No…but I don’t see Lesnar as the champion either, since it’s doubtful that he would ever appear other than at a PPV. I wouldn’t be surprised if (a) Dean Ambrose gets “injured” during his match, giving him an excuse not to be at the arena later, and (b) Cena-Lesnar ends in some non-ending - maybe a double countout - where they both end up fairly beaten up, and then Rollins cashes in MITB on Cena without Ambrose being there to stop him.
They are slowly adding older episodes of RAW. The latest one is 7/31/95.
I’ve heard that Nitro will be added once RAW gets to 9/4/95, the date Nitro premiered. You can then relive the Monday Night Wars.
How many times have the Wyatts fought the Usos now? (I was going to say "jobbed out to, but I forgot the pattern: Wyatts win on TV, lose on PPV title shot.) And The Dust Busters (who really need a name–the Cosmic Connection?)–they spent a solid month doing weird–admittedly entertaining, but weird–promos that sorta seemed like they were leading up to some storyline, and so eventually we got… them fighting RybAxel, just like they did before they went off for the month of promos.
No, sorry–if we’re going to have a tag teams at all, we need more teams–even if they’re only part time or ad hoc teams, like SLATER GATOR BAYBEE! Or the New Nation, except that apparently Creative has literally forgotten about them entirely. We need The Ascension, and we need them ASAP. The Usos had an open challenge on Main Event tonight–I was hoping, as unlikely as it was, for The Ascension to make a surprise appearance and ABSOLUTELY DEMOLISH Jimmy and Jey. (Hey, I like the Usos more than your usual smark, but it is way past time for those belts to change hands.)
What better way to sell the Network/PPVs? That’s how they used to book things–if you wanted to see Hogan fight a match, you bought a PPV (or went to a house show/dark match); on free TV, you’d see him cut promos and maybe a confrontation with whatever heel was challenging, but you paid your money if you wanted to see the big draw. John Cena doesn’t need the belts to do all of his “Face of the Company” PR work/selling merch/cutting jokey Jern promos on Raw; Brock, on the other hand, is enough of an attraction that people will want to pay their [del]$10[/del] $9.99 to see him fight, especially if he shows up (and doesn’t fight) on say, at least one RAW between every set of PPVs–usually the go home, but I like the idea of him being able to show up on any show to help sell RAW as well. Makes every single PPV a “must-see”, assuming they can find credible opponents. (Which is really the issue with Brock. :eek:)
What’s best for business? A part time champ, I think.
(Also, thought I’d bring this over from my IWC hangout, since there’s been a lot of talk about the SS card–so here are rumoured match times, courtesy of the Observer, spoilered just in case.)
Dolph Ziggler vs. The Miz: 10 min.
Chris Jericho vs. Bray Wyatt: 15 min.
Rusev vs. Jack Swagger: 12 min.
AJ Lee vs. Paige: 12 min.
Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins: 15 min.
Roman Reigns vs. Randy Orton: 20 min.
Stephanie McMahon vs. Brie Bella: 15 min.
John Cena vs. Brock Lesnar: 25 min.
NXT’s got some major indie talent coming to their shores. I’ve seen Kevin Steen on RoH, and I’m kind of surprised WWE recruited him. He’s pretty old school, kind of an urban version of Dick Murdoch. I guess WWE isn’t looking for pretty boys like they used to. He’s a good bruiser type who can do some amazing aerial shit as well.
I haven’t heard of Prince Devitt before, but a Googling sample shows that he likes to body paint himself to look like Venom. He looks to have a pretty twisted imagination. Hopefully Kenta won’t turn out to be the next Yoshi Tatsu.
I think the New Nation must have gotten aborted once they realized they already had six episodes of NXT in the can where Xavier Woods was a face, and they didn’t want him to be a face there and a heel on the main roster. Seth Rollins and Big E were both faces in NXT while they were heels on Raw, but that was before the network launched, and consistency was less important.
Maybe. But it’d be a change (for the better). Since I’ve been watching NXT (sometime post WM), continuity has run in one direction: From the main roster down to NXT. NXT continuity doesn’t run uphill–so while Paige winning the “Divas” belt on Raw triggers a tourney for the NXT Women’s belt, nobody on Raw comments on the fact that Bo Dallas was retired from NXT by losing a Loser Leaves Town match. (Well, “retired,” anyway. Bo’s retirement just made way for Mr NXT, who has hopefully posted bail from Full Sail Jail by now and will be making his triumphant return at NXT Takeover 2: Electric Boogaloo.)
OK, I admit it, I marked out the other night during John Cena’s promo on RAW when he looked dead serious at the camera and said “And I know a lot of you are asking… when’s Cena going to turn?” Cena reads the internets!
He managed to work it into his deliberations about the match with Lesnar, by insinuating he was going to have to be heelish to match the ferocity of his opponent. Cena’s showing the same psychological discourse Mick Foley went through when he was trying to figure out how to get the ECW fans to hate him. He knew they despised Eric Bischoff, so he wore a shirt that had Bischoff’s smarmy face with the words “Forgive Me Eric” underneath.
I’m actually kind of doubtful Cena will lose the belt to Brock. If Brock wins, he has to commit to a full-time schedule until March/April next year, at least as far as PPVs are concerned. As good as Seth Rollins is, I can’t see him becoming champ, unless it’s to lose in spectacular fashion to Roman Reigns next WM. Rollins and Ambrose simply can NOT resolve their feud with a lameberjack match. It has to be something like Thunderdome with chainsaws and barbed wire and flaming hoops.
I loved Cena’s promo, even though he was going through some of his old tropes (calling out his hecklers, for example), and of course Heyman’s work was amazing. I really hope that Lesnar doesn’t win the title only because he is a strong candidate for the most boring person on the planet. I suspect we’ll see a more physical, semi-heel style Cena in this match; I wouldn’t be surprised, for that matter, to see Cena get DQ’d so the whole thing gets capped off at HITC.
Rollins won’t cash in yet; he needs to resolve things with Ambrose, and I figure there’s a feud with the Wyatts coming down the line for no good reason. The logical ending for Rollins/Ambrose could be a TLC match at…well…TLC, if they want to extend the feud out that long.
I’ve been listening to Steve Austin’s podcasts on YouTube. He’s a really amiable host. It’s like hanging around with him in his living room. I listened to his interviews with Paul Heyman, Jim Cornette, Vader, and James Storm so far. It’s fun to hear him reminisce with other wrestling veterans, and hear what these guys are like when they’re not in character… which really only applies to Vader, as Heyman and Cornette are pretty much the same. 
I’ve lived in the southeast most of my life, so I’ve seen NWA and WCW before WWF became available. I’ve seen Jim Cornette’s antics back when he managed The Midnight Express and Big Bubba (Ray Traylor, Big Bossman in WWE). He talked about the Mulky brothers, who were the best jobbers ever. They were two emaciated albinos who sold like every bone in their bodies got shattered. Cornette called them Mulkymania, and they started getting hugely over with the fans. He had a funny story about taking on the Mulkys in their home town of Anderson SC, ending with he and the ME escaping the venue as soon as they won the match, turning to see outraged villagers with torches and pitchforks in hot pursuit.
That makes sense, especially as (like I said) they’re doing the same thing with ECW.
If they do show the old Nitros, I hope then include the Horsemen segments they cut out of the WWE On Demand broadcasts.
Does anyone listen to wrestling-centric podcasts?
I have two in my repertoires and my girlfriend has a third in hers.
I rather enjoy the Cheap Heat podcast on Grantland, and I REALLY love The Steel Cage podcast. My girlfriend likes those and also Talk is Jericho. Does anyone else have any recommendations?
Mainly Steve Austin’s on YouTube, and whatever shows up in the suggestion column.
I like Steve Austin as a podcaster better than I did as a wrestler. His interviews with the Kliq are all great.
Was that the match where the Midnights decided to make it a long, competitive match and the Mulkeys (both heavy smokers) got completely blown up? BTW, I have a Mulkeymania t-shirt.
Is that the same as the one on PodcastOne?
In addition to that, I listen to the Ross Report, with good ol’ JR, and Colt Cabana’s Art of Wrestling. Talk is Jericho is a bit hit or miss–he draws from a wider pool of guests, and many of them I have no interest in.
I listen to occasional downloads of the SCSA Show and the Ross Report, to be honest I stumbled onto the SCSA show about 8 months ago when looking for some random podcast to listen to on a long road trip and listened to 4 of his shows straight (Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Kevin Nash and Bischoff.) All were so good it got me back into watching wrestling again for the first time since the early 2000s.
My logic on Brock/Cena is the only result that makes sense is Cena losing the belts. I agree it’s questionable having a part-time champion, but there’s tons of precedent for it. Hogan was essentially a part time champion for much of his career. Daniel Bryan very recently held the belts for several months without wrestling a single match due to his injury.
The reasons for Brock winning:
Brock has a contract which is high dollar, but involves few appearances and even fewer matches. I’m assuming it stipulates x/number of “appearances” (like his crashing Hogan’s b-day party or when he came down to shake H’s hand for the SummerSlam match) and x/number of “matches.” Since wrestling contracts are a guarded trade secret we only hear rumors, but I’ve heard the last 5-6 years Undertaker has had a standing agreement where WWE pays him $100k/pop anytime he wrestles. I imagine Brock’s deal is probably in that range with a guaranteed number of matches so that Brock can make the money he wants to make in exchange for only working a match maybe 5-6 times a year.
All this is to say, Brock is a lot more expensive than Cena. Cena reportedly makes $3-4m + % of merch. But Cena can and is worked 300+ days a year, John Cena makes the same money regardless of his number of appearances, so Cena appearances are “cheap” in that WWE pays no marginal cost for having Cena wrestle. With Brock, they only get him a few times a year, so it only makes sense to use Brock in a way that makes WWE the most money and/or sets up the most important storylines.
Him vs Undertaker is an example of that, him beating the Undertaker likewise needs to have some serious storyline implications because it not only cost a lot of money to put those guys together at WM30, it cost a lot of long-built storyline capital to end the Undertaker’s streak.
So all that being said, does it make sense to use the very valuable storyline “capital” Brock has from his defeat of Undertaker, plus the expensive nature of having Brock wrestle, to have Brock put Cena over? I say no. Because Cena is the most over guy in WWE, he beats everyone almost every time. He’s Superman mixed with Captain America and Batman and Jesus. There’s no “need” to put Cena over.
Is there a need to fill a Summerlam Main Event slot? Yes. Does Cena need to be in that slot? I argue probably not, but WWE thought so after Daniel Bryan went down. So that says to me if you “need” Cena in that spot, do you also need Brock Lesnar? I don’t think so, actually. I think there were a lot of good alternates to Brock if you just wanted a villain for Cena to defeat. Start up a bigger feud with Randy 2-3 months ago, or there are various triple threat / fatal four way matches I can think of that, if the only need is to get people to watch and have Cena keep the belt, make more sense than “wasting” a Brock Lesnar appearance.
It’s very difficult to make new superstars, and the guy that knocks Lesnar off is going to get a huge push. Unless that guy is John Cena–because Cena cannot get a big push because he’s already at the top, he cannot be pushed further. It makes far more sense to setup Lesnar to put over one of the up and coming faces (most likely Reigns) than it does to have him lose to John Cena.
I also should mention I think SummerSlam is do or die for Bray Wyatt’s character/career. As great as Wyatt is in the ring and even cutting promos, to me he’s getting stale. His promos just fall flat when he loses every major match he is in, it’d be like all the stuff Undertaker did out of the ring (various supernatural stunts etc) if Taker lost every big match. It just makes your “evil villain” look like a boring clown.
I was one of the few “Internet” wrestling fans not outraged by Cena’s win in the Last Man Standing match over Bray, because I thought Bray actually was made to look extremely strong in defeat. I said, there is no reason that loss has to derail Bray, and it didn’t have to, but Bray hasn’t really been used well since then. I think anything involving Jericho is great, but for some reason the Jericho–Wyatt feud isn’t doing what I (suspect) it was intended to do–which is put Wyatt over.
WWE seems to get things backwards these days. It used to be when you wanted to have a big heel vs face feud, the heel was going to win a lot of matches. Maybe never cleanly, but win them. Especially on TV and even on the longer feuds the heel would win a lot of the “minor” PPV matches. Then finally you get to the blow off match at one of the “Big Four” PPVs and the face finally overcomes all the cheating and bullshit (sometimes with the aid of the match type, for example a cage match or HitC preventing shenanigans) to beat the heel and vanquish him once and for all.
When you do that, both the heel and the face look good in their respective roles. But Bray’s feuds have largely seen him losing most of the build up matches and most of the in between matches. It makes it hard to understand how he can be regarded as a threatening heel.
I remember Cornette promoting it back in the day. ME vs the Mulkies was being billed as the main event, so it was going to be at least a 20-minute match. I think ME would sell to the Mulks to make the match look competitive. I don’t recall Cornette saying the Mulks were smokers, but he did say they were blowing up.
If I ever had the chance, I’d ask Cornette if they ever considered getting an actress or a lady wrestler like The Fabulous Moolah to play his mama. He played up the Mama’s Boy angle big time. I would love to have seen an aged southern belle wearing fake furs and rhinestone-studded rings and spectacles, pulling along a bunch of poodles (with rhinestone-studded collars) and pinching her baby boy Jimmy’s cheek.
Dunno, but I guess so. He says he does a clean family-friendly show on Tuesdays and an uncensored version on Thursdays.
Also, John Cena would win in a handicap match with them.
Poor Cesaro, by the way, reduced to working the slot previously alotted to a feud between a leprachaun who lives under the ring and a miniature bull. 