Yeah. (It’s a joke about how small their budget is compared to Vince.)
Not everyone is bound by a no-compete. Dawn Marie isn’t, since apparently they didn’t give her a full buyout of her contract. The Dudleys aren’t since their contract will expire soon.
I still think Vince is gonna bring Matt Hardy back. Give things a few months to cool off, then put him and Edge/Lita on opposite shows to keep them from fighting backstage.
Dawn Marie was bought out, according to 1wrestling.com Doesn’t really matter, as she’s about 5-6 months pregnant.
Hardy / Edge would be $$$; wouldn’t be the first cuckolded feud. Who remembers Kevin Sullivan / Chris Benoit?
Yeah, but how many people really knew what was behind Sullivan/Benoit?
And more importantly, what was WCW thinking letting Sullivan book?
Did anyone else think that the Meanie was overselling JBL’s moves? I saw that and thought that he was trying to make JBL look foolish.
Over/underselling happens pretty often. Owen Hart was probably the best at it. Foley’s book has some great stories about Owen’s jokes in the ring.
And yes, Meanie was trying to make JBL look bad (admittedly, not a difficult task.) At least he got busted open hardway for payback.
Through the magic of the internet, I happened to see One Night Stand the other day. I was just glad to see Beulah McGillicutty again. Well, and Taz with the towel over his face.
OK, got the TNA player to work and am watching right now. At best it’s OK and at worst it’s a bunch of ex-WWF guys running their old promors again and again.
I do have to say though that Samoa Joe and Primetime were quite impressive. I wonder how long before Vinnie Mac picks them up.
How did you get it to work? I have just been there and got a new Realplayer but I have sound only, no video. 
I used the torrent file that uses some bizzare flash-based player called “wimpy.”
It’s bundled with the video file. You can get the torrent here
It’s a fun little show, only about 47 minutes or so including the recap of the recent PPV. The show itself is also a couple weeks old - they don’t appear to have released the newest show yet (although I emailed asking about it). The matches are fairly short and the couple backstage/promo segments they have are painful to watch (Jeff Jarrett complaining about getting a title shot, some guy named Abyss trying to decide if he wants to be more Kane or Mankind…). It’s almost worth it for the Samoa Joe squash match alone (against yet another crazy luchador).
Aaaaah, faithful old Bittorrent.
Oh, and thank you. 
(1) Matt Hardy on RAW. Hmmm, how much of this was a work? I’m guessing the cheating wasn’t, but I wouldn’t put it by them to go that far.
(2)(a)Who didn’t see Piper showing up in the opening skit
(b)Who didn’t see Piper getting super-kicked
©Did Piper forget that he was one of Hogan’s main nemeses?
(3) Did anything else of worth occur on this episode?
The Hardy thing is almost certainly a work. The old rule, “If it makes it over the air, it’s a work,” while not 100% true, seems to apply here, especially when the WWE website has a big ol’ Matt Hardy rant right on its front page. Of course, with the real-world publicity surrounding this thing, it might be truer to life than some other angles, but the acknowledgement by the WWE means that they’ll be able to throw enough money at this thing and turn it into a work.
Piper was going to get superkicked and the whole world knew it. I still don’t like this feud- Michaels can do better.
I liked the Carlito/Benjamin match. I thought it was well-paced and a bit better than the squashfests that pass for matches these days.
Which brings me to my rant:
WWE, I know the rules don’t mean anything, but at least pay lip-service to their existence. Carlito lost his match on a countout, yet Muhammad Hassan was “never eliminated” from the six-man match? He was (or should have been) counted out. The number of times that a blind tag has been allowed hand-to-shoulder for story purposes and the number of times that a ref has disallowed similar tags is staggering. I’ve even seen matches won on pins that weren’t on the legal man, just because the story called for it to end that way and the performers were too lazy to make the buildup fit the results.
Come ON. We do watch for the spectacle, but some of us like our immersion.
Hardy was certainly a work, but damn, was it awesome.
That was the first RAW I’ve seen in years and while I walked in during the Carlito/Benjamin match, I thought it was awesome, sans that goddamn DivaSearch crap. What freakin’ focus group thought that was better than “D-Von, get the tables!”
While the Swet Chin Music was a given, I thought that segment was otherwise really good. That shot of HBK standing over Hogan is going to be one of those images that are burned into everyone’s brain.
WWE.com reports that the WWE have decided to not renew Ivory’s TV contract.
Well, worse things can happen. Like the rumor that UPN said Mohammed Hassan is no longer to appear on Smackdown! Given that the parent company of USA (IIRC and which the WWE is negotiating a contract for) also owns UPN, it’s likely that he won’t be going back to Raw either.
Too bad, that promo he cut that ended up on the Web site was really, really good.
I guess they’ll be sending poor Mark Magnus back to OVW, which sucks, because he did the best he could with a doomed gimmick, and proved to be decent in the ring and good on the mike. I wish they had turned him into a face, like my idea from the first page of this thread. Now I have no idea what they’ll do with Daivari (who is supposedly an amazing worker), but UPN hasn’t complained about his “evil angry Muslim” gimmick, only “Hassan’s.”
USA is owned by NBC Universal, who also own NBC, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC and… something else on cable.
UPN is a division of Viacom, who own CBS, Spiky TV (TV with sharp edges!), MTV, VH1 and all their ilk.
[jim ross voice]
Matt Hardy!
Matt HARDY!
Matt Hardy is beating the holy hell out of EDGE!!
[/jim ross voice]
I told y’all it’d end up bein’ a work.
I wonder how much they paid him?
For the opportunity to get in the ring and stiff Edge a couple of times? He’s probably paying them. Watching Edge’s face when he called Hardy a fucker looked like a shoot to me.
Is WWE trying to get back on USA? I can’t recall if they were trying to stay on Spike.
They’ve already signed and will be moving to USA this fall.
TNA will be taking over the Velocity spot on Saturday nights on Spike…