gets the rollup pin, capitalizing on the white referee’s inability to tell him apart from his teammate.
Ryback vs Bray Wyatt: I realize they’re trying to have Ryback connect with the audience by making it look like he’s struggled to get through life, but the guy looks like the CGI Hulk without the green skin. Even somebody the size of Bray looks incapable of hurting him. I do like that Bray won by outsmarting him, but I was hoping Harper & Rowan would do a run-in and have the Wyatts reunite. Ryback losing against three guys is more plausible.
Cena vs Rusev: With Lana out there, you knew she would be the one to submit for Rusev. I got the spinning dial about halfway through, so I had to reboot and picked up where Rusev was about to choke Cena out with the ring rope. Yep, just like I called it.
Bellas vs Naomina: Beer refill match. I can’t decide if the Bellas are more annoying as heels or faces. Nikki’s promos are her crying about Daniel nowadays. Not like me. I didn’t shed one teat when Daniel announced he was bowing out again. (sniff) That was onions.
King BNB vs Neville: The main roster decision makers seem to really like Neville. Having him prelude the main event speaks of good things to come for him. IC belt imminent perhaps? Barrett chickens out for a countout loss, then goes for the sneak attack, but eats a Red Arrow for his trouble. At least he didn’t get pinned and look even more like a chump, but he’s pretty much bottomed out anyway. Maybe his next feud will be with Barrettdow.
Fatal Four-Way: At this point, Kane & J & J running constant interference isn’t anything to get upset about. It’s become acceptably stupid instead of ingratiatingly annoying. It actually worked this time, because it kept Dean, Roman and Randy from ganging up on Seth at the beginning. They all started by scoping each other out, then slowly turned toward Seth, who started grovelling.
I marked out big time when the three former SHIELDsters triple power bombed Randy into the announcers’ table. Then, Seth extended the unity fist and Dean and Roman turned to look at him with differing opinions. These guys have such great chemistry together even when they’re fighting. While a reunification hasn’t got a chance in hell at this point, teasers are still fun. The ending was a huge downer. The Pedigree never looked that devastating to begin with, and Seth adopting it makes him officially HHH’s boy.
The good matches were really good (4-way, tag team match, Zigs and Sheamus, anything with Neville) and the boring matches were just fine I guess (the rest of them).
I’m mostly mad at Ziggler for cutting himself open. Yeah it’s cool to us. We mark out and say “awesome!” and “Yeah Ziggler! Way to be extreme!”, but to me it was just Ziggler being reckless with his body (his head!!) and being 2 seconds away from concussing himself. See, this is why you aren’t in the main storyline, you need to dial it back there chief and don’t take unnecessary risks.
New Day is perfection as always. Did the Freebirds also have their third guy run in and make a pin like last night? I’m going to give WWE a liiiiiiiitle benefit of the doubt that it’s a callback and not semi-veiled racism. I also loved their promo later in the night. “We don’t spit…we don’t curse…we don’t complain…” (later) “pbhththt…what the hell??..how can this happen? it’s not fair!” Oh lord that’s just perfect.
Can we get a WWE documentary on Naomi’s shoes? I’m more interested in that than anything else. How are they made? How do the lights withstand the pressure of a match? Who controls the lights? Are they on a timer? These are the important divas questions I need to know.
How does elimination chamber work? I think they retired the cage before I started watching again, and if they didn’t it was new enough in the year I just don’t remember it.
Overall I give Payback a C. I enjoyed the matches that were good, but mostly I was just bored because nothing was really that particularly compelling.
STC: The idea behind Freebird rules is that 2 of the FBs would participate in the match while the 3rd stood outside the ring. Sometimes it was Michael P.S. Hayes and Terry Gordie, but usually it’d be Gordie and Buddy Lee Parker in the ring, and Hayes would be outside, prancing around like a rooster and jumping up on the ring apron to distract the referee and whatnot. The three looked nothing alike, so I don’t think Hayes ever pulled the same stunt that Xavier did, but he would definitely cheat.
I remember one time they were interviewing Hayes while they showed a match of the Freebirds vs some guy and a big fat farm boy who would eventually be Uncle Elmer in the WWF. Hayes kept pissing off Elmer, and Elmer would chase him around the ring while his buddy was getting stomped by Gordie and Parker. Elmer finally tried to climb in the ring to help, but Hayes grabbed him by the legs and prevented him from saving the match. Hayes said “Look at that, I was trying to help him back in, but he’s too STUPID!”
Re: Payback, line of the night: One of the Bellas gets jerked down by her hair, and JBL says “That’s what you get for letting your hair grow out.” It was such an uninspired rote heel comment, Lawler had to call him on it. JBL replied, “Be like Sinead O’Connor if you don’t want your hair grabbed like that!”
Let’s just hope that Vince doesn’t decide to rib Booker and have Sandow come out in blackface as Bookerdow. Hopefully at that point, Trips and Steph would have the man sedated and taken to a hospital.
Paige v. JBL in a Hair vs. Hair match!
JBL massively overconfident, says he’ll just give her a Clothesline from Hell and it’ll be over with, she’ll never wrestle again. Paige ups stakes and says make it a No DQ Match.
Paige comes out to begin the match with a shaved head! Just like Sinead O’Connor! (read that in Vince’s voice) Out comes Natty, Charlotte, Sasha Banks, Tamina and the Bellas. They beat the holy fuck out of JBL, humiliate him, tear off most of his clothes and shave his head.
Book it Danno!
Forgot to mention, in honor of Bray Wyatt’s victory I’m wearing my [Maggle Cole] the self proclaimed ‘new face of fear’[/Maggle Cole] white pants to work today
Although speaking of Bray, anyone have any tips on how to book him out of this hell he’s in? Change up his character or whatever?
Let him win this feud.
Net positive for Ryback because he can talk about turning that negative into a positive. :rolleyes:
Then have him go after Adam Rose “Leo”, as they hinted. Squash the everloving fuck out of Rose repeatedly until Rose completely loses it, becomes Leo in the ring and finally wins a match. Then joins Wyatt, who then puts the Band (+1) back together.
They too can use the Freebird rules. And you know, the whole “three guys at ringside, guess what they’re going to do” shenanigans.
What would be funny/interesting is a punishment booking by the Authority, booking the face tag team champs (whenever that happens) in a triple threat match against…
The team of Rowan and Harper…
… and the team of Wyatt and Leo Kruger.
“ALL FOUR MEMBERS OF THE WYATT FAMILY AGAINST THE TAG TEAM CHAMPIONS? THIS ISN’T FAIR!!!”
Payback was actually pretty good. No real complaints, except that technically Rusev should have lost his match right at the beginning when he told Cena to say I Quit, and that they’re apparently going to continue dragging this Kane/Rollins thing out instead of pulling the trigger.
In other news, it turns out there exists at least one person on the internet who watched Payback and speaks Bulgarian, and they provided the following translation of what Rusev was yelling before Lana quit on his behalf;
[QUOTE=Rusev]
Ahh… no… ahhh… I give up! Next time we will crush you! I give up! Stop! I told you! I’ll crush you, Cena! Damn your old mother, Cena, I will crush you! That’s enough, I told you!
[/quote]
Provided the translation is accurate, that’s actually pretty good storytelling. Rusev didn’t say the specific words ‘I quit’ (or maybe he did, but I don’t know to what extent ‘quit’ and ‘give up’ are used similarly in Bulgarian), but did it in a language Mike Chioda couldn’t understand, presumably expecting that the only other Bulgarian-speaker at ringside wouldn’t translate it for him.
Hopefully, though, WWE won’t actually mention this, because if they do it’ll just lead into another Cena-Rusev title match and the feud should really be conclusively over at this point.
I sincerely hope that’s true.
I would love it if WWE (or hell maybe just Rusev) payed enough attention to detail to do that
For those wondering, that sound you heard was me MARKING THE F OUT over the Kevin Owens Experience. It was truly orgasmic…the rest of Raw was like trying to get out of cuddling afterwards.
WOOT WOOT WOOT!!!
KO invades RAW! Damn, his stock has risen a million percent! John Cena sux, but he’s putting over NXT. John Cena sux, but he’s putting over NXT. DAMMIT JOHN, WHY ARE YOU SO POLARIZING??? At least quit gloating about it. John Cena sux, but he’s putting over NXT. John Cena sux, but he’s putting over NXT. GAAAAAH!!!
Another exciting development, but not for the same reasons, because I really really really don’t want this to be an an occasion where history repeats itself: the Lana/Rusev/Ziggler triangle.
WCW did a similar angle, where the handsome guy who put his body on the line more than enough times was booked to seduce the main villain’s wife. That was Chris Benoit, and the angle became real when he and Nancy Sullivan hooked up. Years later, repeated exposure to concussions jarred his sanity enough to gun her and their son down, then turn the gun on himself. Please Vince, don’t ever let Lana and Dolph be alone together.
Dean FINALLY gets revenge on Seth and turns the hell of his past actions in his face. FUCK YEAH! Any reason to have their feud extend to WM LXXXVIII is fine with me, even if they’re both in wheelchairs and try to choke each other with their IV tubes.
This was actually a decent RAW. They broke out of the old mold and went in new directions, and it’s working! Now all that’s needed is for Harper and Rowan to ambush Los Matadores and take their place in Elimination Chamber and everything will be fine and dandy. 