Apparently, there’s some “shock” that Smackdown will remain at “only” two hours when it moves to Fox in October.
What did these people expect? A lot of Fox’s affiliates depend on their 10 PM (Eastern/Pacific) local news, as in a number of cities (e.g. San Francisco), it’s the most popular late night local news show, and they probably already complain that they have to give it up on Thursday nights in the fall for Fox’s NFL coverage (out east, anyway), “but at least it’s football, so the ratings will be high and we can get more money for our commercials, but we’re not giving it up for professional wrestling.”
I had no idea who he was, and thought this might have been an imaginary wrestler like the one from Edge & Christian’s show. I looked him up, and found he was recently the victim of an assault over a parking space. I guess WWE decided to get him over instead of sending him flowers.
I’m going to assume either their translator was drinking heavily at the time, or they chose something that would get by Vince without much fuss. Or both.
Considering that Vince had to be told by JR that many men find Asian women attractive, the approval process probably consisted of finding a Japanese word that the old man has heard at least once before.
There was The Great Kabuki, managed by Gary Hart in WCCW and GCW back in the 80’s. He supposedly was the first to use Kool-Aid spray, aka the “Asian Mist.” Vince fondly remembers the 80s, when Hulkamania made him rich.
Heh. I remember the shock when his kayfabe son, The Great Muta, spit not only green blinding mist but also red burning mist…in the same match! Apparently “The Great” was their family name and “Kabuki” and “Muta” were their first names
Asuka explains here why they picked the name. I honestly don’t mind it.
He’s someone’s champion and he doesn’t want to go around being jobbed out and making his promotion look weak for having him as champ. I don’t see a problem with that.
Dammit, I really wanted to see Page vs PAC. I thought they’d book PAC to win, because he’s more famous, but I guess he’s a one-shot deal and not a full-timer. I just wanted to see the match. It wouldn’t have been for whatever gumball machine belt PAC has outside of AEW, and Page isn’t Enzo!
They supposedly had Page run in on a match with PAC in the UK, which Page won via DQ, and they’ll show it for free somewhere, maybe on the pre-show?
I otherwise want to see the former LU stars like PJ, Fenix, Jack Evans and Angelico. SoCal Uncensored, Taylor & Barreta are solid workers who came over from RoH, and Kenny Omega hasn’t been tainted by WWE yet. Maybe it would be worth the $50, but I haven’t decided yet.
one of the last “divas” (before they started taking the women more seriously and ended the term ) passed on the other day from what’s now being called possible suicide
other than a wm match did she do anything important? seems like once the contract was up she just became a manager before fading away …she was also involved in some sort of lawsuit that was skeezy against the wwe Ashley Massaro apologized to WWE before her death
Forgotten that the PPV was last night (I was working anyway) and am watching bits of it now.
But wow, are a lot of fans pissed on the various wrestling boards. A number of them saying they cancelled their network subscriptions after the show. Of course, I wonder if that will amount to appreciable numbers or not. Honestly considering it after the Brock crap and if they go Brocky 2 Belts, I probably will. I can always catch up on NXT some date in the future if things change.
You can always rely on the WWE to come up with a good storyline, and then ruin it. MITB doesn’t even reach ‘not as bad as I expected status’. It was worse.
Vince: Come back Brock! Our ratings are dropping like turds!
Brock: I love it when I have leverage. Mo money, mo money, mo money.
I did enjoy the “Bet I can take sicker bumps than you” contest between Ricochet, Finn, Ali and Andrade: Ricochet recreated the breaking ladder spot he did in LU, and Finn took that wicked looking power bomb off one ladder onto another, but the Brock run-in was a total buzzkill. All that potentially injurious work pissed away to nothing.
The Network is still worth it for NXT, but I think I’ll just watch the main brand PPVs the day after they air so I can skip ahead through Vince’s self-wanking.
Fox network CEO: Gee, I’d hate for Smackdown to move to FS1, or even FS2 (in which case you try talking Comcast into including it onto any of their “affordable” tiers in about half of the country), in January (and we’ve already promised Thursday night to Tim Allen, and possibly Seth MacFarlane as well, once NFL coverage ends), but it doesn’t look like Ronda Rousey is coming back any time soon, and there’s no way I will be able to sell “Smackdown, featuring Kofi Kingston and - who’s the women’s champion now? Bayley somebody?” to very many advertisers. Don’t you have any “names” left?
Vince: Well, there is one I might be able to pull out of my butt-er, hat.
Meanwhile, my wrestling crystal ball needs some adjustment - I did see the same-night women’s cash-in coming, but I called Becky winning both matches and then losing on the cash-in, so there would be some argument over the next few weeks over whether or not the winner got one belt or both (and it would end with the winner getting the Raw belt so Becky would make the transition to Smackdown on Fox as the champion), and I also saw the men’s match being “one short” after the Sami Zayn beatdown, but I figured he’d make an “incredible recovery” to grab the belt; I did not see Brock returning at all. (My “B choice” would have been Cena, so he could finally break Flair’s title count record.)
Now there’s an idea for the Fox Smackdown premiere: Kofi vs. Cena for the WWE title.
