I think the Bloodline has DJ Tanner Wrestling’d

May 7, 2024May 10, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Only the longest of my zero readers know that DJ Tanner Wrestling-ing is my personal evolution to jumping the shark, and in the case of this particular topic it’s relevant since this is yet another post about, professional wrestling.

Anyway, over the weekend the WWE did their best to surprise the Universe by introducing Tanga Loa into the company, when he interfered during the Bloodline vs. Kevin Owens and Randy Orton tag match. A few weeks ago, they had brought in Tama Tonga to join forces with Solo Sikoa, whom the storyline has as being the guy now assuming control over the Bloodline, with the long-deserved hiatus of Roman Reigns after Wrestlemania.

And with that, both members of the Guerillas of Destiny (GoD) have made their way to the WWE after a long and fruitful career overseas in NJPW. Both have aligned with Solo, and are representing the new age of the Bloodline. I doubt that they’ll still be called GoD once the dust settles from their arrival, but to those that are familiar with them, they’ll always be GoD.

Personally, I’m high on GoD, and loved their work in Japan. It was the highlight of the evening when NJPW had a tour stop in Atlanta, where the main event was the Guerillas winning the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team championships, and above all else, I love that they’re the son and the adopted son of the baddest man on the planet, Haku. That alone gives them a 10 in toughness, because I can’t imagine anyone raised by Haku would be anything short of being the polar opposite of a pussy.

I am excited for their arrival in the E and the sheer potential they bring by both being in the company, but at the same time, I still can’t help but have this feeling that they’ve caused the whole trajectory of the Bloodline to DJ Tanner Wrestle, mainly because of the simple fact that they’re not actual bloodline to the Anoa’i family.

In fact, they’re not even Samoan, but Tongan. I know that white people can’t tell Asians and island boys apart, and there are a lot of similarities between the cultures, but the fact of the matter is that Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa aren’t related to the Anoa’i family nor are they Samoan, so having them be a part of the Bloodline seems kind of shark-jumpy in my opinion.

I know that Haku is super tight with many Anoa’i members, and as Rikishi once said, us island boys have to stick together, but it does feel like a little bit of a cop out to just slap GoD into the Bloodline and hope that nobody questions the genealogy here just because they’re all from island origins.

Sure, they did it already with Sami Zayn being the Honorary Uce, but the difference here is that they weren’t trying to hide the fact that he wasn’t Samoan and related to an Anoa’i, and I’m not saying that they might not do the same with GoD, but so far, they also haven’t made any attempt to dispel it either. I have this suspicion that unless they get some heat from any Polynesian groups, who demand specificity, the WWE is just going to hope that fans at home assume that GoD are Anoa’i and don’t question it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m stoked that GoD are now a part of the E. They will inject a viable tag team into the division of whichever show they land on, and I’m sure fans are already salivating at the idea of an inevitable GoD vs. the Usos matchup, because a Bloodline civil war does seem like it’s the obvious end game coming once Roman Reigns’ vacation is up.

It’s just details matter to me, and two guys whom aren’t even blood-related themselves, joining up with a faction called the Bloodline to which they’re not related to, seems a little DJ Tanner Wrestling-ey in my opinion. I get why they did it, and honestly from their perspective, as far as being fast-tracked to the main event and making money, they’re probably not sweating it, but it doesn’t change the fact that the execution of it, holistically as a whole, does seem forced and just a little bit DJ Tanner Wrestling-ey. Creative might surprise me and spin a magnificent story, as they did over the last two years of Roman’s reign, but seeing as how they blew the wad at Mania, I’m not optimistic that this long-term story will be worth the wait if all the moving parts happen in the manner that I think they will.

Does a Popeyes title make Chris Jericho the Nueve?

April 26, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the appealing card on paper, I didn’t watch AEW Dynasty. Frankly, I don’t know how I’d watch it, or any true pay-per-view event anymore. I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I can call an automated system and pay over the phone. I typically refuse to download anymore apps, especially to watch a singular event, and frankly, the WWE has conditioned me over the last few years of just how convenient it is to have a singular service where I can get these events included, and it’s about as easy as it is to tune into something on Netflix or Disney+.

All the same, I was intrigued by the card, to where I took the effort to seek out results, on the same night in which it happened. Most everything happened close to how I’d have predicted it, showing that my decades of watching professional wrestling has gotten to where I barely need to watch the product to know what’s going to happen anyway. Okada over PAC, the Bucks over FTR, Ospreay over Danielson, and I figured Swerve was finally going to dethrone Samoa Joe, because you just can’t keep feeding a champion the same guy three times in a row and expect the result to just continue to be the same.

But amidst the results was one thing that caught my eye: Chris Jericho defeats Hook to become the new FTW champion.

So the question I have is, does Chris Jericho winning a Popeyes title (unsanctioned) count towards his world title count? After all, it does say “World Champion” on it and frankly, even in the ocean of championships that AEW has floating in its pool, between Hook, Jack Perry and Brian Cage, the holder of this Mickey Mouse blet has done some good work.

That being said, that would make Chris Jericho no longer the Ocho, but the Nueve; I doubt such will happen, but it is still funny to hypothesize the silly wrestling logic.

But even funnier will be the fact that despite it not being a sanctioned championship that “counts” in the AEW canon, I think it’s a safe bet that Chris Jericho is still going to elevate it to the point where it’s going to get some substantial television time and attention over a number of the men’s championships the promotion has in circulation:

Because that’s what Chris Jericho does, he elevates things, regardless of how much the fickle AEW fanbase seems to have turned on him, and are giving him the old Big Show treatment of pretending like they want him to hang up his boots. These are the same fans who will be bowing in the crowd and chanting positive things like “you’re the great-est” when he actually does hang it up, but a guy like Jericho also doesn’t care, because he understands the most important thing about working is the ability to get a reaction at all, and he’s a man who has thrived under fan hate in the past, and will undoubtedly do it again and again until he’s done.

It seems obvious that he’s basically repeating the same program he did with Cesaro Claudio Castagnoli, where he won the Ring of Honor World Championship, ducked him repeatedly and made him work to get back in contention, and then dropped the title back to Claudio, but with the title in a better place in which it started.

Chris Jericho hasn’t hidden the fact his desire to work with, and elevate young talent, and there’s no question that he’s going to accomplish such with Hook. And by the time Jericho drops the title back to Hook in 5-6 months, the Popeyes title will probably be worth more than over half of the above listed championships, because that’s just the kind of thing AEW would let happen, having a meaningless blet become more meaningful than their own prizes.

Dad Brog (#130): Parenthood did this

April 3, 2024April 12, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t really felt much like writing over the last week or two. It’s like no matter how much I try to streamline my days and look for ways to open up a little bit more time in the evenings to where I can have some quiet, wind-down time to myself, the more it seems like the windows of freedom get smaller and smaller.

Whether it’s daily chores and the resetting of the house for the kids to wreck it the following day, food prep for the kids, side projects that have long since gotten to the point where it almost feels like a chore but I still have to follow it through to the end, or when I feel like I need to do some exercise, what used to be 4-5 hours a night of downtime feels more like three hours, sometimes two, where I feel like I can actually goof off and do something, not necessarily productive.

And then I get choice paralysis and/or trapped into doom scrolling on my phone, where I fall into a reel pit of Game of Thrones clips where I muse about how good the television show really was in spite of the dodgy ending. Now I have like an hour to myself, and an hour doesn’t feel like an adequate time to get my head into the act of writing, so I end up watching Ted Lasso clips on YouTube or continuing to fall into the pit of old GoT clips among other useless things.

Or, I watch an episode of Yellowstone, which is actually something that’s been on my list of things to watch. I’m on season three currently, and I’m relieved that save for the pilot episode, the episodes are a fairly manageable 45~minute range. It’s not necessarily the banger of a series that I thought it might be, but at the same time it’s still slowly intriguing. I have yet to watch Succession, which is another show on my list, but given what I know about that show, I feel like Yellowstone is basically a cowboy version of it.

Not giving anything away, but some of the moments of the show that I’ve found myself enjoying every time, is whenever Kevin Costner’s John Dutton character, is interacting with his grandson, Tate. At least so far, the boy is as innocent to the world as they come, and in spite of being the cunning mastermind of just about everything that goes on in Yellowstone, Montana, John Dutton turns into a tender, caring and seemingly awesome grandfather to Tate, and as a parent to young children, it’s scenes like these that pique my interest every time they present themselves.

But it’s not just Yellowstone solely, I’ve come to the realization that when it comes to watching shows or movies, what tends to elicit the most uncomfortable reaction out of me is whenever there’s anything pertaining to violence, trauma or just a negative situation against young kids. Like if a kid is in danger, I find my anxiety beginning to spike, and these are the instances where I feel like I might squirm or squeeze an arm rest.

It bleeds my heart when children characters have to deal with non-physical trauma like learning of a death in the family, abandonment, or divorcing parents. Just about anything that results in a child becoming sad, breaking out in tears or wailing out hits a place in me that obviously didn’t exist prior to having children myself.

I’m not saying that I was ever immune to empathy for children prior to having my own, but now that I do, it’s amplified and it’s almost like I’m going to start needing trigger warnings on things that feature children having to deal with trauma of any sort. Having my Dada-radar tripped and bringing me close to tears watching innocuous television is something I didn’t know was going to happen when I had children.

Was The Leftovers supposed to be a horror story or Damon Lindelof’s personal fantasy?

March 19, 2024March 22, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is actually a post that I’ve kept in my back pocket for a while, and one that I knew that I had to be in the right frame of mind before I could actually write it. I had to be in an agitated mood, which is hard to imagine a person like me not being in an agitated mood, but I also needed to have the time necessary to put my thoughts to keyboard.

But not just any agitated mood, but one specifically where I’m feeling like there are just too many fucking people in the world, and how I’d wish a ton of people would just spontaneously vanish, like Thanos’s Snap or, and in the context of this specific post, like in the plot of The Leftovers.

Now [spoiler alert] because I’m going to go ahead and just probably spoil a bunch of things for those of my zero readers whom might actually be interested in watching this show in the future, despite the fact that at this point it’s like ten years old.

But the basic plot of the show in the beginning is that for absolutely no apparent reason at all, 2% of the entire earth’s population just spontaneously vanished. Nobody knows whether they were killed, were transported, were abducted or whatever, the point is that 2% of the earth’s population just mysteriously disappeared, and that 2% might sound small, but still equated to about 140 million people.

[Spoilers begin] It turns out at the end of the series, the answer to The Disappearance is that the 2% did not die, or cease to exist, they were simply transported to basically, another version of the world where they were the only ones on the planet. To them, 98% of the planet mysteriously vanished, and they clearly had it way worse than their counterparts, because with 98% of the planet’s population disappearing, that’s a whole fuckton of global infrastructure that’s gone with it.

And such is actually explained, that as a result of the planet becoming so sparsely populated, a lot of shit did kind of go primal, and stuff like the grid becoming unreliable, things such as transportation, flight, and science crashing to near halts, but the 2% of humanity does survive. They acknowledge, adapt and survive, and as time passes, people move on with their lives.

All of this is explained as one of the main characters, late in the series, Nora, who lost her husband and both her children in The Disappearance, finds a scientist in Australia who claims to have figured out what had happened, and had invented a machine that could transport subjects into the alternate world, goes to the alternate world, discovers that her family, after dealing with the shell shock of their own Disappearance and the loss of a wife and mother, moved on. So, as not wanting to traumatize her family with a miraculous reappearance, she decides to go back to her world, but is rudely awakened to the idea that a world with 98% less people in it, is just a little bit behind scientifically, and basically has to wait decades before the invention of the alternate world travel machine to be built so that she could return to her version of existence.

The point of explaining all of this is that every now and then, there are days of my own existence where I feel that there are just too many fucking people on this planet, and musing how liberating it must be to be on either end of a Disappearance. Like days where I’m commuting to work, and wondering just why there are so many fucking cars on my route on some days versus others (the existence of I-285). Or when I’m going to Costco and the parking lot is practically entirely full, and there are 107 cars in line for gas on top of everything. Or when I go out of the house to run a quick errand and there’s a surreptitiously high amount of cars also on the road or at the stores, and I’m thinking what the fuck.

It sure would be nice if 140 million of these motherfuckers just bamf’d to alternate world and alleviated my world of their existence. Or better yet, I get to be one of the lucky 2%-ers who gets to have a wide open fucking empty version of the world where there’s tremendously way less chance of people fucking up my daily rhythm just by existing in close proximity to me.

I figure Damon Lindelof came up with the general premise of The Leftovers to sound scary and ominous that such a wild global event could occur, but on days like this where I’m sour over the knowledge of the world’s global 8 billion human beings, I begin to think that perhaps The Leftovers and The Disappearance might also be a fantasy. Because on days like this, it definitely sounds like a dream come true to me, to be somewhere 98% less populated.

I’d definitely miss my kids and family though. 😢

The Power of The Rock

March 16, 2024March 22, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

By now, everyone knows that The Rock is back in the WWE, presumably just for Wrestlemania SZN, but the reality is that he’s still back on television, making appearances here and there to hype up the event.

His return has sparked a lot of debate among the general wrestling community, and there are some pretty concrete sides on the field: those fans who dislike when guest stars pop up during Mania SZN, just to hype up the event, and ultimately vanish into thin air once Mania is over, and then there are fans who love it when part-timers like The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, or the Undertaker show up for Wrestlemania, because they’re legends, they’re icons from their era, or whatever reason.

Typically, I’m often times in the camp of not really preferring when guests show up for Wrestlemania, because I’m of the mindset that the people who carry the company week in and week out, should be the ones to get the biggest billings at the biggest show of the year. And in lots of cases, I don’t want to see some older performer who’s rusty, out of shape, and incapable of putting on a good show any more, having the opportunity to do so, and denying one of the aforementioned week in and week out guys in the process.

Stone Cold Steve Austin had a respectable program two years ago, but I’d still maintain that it had largely to do with the fact that a very respectful and capable Kevin Owens was carrying him, and let’s not forget all the times in history we’ve seen the Undertaker, Mick Foley, Hulk Hogan and even Triple H gear up for Wrestlemania, only to be one of the least impressive contributors on the card.

But The Rock, I have to say that he’s just on another level when it comes to drumming up excitement and hyping up a program. For starters, mythical wife, who actually did watch a little bit of Attitude-era wrestling when she was a wee lass, heard completely independently, that The Rock was back, and put forth her own independent effort to check out his first promos.

Since then, The Rock set an incendiary blaze on the internet wrestling community, diving up the fanbase entirely, and even forcing me to soften my stance on Cody Rhodes, and then adjusted based on the crowd feedback, and has gone full-ass heel mode, and has returned to his Attitude-era roots and is once again doing the lord’s work when it comes to cutting promos and building up hype for a show.

Obviously, I look forward to Wrestlemania just about every year, but I have to say that I’m really looking forward to Wrestlemania this year. Even if it’s going to be in a cesspool like Philadelphia, I know the crowd will be hot, because Philly fans get hot for wrestling, and The Rock, being the mutant athlete he is, is sure to still be capable of putting on a decent match.

Despite the fact that when The Rock came back, I was just kind of like oh cool, I have to say that the way he just so effortlessly creates excitement and drums up anticipation for the event, is truly why he is the most electrifying man in sports entertainment. It’s just so easy and organic for him, and now I’m looking more forward to this year’s Wrestlemania than I have in prior ones. The card seems wildly predictable in what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m looking forward to it this far out, and that, really is the power of The Rock.

TIL that the Hound was also Lurch

March 7, 2024March 8, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I’m getting a tremendous amount of Game of Thrones clips being fed to me on social feeds. Perhaps it’s because of the announcement of House of the Dragon’s second season is coming in the summer, I don’t know. I definitely fall into the category of fans that were largely unimpressed with how the television series came to an end, but seeing a cavalcade of GoT clips from seasons before the ending, did remind of just how brilliant the show was prior to its conclusion.

It almost makes me want to marathon the entire series all over again, but after watching eleven seasons of Shameless in short order, I’m definitely not wanting to commit a ton of television time on something that I’ve already watched before, especially since my queue of things to watch is already about three year’s worth of content long, so I’ve been fairly content to just scroll and imbibe on short clips for the time being.

I would say that throughout the show, I tended to favor a lot of the side characters over the core cast. I’m basically pegged as House Stark until I die, but really, my interest and enjoyment of the show always revolved around the happenings of characters that weren’t necessarily from one of the great houses, like Bronn, Brienne, and Sandor Clegane.

And speaking of the latter, one of my many favorite scenes from the show would be the part where Sandor and Arya go into a tavern, and come across several shithead Kingsguard soldiers, and the Hound basically goes on a diatribe about eating chickens and it culminates with him, and Arya killing all of the soldiers, with Arya getting her sword, Needle back from the one that captured her and murdered one of her friends.

But it was in this clip that I did notice a comment from another viewer that posted a screen grab of Lurch from Hot Fuzz, and making some remark that made the connection that the Hound was Lurch. No fucking way was my knee-jerk reaction, but it’s also something that I never thought about before, and staring at the picture of the dim-witted heater of the Sandford Neighborhood Watch, I begin to really see that there’s a possibility.

Of course, next game Googling Rory McCann’s film and television history, and sure as shit, confirmation that Game of Throne’s Sandor Clegane was definitely the same guy who played Lurch from Hot Fuzz.

Color me amused; the same guy who was Lurch, just so happened to be one of the sneakiest, underrated and complexly most developed character in the entire Game of Thrones television series

Yarp indeed.

Catching up with Shoresy, saying farewell to Letterkenny

February 19, 2024February 23, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I’ve found myself able to catch up with season 2 of Shoresy, as well as the 12^th and final season of Letterkenny, and seeing as I don’t think I really have a ton to say about either of them, and the fact that one is a spinoff of the other, it seemed appropriate to lump them into a single post and save myself the anxiety of making separate posts for every fucking show that I manage to catch up to.

So I’ll start with the final season of Letterkenny, and if I really had to boil it down to a singular statement, I would say that it’s about time that the series finally wrapped up, because honestly the series really could have ended in season 9 with the hockey story arc, which was probably the last time that the series really had any sort of centralized story, and wasn’t as randomly bouncing around like it were Canadian Seinfeld.

Season 10 was clearly designed solely to build up and soft launch the arrival of the Shoresy spinoff, but Season 11 had basically no point at all, and I’m pretty sure I compared it to Ocean’s Twelve, in the sense that it felt like it was a working vacation for all cast and crew, and they phoned in an entire season in the process.

Which brings us to Season 12, where little time was wasting in the cold open of the first episode that this was the end, which was about as appropriate as it could be, considering it was a series about small town Canada, so them literally running out of stories to tell seems about as appropriate as it could be.

It was a gallant effort to have at least some small stories, about Derry and the Degens, as well as a poignant reminder of small town living and feeling stuck in time, but at the same time, it felt like the show was trying to check off a list of characters to have some screen time in the final season, and considering every episode is just 22 minutes, it’s not a lot of screen time available to give, as well as tell a concurrent stories in the process.

The ending was chill and it did feel like there was some heart in it, but at the same time it felt very small and not necessarily fitting for a series that churned out 12 seasons. For a series that had some really incredible culminations of storylines, this ending felt more like they ran out of gas as opposed to reaching a destination of a satisfying conclusion.

All the same, I look at the series with a general fondness, but it’s a lot like anime; really good when all cylinders are firing, but an ending that kind of feels lacking and unsatisfying.

Which brings us to Shoresy, because when talking about the shows together, I have this feeling that the decline of Letterkenny coincides with the arrival of Shoresy, because as Letterkenny limped their way through their final two seasons, the first two seasons of Shoresy were definitely above average in storytelling and general execution.

Upon the finish of season 2 of Shoresy, I’m left feeling wanting more, and looking forward to future episodes, because they’re telling a very linear and straightforward plot, and it feels to me that both Keeso and Tierney definitely shifted more and more of their eggs from Letterkenny’s basket to Shoresy, and with Letterkenny concluded, the sky’s the limit for the future of Shoresy now.

There’s definitely more heart and emotion put into a lot of the characters of Shoresy, and it’s like they have fewer spotlights of characters to really care about so all the focus really stays, or eventually returns to Shoresy himself, and no matter how wacky his teammates get, it always comes back to the captain, who drops the most meaningful anecdotes and quotes that touch the people around him as well as the viewer the most. Must be nice being both the writer of the show as well as the star.

Either way, as appropriate it is about two shows about small towns and their small worlds, this post really doesn’t have much else substantial to be blathering on about. Letterkenny was an entertaining ride when it was firing on all cylinders, but the ending left a lot to be desired. It just felt like everyone involved with making the show was tired of it, but they felt the need to wrap it up. But Shoresy feels like they took all of the people who were still all-in on making more Letterkenny and funneled them into a project in which they could give their all, and still create a show that feels like it’s being made by people who still care, and like I said, I’m looking forward to more of the show in the future.