Tag: wwe

The rando wrestling post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Looking through my queue of random notes of things I wanted to write some words down about, I realized that there was the opportunity to occasionally consolidate some things into singular posts, to both artificially suppress my imaginary queue of important things to post about, as well as not to bore my zero readers with too much rambling about specific topics that really I’m the only one who cares too much about.

Naturally, my brog wouldn’t be the brog without there being random observations about professional wrestling, and although I’m having a tremendously difficult time keeping up with the business these days on account of having, no time at all, I sometimes try to keep up by either watching the top 10 clips that show up on YouTube, or by watching episodes of WWE or AEW, by fast forwarding through most of it.

Seriously, when I do that, I don’t even watch the wrestling itself; I usually fast forward until when I think the match could be potentially come to an end, and just try to watch the endings to the matches, just so I can see what post-match interactions there are.  Also, promos, because I like to see the progressions of stories and not the actual wrestling product itself, in comparison.

Watching one of the more recent episodes of NXT two-point-oh, it’s evident of what the directive of the product is, and I kind of do really understand that Triple H’s NXT was still anchored by a bunch of older performers, when NXT really was designed to be a training ground of young, up-and-coming talent, and not a place for outside stars to assimilate into the WWE machine.  I can’t say that I’m at all that impressed with the transition, nor its obnoxious ADD color schema, but I do understand the end game with the repackaging of NXT.

But there was an ending to the show where women’s champion Raquel Gonzalez was jumped by a new stable of women, and I couldn’t help but get flashbacks to Takeover: Brooklyn III, where Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly jumped Drew McIntyre after he won the NXT championship, only to be joined by a debuting Adam Cole, and the three of them stood over the champion, signaling the arrival of a new faction.

When Gigi Dolin and Jayce Jane jumped Gonzalez and then were joined by a repackaged Mandy Rose, with the three of them standing over her prone body afterward, it basically felt precisely like the debut of the Undisputed Era, all the way to Rose grandstanding with the championship.  I mean, with the Era all but dead now, with two of them in AEW, why shouldn’t NXT just swap the genders and try the whole idea all over again?

Sure, Mandy Rose was never a stalwart in the ring, Jane is as green as ten Lex Lugers, and Priscilla Kelly Gigi Dolin will probably never let her whole arsenal be used, so I can’t help but bet that they’ll never reach the heights of the UE, but at least they had a cool debut and looked good in the process.

Moving onto the other company, I feel like I had a home run of an analogy of how the world of professional wrestling fandom kind of feels like these days:

AEW is basically like Sega, while the WWE is unmistakably Nintendo.

Continue reading “The rando wrestling post” →

A fate worse than death

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few months, among the few things that I still do pay attention to outside of my own little world, professional wrestling is still there.  Normally, I’d cite sources or link to the things that inspire my writing, but frankly the brog’s sense of time is pretty warped as it is, and my zero readers will have to take my word on the things that I’m talking or referring to.

But long story short, over the last few months the WWE has been firing an alarming amount of talent and personnel, AEW has been more than happy to pick up the crème of the crop, and there’s all sorts of panic and wild rumors flying around scuttlebutt and I’m taken back to 1999 when I wish wrestling chatter on the internet could all collectively stfu because it’s kind of ruining everything when everyone’s so astute to backstage happening.

Among the fallout, Triple H, whom most are aware is the head cheese when it comes to anything NXT-related, has been given the lion’s share of the blame when it comes to the fate of the short-lived Wednesday Night War, when an arriving AEW was met by a nationally-televised NXT.  After about a year and amidst a pandemic, NXT decided to move to Tuesdays, in a move widely seen as hoisting a white flag and surrendering.

And supposedly, Triple H is the fall guy in this scenario, and as a result of it, regardless of the corporat-ese used to describe it, has been basically demoted and alleviated of the reigns of NXT.  Vince McMahon and one of his lifer-stooges, Bruce Pritchard will take over the production of the show, which basically means that NXT is going to be run a lot like RAW and Smackdown, which for the better part of the last 2-3 years has been the very definition of mediocre and hardly watchable.

Needless to say, this is basically a fate worse than death for NXT, which is restructuring under new management, naturally accompanied by, a rebranding, complete with new and questionably horrid logo.

A long time ago, I read some adage about how fewer things attempt to smokescreen mediocrity more than a rebranding, and from the looks of things, this is going to be a textbook instance of something once good, headed down a very slippery slope, with the rebranding and restructuring of NXT.

Continue reading “A fate worse than death” →

Thanks, I hate it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I like baseball.  I like wrestling belts.  You’d think a collaboration between the WWE and MLB to release team-themed replica wrestling belts would be a layup for a guy like me, right?

If you think so, you couldn’t be any more fucking wrong.

An obvious cash-grab for starters, but all I see when I think about the fact that there are going to be 20-30* belts that will be put into production starting in the 2022 season, all I see are 20-30 blets that stand in the way of the WWE getting off their lazy asses and actually making replicas of the only fucking WWE blet I want left, the NXT UK Tag Team Championship.

*why anyone would want a replica belt for teams like the Rays, Rockies, Reds, Marlins or Orioles is completely beyond me, but homers are homers for a reason

For the record, I don’t just hate these MLB-WWE collab belts, I hate every other belt out there that’s not an actual active or historic belt.  I hate all the shitty tribute belts that WWE makes that takes existing plates and slaps them onto some overly-designed shitty straps themed to a hall of famer, and calling it a tribute.  I hate Xavier Woods’ and Tyler Breeze’s shitty YouTube show belts that have come into existence ahead of the only active fucking belt without a replica available.  I hate when they take some shitty stinky brown leather and wrap it around an Attitude-era World championship and call it a Mankind tribute.

But both MLB and the WWE really like money, and it really is low-hanging fruit to make these and watch them sell a justifiable number of them to warrant the decision to produce them.  I can’t hate on the business of it, I just hate that these things are definitely going to stand in the way of what I actually want.

And frankly, given the news over the last months of NXT kind of being rumored to being shifted back into a true developmental territory, who’s to say that any of the NXT and NXT UK blets will even get to be sold for much longer in the future, especially if they’re deactivated and removed from television.

Only hardcore blet-heads like myself may have noticed that for about four days, the WWEShop released the NXT Women’s Tag Team Championship Replicas that’s still listed as available in the Euro store, but was already taken down from the American site, which initially had me curious that they took it down in order to have a brand new blet available at promotional discount, but seeing as how it hasn’t been brought back, it makes me wonder if it’s more the possibility that the blets will be deactivated on television, and therefore not needing replicas to be sold online.

As far as the NXT UK Tag blets, I’m beginning to think that they’ll never even be made in the first place, because perhaps the division as a whole might get folded up, if the talking heads surrounding Vince McMahon in Stamford see them as a risky ROI.

At least I’ll have an Atlanta Barves blet available to me with the cash I’ve been sitting on for literal years, waiting for the one blet I actually wanted.

What if… Tim Tebow, the professional wrestler?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The other day, my bros and I were bullshitting about professional wrestling as is often times the norm, and the thought crossed my mind that AEW is low-key owned by the Jacksonville Jaguars, since owner Tony Khan is the son of the Shahid Khan that owns the Jags. 

Recently, I saw some blurb about how despite having signed with the Jaguars, the attempting-to-return-to-football Tim Tebow is no guarantee to make the team, even though he’s still built like a tank and trying to come back as a tight end and not a quarterback, and then the wheels got turning in my brain to do so fantasy booking in the event that Tebow flames out of football again, but instead of trying to pursue professional baseball, chooses professional wrestling instead.  Especially since there’s already a convenient transition from the Jags to AEW, being under the same family umbrella and all.

After about five minutes of bullshit, I realized that this hypothetical bullshit would be better served as brog material and not a passing conversation in private company, because some of these ideas would be fucking gold in an ironic sense if they were to come to fruition, even though there can hardly be fewer things in the world nerdier than fantasy booking professional wrestling.

Anyway, Tim Tebow is cut from the Jags, not for anything performance-related so much as is it that the Jags are an NFL team and NFL teams are more afraid than Gabriel is in The Walking Dead of anything and don’t want Tebow’s faith to ever be mentioned in the same breath as them.  He’s in the locker room, silently crying, cleaning out his personal effects, and our character arc begins with Tim saving a cross that he hung, for last, staring at it wistfully, thinking to himself why the good lord has failed to give him the strength he needed to make it back to the NFL.

Tony Khan enters the locker room, and gives Tebow some fluff about how he performed great, and how his failure to make the team had nothing to do with his talent.  But seeing as how he wasn’t going to make the team, and to not let such physical gifts go to waste, he offers Tebow an opportunity to join All Elite Wrestling, so he could still potentially have a platform to spread the word.

“Professional wrestling?” thinks Tebow.  The fake sport with fake storylines, so much of which is debaucherous, scandalous, and frequently sacrilegious?  Khan assures Tebow that AEW is different than those whom might have put out such unsavory product, and points no further than AEW’s own TNT Champion, Miro, God’s Favorite Wrestler, as proof of AEW’s respect and commitment to Christianity.  Tebow is intrigued, and agrees to a developmental tier-1 deal.

Continue reading “What if… Tim Tebow, the professional wrestler?” →

About AEW’s replica blet…

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not entirely sure how I ended up on ShopAEW’s distribution list, as I have never purchased anything from them, or ProWrestlingTees.com at any point in my life, but for whatever reason, I still get their periodic emails.  It’s hasn’t really been a nuisance yet, and as much as I clown on them as a promotion, I do think that they still produce some decent merch from time to time, 75% of it being for Britt Baker.  And I figured if the company were ever to eventually release replica title blets, this would probably be the most accurate source to get information about them.

Well, that time finally came, and I saw an email titled “AEW World Championship Replica Title” and my interest was immediately piqued.  Honestly, I’m not that big on their world title; if I had my pick on any of the actual AEW blets available, it would be a Tag Team blet, and since Miro became TNT Champion, it’s slowly softened my opinion on what I originally designated a Popeyes Blet.  But as a collector of replica blets in the first place, I still wanted to see what was going, in case there was an appealing price point that could change my mind.

$699.  Six hundred, ninety-nine dollars. 

For a replica blet.

My knee-jerk reaction is definitely, yeah fuck no

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shitting on this blet because it’s AEW and I know I’ve been quick to shit on them for all the dumb things they’ve done so far.  I’m not shitting on this blet because of its seemingly high price tag; frankly, this isn’t the most expensive blet out there.

I’m shitting on this blet because it has a high price tag for what they’re not going into any real detail about.  I even watched the video of it in case there was some more clarification on what materials they’re using and the quality of the metal, but it’s instead just more fluff from Pentagon’s valet/AEW’s Spanish language announcer, Alex Abrahantes.

New Japan sold official replicas of IWGP belts, which ranged from $2,080 to $1,800; but they’re clear that they’re using 18-karat gold, and the craftsmanship is very Japanese exquisite.

Even WWE sells more expensive blets, like their deluxe line, which justifies the cost by using real leather, and then they have nearly $2,000 elite replicas which are basically actual, television-ready replicas that are made from 10-karat gold and cubic zirconia stones.

However, WWE also sells all sorts of “more affordable” replica blets, usually not exceeding $399, and are always going on 20-30% off sale, and that’s the bread and butter in which I like to throw my money away at.

The fact that AEW comes out of the gate with a $700 blet doesn’t particularly seem like a great idea, but that’s just me.  Especially if there’s zero information on why it costs that much, other than “simulated jewels.”  I know I’m one to speak seeing as how I have literally 20 replica blets, but not one of them has exceeded $349, and nobody’s ever looked at a blet of mine to try and validate its authenticity.

But as someone who’s literally purchased blets before solely because the price point was appealing, if AEW really wanted to move a lot of blets, having more cost-effective alternatives to their $700 coup de grace would probably result in more profit which ultimately should be the goal of any self-respecting retailer.  It boggles my mind how many examples of people and companies who raked in millions selling a whole lot of cheaper, that there are so many out there that still think selling a lot less of really expensive, is a viable business model.

I know the blet industry is about as niche as they come, but if AEW, WWE and NJPW want to actually compete with Pakistanis making bootlegs in caves out of scraps, they all need to rethink their strategies and start releasing some more cost-effective alternatives and an NXT UK Tag Team replica.

Cen-owned

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

lol’d – John Cena calls Taiwan a country, gets massive backlash from China, apologizes, then gets heat from the industry that made him

I don’t really have an opinion on the whole is Taiwan a country thing, and frankly I don’t really want to.  I have no horse in this race, and I have friends and acquaintances that are both Chinese and Taiwanese, and it’s really none of my business to what my opinion might be.

But what prompted this post is that throughout his wrestling career, John Cena has been something of this stoic, unflappable icon, that in spite of the internet’s general disdain for him, has been somewhat of a maestro at navigating through time, shifts in fandom and I have a tremendous amount of respect for everything that he’s accomplished.  Scuttlebutt may disagree, but I feel that he’s aged extremely well and has gracefully transitioned from wrestling into movies almost as well as the Rock did.

It’s safe to say that John Cena has kind of transcended into something of a brand throughout the years, based on how methodical and clinical he’s conducted himself throughout his wrestling careers and his transition into Hollywood.  Look no further than his time on Total Divas to realize that nobody was a bigger diva than John Cena; he’s such a company of a man that he basically has the equivalent of a pre-nup for a live-in girlfriend.

So in the whole adage of as much as people love heroes, they love see heroes fail, it’s noteworthy and hilarious to me, that of all the things in world that could possibly trip up a machine like John Cena, it would be a subjective opinion on China that would land him in global, public hot water.

Honestly, regardless of the cringey, pandering and embarrassing apology to all Chinese people, a Fruedian slip-like blurting out of a statement like calling Taiwan a country is clearly what he believes, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s an opinion, and we’re all entitled to them, no matter how much criticism they’re subject to.

Frankly, I’m more disappointed in Cena’s response to the whole Chinese backlash, because contrary to the hustle-loyalty-respect brand he built himself on throughout wrestling, he kowtowed and crumpled like a burning piece of paper when it came to upsetting an entire country and very obviously at the behest of a Hollywood studio, he tucked his tail between his muscular legs and made a pretty immediate apology.

He, and the studio could’ve sent a powerful message to the world by digging in and standing their ground, but because the Chinese economy is basically the strongest in the world, they couldn’t possibly risk upsetting them and their coffers, so they showed their hand at what they prioritized above all hustle, loyalty or respect.

In the end, John Cena has basically jobbed three times in a row, which is probably a new record and something he didn’t even do, even in the post-Ruthless Aggression era.  He jobbed to China by looking like a bitch kowtowing to them, which makes him job to the wrestling industry that made him, because his peers now reportedly have heat with him for being a bitch, and of course, he’s jobbed to himself, because this course of action is most definitely something that the John Cena brand really wouldn’t be doing, if not for the tainted influence of Hollywood money.

2 Under 2: the girls’ first blets (#042)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Until my girls are old enough to make the choice themselves that they want to have their respective blets on their own walls, they will have a forever home on my office wall, alongside my existing collection.  It brings the total blets on the wall up to 20, but the reality is that I hope to someday relinquish these two blets to my daughters one day, and I will be the proudest dad in the world on the day I get to mount these onto the walls of their rooms.

I have to say that up until I received my replicas, I’ve always been kind of lukewarm on the design of the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship blets.  Seeing them on television, I wasn’t ecstatic about the design, but I knew that after I learned I was going to have a second daughter, that I was going to want replicas of them anyway, because two daughters are a natural tag team, and they need to be recognized as the champions they are inevitably going to be.

But upon receiving the replicas, I’m quite blown away by the quality of them.  I don’t know if the actual blets are like it, but the replicas’ straps are more of a cream color than straight up white as I figured they, and all the other women’s blets in the company were, but it’s such a subtle thing that I really like.  The plates are impeccably crafted, and I’m both sold and thrilled that I have a pair of them to bequeath to my girls when #2 officially arrives.

It’s so lame, it’s so expensive and it’s so frivolous, but I don’t care.  Collecting blets is something that I enjoy and I hope that one day my girls recognize such, and would be willing to indulge their old man and want to carry a piece of his hobbies, at least onto their own walls to maybe show that they love me too, even when they’ll inevitably hate their parents for being squares and out of touch.