2019 Pro Wrestling thread

It's Robin Hood all over again.

 

Back before he was a grown-up prick, MJF was a 5-year-old prick.

He wanted to be an opera singer and a wrestler when he grew up.

DAMN YOU, AIDEN ENGLISH!!!

 

Kudos to the Turner folks for finding a place for AEW if baseball interferes.

 

Tru TV: It's not just for the D-level NCAA Tournament games anymore!

 

Jericho with a fun promo that included a burial of WWE creative for Hager/Swagger’s “We The People” gimmick and the word “shit.”

 

Thinking out loud about the AEW chants at Hell in a Cell.

Its not possible right now for AEW to do anything the fans would dislike enough to do a WWE chant.

If it ever gets there, 1) What could they do to make people that mad?
2) What would the chant even be? NXT? Yowie Wowie? Punk?

 

Didn't watch all of AEW tonight, just the opening match and the main event, but three things stuck out to me:

1) I'm very impressed with the way they're trying to introduce and put over some of the B-listers. I don't watch a lot of the indies, but have heard of some of the bigger names, and there are a ton of guys on the AEW roster where I'm like "Who the hell is this guy?" And then, 15 minutes later, I'm like, "Wow, that dude looked good."
Last week it was Sammy Guevara. Tonight it was Private Party, who went over clean on the Young Bucks in the tag team tournament. I have no idea who Private Party is, but they looked great and the announcers did a great job of selling the magnitude of the upset. Next week it seems like it'll be Jericho's turn to make Darby Allin look like a million bucks.
It says a lot about the guys at the very top of the card (Cody, the Bucks, Jericho) that they're willing to make these guys look good to help build stars.
That was the good.

2) The bad was the ending. Two weeks, and two kitchen sink endings where they have a million things going on at once. They really need to dial that back a bit. I get that they're still trying to introduce a lot of folks and perpetuate two or three major feuds, but it's rather overwhelming. Kind of reminds me of the nWo endings in WCW, where they'd just have a giant brawl between the two factions to close a lot of shows.

3) NXT had about 10 minutes of runover tonight, which carried it into the start of the AEW replay. Wonder if that's a thing again, or if it's a sign of something on WWE's end?

 

Historically, the WWE has -always- loved doing the runover to the next hour, for a couple reasons, IIRC: 1) Unlike WCW, their contracts were better, and they didn't give a shit if they caused the 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. show to run late. 2) If you know they go over a lot, you either have to remember to set your DVR correctly, or just watch it live. 3) Running over makes it feel more like "sports entertainment" than a scripted show; it's like overtime in football.

 

WCW actually was the first one to run over on time because they wanted to keep viewers longer.

They also used to sometimes start two minutes early, until they started running three hours.

 

Yeah, but they had eliminated the runover for Raw and Smackdown a few months ago at USA's request and turned it into a hard out at 11 p.m. EST. That's why it was curious that they've revived it for NXT and the Wednesday Night Wars, especially this soon into it.

 

So they bust a hole in the ring for the Fiend in the first match of the show? And nice camera work showing the lighting guy with the strobe light.