Since this place seems to be picking up what are your wrestling hot takes over the eras?
-If Hogan didn’t screw Mr Perfect out of the Royal Rumble win in XX he would have gone to be in the conversation with Bret, and HBK.
-Bret would have always became the man he is regardless of Goldberg.
-DX really wasn’t that great but they had a theme and a look that worked, and every subsequent trip to the well just got worse and worse.
-If NJPW and AEW really wants to grow their American audience they need to make anthology videosthat cover feuds or longer storylines cap them at 20 minutes and put them on YouTube. No new viewer is going to watch hundreds of hours to understand who Kota is or what Moxley is talking about when he says “Chikara bullshit” to Eddie Kingston.
-Adam Cole needs to gain just enough so he doesn’t have baby knees. I love the guy but when he lowers that knee bad I just wanna go “awww”.
-Let Keith Lee look the way he wants, old man Lee was a great look.
AEW’s Battle of the Belts has been a colossal failure for those of us that like character building and not just bangers because nothing ever happens on the shows since BotB I when Sammy became Interim TNT Championship and BotB II when Sammy became TNT Champion. Since then, the champions always win and the matches are telegraphing the winners based on opponent choice.
I can’t comment too much on your takes (I’m not too familiar with the older WWF/WWE stuff) but here’s mine:
The most important thing in wrestling isn’t wrestling. It’s character and promo work.
There has to be a healthy dose of both. Someone with poor wrestling skills can definitely be pushed to success if they have the right character and promo work. There are plenty of big names who only knew how to do a few moves really well. They have to have the respect of the locker room to do so though, because it will be everyone else’s job to make them look good and they still have to know the bare minimum not to hurt any of the other talent.
There’s only so far you can go without improving the wrestling though. Matches get too repetitive and it’s very easy to get cornered into Goldberg territory.
Personally, if I had to watch someone with incredible wrestling ability who can’t work the mic or someone with all the charisma in the world who only knows two moves… I’ll prefer to watch a great wrestling match with a manager boosting the out of the ring portions. For true success, you really need heavy doses of everything.
I totally agree with you it’s why I love Eddie Kingston.
Seeing aew bend over backwards for cm punk is souring me on the show as a whole.
I was ready to give up completely when they made him champ the second time. But with the gripebomb I thought I was in the clear.
What a joke.
Funnily enough, I think of Cody and Punk switched places but were basically booked the same they would be happy.
Cody is treated as the actual main eventer that Punk wanted to be treated as.
I get why he made the decision, but Cody booked on the level of a Main Eventer, MJF as a central rival, and given Collison a more sport based old school show all sounds perfect for him too.
I want to live in this alternate timeline.
Probably more of a “warm take” but when Mark Henry says “It’s time for the main event!”, the main event needs to fucking start. Or he needs to say “It’s time for 2-3 minutes of match announcements, then the main event!”
Edit: Did TK follow us here? Because it was actually time for the main event this week.
For all the negativity it gets, I really like Rampage. The hour tends to fly by, and JR is a good fit here compared to longer shows.
I was at Wrestlemanias XXV and XXVI. I agree with Meltzer’s ratings for both Undertaker/HBK matches.
The Ryback should have come out eating local foods when his catch phrase is “feed me more”.
If they want him to be a face he can bring extras and hand them out to fans, if he’s a heel the takes a bite and throws it in the trash every time.This is hilarious
