Tag: wwe

AEW got to be out of their damn mind

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Much to both my chagrin and dismay, the WWE is basically out of blets that I could possibly want.  For the time being, there are no blets left for them to release, because at this point, just about every single WWE blet in history has been released at some point. 

They could start digging, and begin releasing older WCW and ECW or even AWA and territorial replicas like Jim Crockett or Smoky Mountain.  But instead, they’re making all these gaudy tribute blets as well as for some reason releasing WWE championships with side plates of SEC schools.

Hopefully when they inevitably launch NXT Europe, the inevitable blets will be baller.  Or not, I don’t need any more temptations to suck my spare money, $300-400 at a time.

Because that’s the general price range, if not lower, of what replica wrestling blets should cost.  $599 for one, or the bargain price of $999 for two AEW tag team replica blets??

As the kids these days like to say, the fuck outta here

The thing is, the tag blets are the one AEW championship I like the most.  Aesthetically, as well as fandom wise.  AEW does have outstanding tag team wrestling, and these titles hold more weight in my opinion than any other championship they have currently, and if they weren’t $600, I’d definitely want one. 

I don’t know how AEW can justify having such egregiously priced replicas in the first place, and I’m curious to know how many other blet collectors have any.  Their world title replica is around $800 and I know they released a TNT replica that was also in the $600-700 range.  If I played my cards right, I could probably get three, maybe four WWE replicas, and if I didn’t care about quality, I could probably get like 8-9 Pakistani bootlegs on eBay, including all of the AEW ones.

I know they don’t use the same blet makers as WWE or old Ring of Honor did, and use someone completely different.  I don’t know if they’re not mass producing them overseas like most other replicas not New Japan are, but the bottom line is that it’s causing AEW to have to price them way too fucking high that even the most hardcore of collectors like me don’t want to pay. 

Inevitably, I will eventually want some AEW blet(s), because it doesn’t take a whole lot to inspire me to want a blet.  I’m going to kid myself; as much as I criticize AEW, I do want them to do well, it’s just I think TK is kind of an obnoxious mark, as well as all of the vast majority of their fans.  But with the price point they’re at, it most definitely isn’t going to be any time soon.

Kairi, and the long overdue IWGP Women’s Championship

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I heard the news that KAIRI (FKA. Sane) had become the first-ever IWGP Women’s Champion, I was both pleased and disappointed.

I liked Kairi Sane when she was a part of the WWE; she really captured the imaginations of those who watched her rise in NXT through the Mae Young Classic (which they really should consider doing again), and I enjoyed her development into the main roster where she formed an entertaining team with Asuka.  She could work and had charisma, and I was disappointed when it was revealed that she did not re-sign with the WWE, but understandable given the circumstances of her wanting to go back to Japan.

Needless to say, I’m happy for her that she’s the inaugural IWGP Women’s Champion because I always liked KAIRI, and I think she deserves it.

However, at the same time, I’m perplexed and mostly disappointed in the fact that in 2022, is when New Japan Pro Wrestling had finally decided to create an IWGP Women’s Championship.

Sure, NJPW never really had a women’s division at all, often outsourcing their need for women talent mostly to Stardom, but as the rest of the world continued turning, NJPW remained in the Bronze Age as far as gender equality went.  Which is doubly ironic, because Japan is home to such a deep well of female talent, both Japanese and foreigner alike, with most of the latter ex-pats coming to Japan on their own fruition as it’s known to be such a robust scene to grow as performers.

For as much of the weebs of the world think that Japan is this magical culture that can do no wrong, the fact that there’s never been an IWGP Women’s Championship until now is just a little microcosm of where they as a culture truly are behind the times.  And it’s not even just about wrestling, it’s the simple fact that as culture, Japan is still extremely misogynistic.  Sure, they’re no draconian Sharia law country, but they’re still a hundred years behind the United States, and we frankly are mediocre at just about everything.

Either way, I’m pleased with KAIRI becoming a champion once again, but it really is kind of pathetic that it’s taken this long for NJPW to even have something of a women’s championship in the first place.

The Qatar World Cup is going to be not great-great

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not that I’m an Islamaphobe, it’s just that I happen to disagree with a lot of their cultural customs, and when it comes to things I’m interested in, I tend to be disenchanted with whenever an Islamic country hosts things, but imparts their, what I think are archaic and frighteningly draconian, rules and customs onto them.

I have little interest in whenever the WWE runs events in Saudi Arabia, regardless of the egregious amounts of money that clearly sways them, and I can say that I have fairly similar opinions about the World Cup being held in Qatar, right fucking now, instead of the usual summer in which most World Cups tend to be played.  The difference is, professional wrestling is still fairly niche and there are way less people interested in the industry than they are about futbol, and the whole every-four years aspect about the World Cup makes it harder for me to ignore regardless of my disagreement about Qatar.

There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a yacht full of money somewhere involved to where FIFA agreed to have it in Qatar, but what has been ironically entertaining is the sheer amount of disdain and expectations of utter failure and ownage that the event as a whole is being scrutinized over, and after day 1 of the World Cup, it appears that the watching world is in for a great ride in the sense that it might just be a brilliant shitshow.

Obviously, Qatar really has no business being in the World Cup, only being allowed to play by virtue of an archaic rule that gives the host nation a spot in a group, and it was no more evident when they became the first host team in World Cup history to ever lose their opening game.  Now I’m not the biggest futbol enthusiast in the world, but I thought there was a constantly missing “in X amount of years” because the World Cup has been going on for a long time, and even if it’s every four years, surely in some point in time a host country had to have lost at some point, especially since the United States hosted in 1994.  But no, it really has been a 92-year streak where the host nation, has never lost their first match; sure, there’ve been some draws, but still no losses.

Until Qatar, who was basically de-pantsed in 15 minutes, allowing Ecuador to score twice, and basically never challenge them for the remaining 80 minutes of the game.  Every opinion that Qatar didn’t belong was validated, and frankly, I’m looking forward to their next two matches, and hoping they don’t score a single fucking goal, which is a very viable possibility.  They may never even have a single target shot on goal.

Amusingly, it seemed like the refs might actually be as unimpressed and disenchanted with being in Qatar as most peoples’ opinions are; I figured they would have all been bought off, like most host nations tend to do with the refs, and Qatar was going to win the match.  But be it Qatar’s lack of skill, the refs ambivalence of being there, or whatever circumstance, Qatar players were getting nailed with fouls and yellow cards at an alarming clip, and I before I sat down to start watching, I knew the narrative already.

But the best part was undoubtedly the seas of empty seats throughout the arena, and the cameras catching locals leaving the game while it was still going on.  Much has been made about, how being in an Islamic country means no alcohol at the stadium (unless you’re a VIP in a VIP lounge apparently), as well as the reported attempts to basically buy influencers to pretend like they were having a great time, but once the matches begin, Qatar gon’ Qatar, and fans who can’t have a good time are going to bounce, and clearly Qatari fans are pretty fairweather, and don’t want to stick around if their team is getting trounced.

Either way, it’s only been a single day, but I have to say that the Qatar World Cup has delivered on its fuck-uppery in an entertaining way so far, and I’m kind of looking forward to seeing what ironic bullshit is going to emerge in the coming weeks of play.  Also, I’m looking forward to being able to make the obvious dad joke on Thanksgiving about how I’m going to watch futbol instead of football americano, because again, of Qatar’s bullshit demands, we have World Cup over Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving Day just so happens to be the day in which Korea has their first match where they’ll probably get trounced by Uruguay but I’m obviously still going to watch because O Pilsung Corea motherfuckers

WTF is AEW doing #192

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There are a lot of times I find out of what’s going on in wrestling solely based on one of my close friends sending me a random text message commentating on something that he’s watching live and I’m not.  Just the other day, he sends me a message saying:

We’re going to see if we’re right about Jeff Jarrett being a company killer

I laughed because of the time of day it was and that it was on a Wednesday, I knew that Jeff Jarrett had finally decided to become hashtagALLELITE and that he had shown up on AEW.  The real question was who he bashed his balsa wood fake guitar on, because Jeff Jarrett literally does nothing other than that spot.

A quick Google search confirmed that Jeff Jarrett was definitely ALLELITE and had done so by bashing his balsa wood fake guitar over Darby Allin, which I probably could’ve guessed in maybe three or four tries, because for some reason, Darby Allin seems to be completely okay with being a gatekeeper for the company in which all incoming talent seems to gravitate towards, and usually beats the unholy shit out of him at some point.

Regardless, let’s get back to Jeff Jarrett, and the claim that he’s a company killer.  After all, the Jarrett family is somewhat low country wrestling royalty in the regard that they’ve been running promotions for generations now, but Jeff himself has been varying degrees of involved with primarily TNA which is now Impact! Wrestling, but also the NWA, Global Force, GCW and even with some appearances with New Japan.  At no point in his involvement with any of these promotions did they ever really light the world on fire, and only in his time with TNA was Jeff himself remotely close to being anything of a superstar in the industry.

The reputation comes from the fact that none of these promotions ever really benefit from the addition of Jeff Jarrett, feeding the narratives that the WWE put onto him that he was never really more than a mid-card ceiling kind of guy.  Furthermore, Jeff Jarrett has been around long enough, to where he’s gotten to be involved with various factions and trends throughout the years, but again, not in a particularly good way.

I ilke to describe Jeff Jarrett as kind of wrestling’s version of the Family Guy joke killer meme, where once Family Guy makes a reference to something popular, that thing is immediately uncool and dead in the water right then and there.  Jeff Jarrett had the misfortune of being added to the nWo 2000 stable during his time in WCW which lasted all of like a month; it’s easy to say it’s because WCW couldn’t book a fish into water, or that Bret Hart’s career was already over, but let’s be real, it was because it was Jeff Jarrett was a member.

Nearly 15 years later, after Jarrett had lost TNA and was spinning his wheels with Global Force, during a show in partnership with New Japan, Jeff Jarrett shocks (read: surprises nobody) when he brandishes a balsa wood fake guitar with the Bullet Club logo on it and bashes it over Hiroshi Tanahashi, effectively joining the evil gaijin stable.  Needless to say, all the coolness of Bullet Club flew out the window faster than the hopes and dreams of everyone trying to win Powerball, and the stable hasn’t recovered since.

Earlier this year, Jeff Jarrett has been clawing at relevancy in any way shape or form, derailing promotions left and right.  For all the exposure and life Matt Cardona had injected into GCW, all it took was Jeff Jarrett appearing on their THE WRLD ppv, where he buried Effy, and GCW hasn’t recovered since.  Jeff Jarrett was Ric Flair’s LAST MATCH EVERRRR, and it’s almost like the marks who put the show together were trying to hedge their bets by preemptively calling their Jim Crockett Promotions show a one-time deal, but it’s really like they’re restauranteurs who already saw the writing on the wall when working with Double-J and didn’t bother promoting anything beyond the single show, if it meant being associated with him.

Even the WWE wasn’t safe from the stink of Jeff Jarrett, as he was brought in for some reason to be a special referee for the feud between the Usos and Street Profits, and not long afterward, the Vince McMahon scandal blew up, and of all the people and shots that have been fired at him throughout the decades, really all it took was having to work with Jeff Jarrett that seems to have effectively killed such an unkillable career.

So, hopefully Tony Khan knows what he’s doing in getting into bed with Jeff Jarrett, because as history has proven throughout the millennium, doing business with Jeff Jarrett has often come with some seriously bad consequences.

WTF is AEW doing #177

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not that I don’t want to watch AEW when it airs, it’s just that I’d rather be doing one of the fifty other things that I could be doing with what spare time that I actually have when I have it.

Typically, highlight packages on YouTube are how I best keep touch with the pulse of wrestling, and when things seem compelling enough, I’ll look for video on demand or make a conceited effort to watch. 

Needless to say, that very rarely happens, and it’s not just with AEW, but with WWE as well.

And then I see things like this populate on YouTube, and I’m left scrunching my eyebrow and thinking [title of post]?

I kind of feel bad for both the guys in this very unfortunate pairing of thumbnail and subject line, regardless of it were deliberate or not by the digital media team of AEW.  Billy Gunn probably watched with a tear in his eye and piss and vinegar in his mouth as D-Generation X celebrated some 25 year anniversary on a very recent edition of RAW, and Swerve is probably just another of many former WWE guys who is feeling increasing regret over being quick to jump to AEW after their releases from WWE before Hunter came back.

And now one of them is kayfabe abducting the other in a strange storyline where four black guys are clumped together, fighting each other, seemingly over an over-the-hill white man who once made a name for himself as Mr. Ass, but because he’s at the elder statesman point of his career, he’s now “Daddy Ass.”

I’ve said it once, and I’ll undoubtedly say it thousands more times, if there are ever reasons why I’ll always have a hard time taking AEW seriously, this is definitely one of them.

WTF is AEW doing #137

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After hearing about, and then seeing the visuals of Chris Jericho defeating Cesaro Claudio Castagnoli for the Ring of Honor World championship on AEW Dynamite on TNT TBS, that was the first thing that I said: wtf is AEW doing?

Then I came to the realization that I say this almost on a weekly basis, because the promotion is always doing some weird questionable things on a weekly basis except for the precise single AEW taping that I was physically present for, where absolutely nothing substantial occurred except an amusing squash match between Brody King and Darby Allin. 

Ordinarily, I’m typically in favor of most things that benefit Chris Jericho.  Notwithstanding his unfortunate political alignment that has increasingly come to light over the last few years, I can still (mostly) separate the wrestler from the guy, and it’s safe to say that I’ll be able to say that I was a fan of the performer, his impressive body of work and his timelessly impressive ability to be creative, inventive and stay relevant no matter the decade.

And with an official ROH title reign now in his pocket, Jericho joins an extremely exclusive club of guys that have held gold in WWE, WCW, ECW, NJPW and ROH, with the only other guy being to my knowledge, Bubba Ray Dudley.  Jericho may never have held TNA/Impact gold before, but Bubba has also never held an AEW title before, so it’s kind of a push for being the most decorated champions of all time.

But maybe it’s because it’s AEW and it never seems like there’s ever an endgame in sight for their seemingly random booking, but I’m more left with the feeling of wtf is AEW doing, over trying to analyze the rationale for having Chris Jericho defeating Claudio for the ROH World title.

Traditionally, logic would say that Claudio is getting a push by dropping the ROH World title, as ROH is unfortunately seen as a tier below AEW, so alleviating him of a second-tier championship frees him up to pursue AEW’s bigger and grander prizes.  But AEW doesn’t seem to know what to do with their World championship, since CM Punk can’t stop being a diva or trying to sabotage the company, so it just keeps ending up on Jon Moxley’s shoulder and is barely worth its weight right now, so it begs the question on whether or not it’s even worth pursuing.

Giving it to Jericho makes a little more sense, because it gives him one more notch on his mantle, of being the most decorated guy in the business, but at this current juncture of his career, where Jericho is seemingly content to be a star-maker, the hope is that the ROH brand will get a young technician to grow and rise to challenge Jericho for the ROH World title, to where Jericho can do good business with. 

However considering ROH still has no television and is completely reliant on AEW programming to advance their stories, it’s probably not going to be nearly as good as the potential of it is on paper.  My guess is that ultimately it’ll be Daniel Garcia vs. Chris Jericho, but it’ll come at the expense of imploding yet another Chris Jericho stable, and the likely alienation and scattering of a bunch of decent workers in the process.

Such a narrative is one that requires logic, something that AEW doesn’t seem to have.  With its World championship in the shitter because their long-term investment went berserk and got into a physical altercation with three executives who were also three of the boys, which was never a good idea in the first place, who also happened to immediately tank the six-man championship that the entire promotion was building up for since day one, the company’s entire main event picture was decimated in a single night.

And for a company with like 15 titles in active circulation, you’d think some of these guys would actually get some television time with them right?  Take PAC for example, the guy is hands down one of the top-3 workers in the entire promotion, is holding the brand new, All-Atlantic Championship, is also co-holding one of the brand-new Trios blets, you’d think he’d get some screen time right?  No way!  After winning the title in June, he doesn’t make his first televised appearance with it until August, and that’s on Dark, and literally this past Wednesday was his first-ever Dynamite defense of the title.  The belt has literally been seen more at non-AEW shows than it has been at AEW shows.

So I suppose with such a tumultuous roster, something’s gotta happen somewhere, so why not start with this, but damn if it just doesn’t seem like something interesting as much as it’s wtf is AEW doing, again?

New blets are probably going to be inevitable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t watched much wrestling over the last weeks months years, but when I heard about the latest NXT Worlds Collide show, I made a point to carve out an evening to watch it.  After finding out that NXT UK was being folded in preparation for the coming of NXT Europe, I was kind of sad because I actually really grew to like NXT UK in its short lifespan.  Their show really felt grassroots, and the roster size led to quick and exciting stories, and when they started doing their own Takeover events, they were always full of real quality matches, with always at least one broadway on them.

The rise of Jordan Devlin, Walter vs. Dragunov, and Kay Lee Ray vs. Meiko Satomura were some of the best things about NXT UK.  Even their midcard guys like Noam Dar and A-Kid were starting to really shine, and for a while I’d have said that NXT UK was my favorite program within the entire company; granted it didn’t hurt that everything else had moved to cable tv and I didn’t watch it, but still.

Anyway, none of the matches ended in any real surprises; Ricochet wasn’t going to win and take an NXT blet away from the show, same with Nikki ASH and Doudrop.  Pretty Deadly unifying the tag titles was a little surprising, but if the UK scene needed to have anyone thrown a bone to it, it was obviously the tag team championships, because in spite of how much I was hoping Tyler Bate was going to win, it didn’t seem likely that any of the Americans were going to lose the respective men or women’s NXT championships, which is exactly what happened.

But the thing is, Worlds Collide kind of acted as something of a bookend to me as far as all the NXT UK and even the NXT blets are concerned.  Obviously, the UK blets all have to go since the brand is effectively dead now, but it also doesn’t mean that the existing blets in NXT also aren’t on the chopping block either.  Save for some coloration being added to the plates, all of the blet designs were carried over from “old” NXT, and the designs of the blets don’t match the Cosby sweater new logo of 2.0.

Of course when NXT Europe drops in 2023, it’s inevitable that they will get an array of their own titles, that I hope will look great so I can get them, but also hope that they don’t look great, so I won’t be tempted to get them because I haven’t really been chugging out surveys like I used to, so my blet monies have basically evaporated into nothingness now, and I wouldn’t really have the spare cash to get them.

But I also anticipate that NXT 2.0, within the next 12 months, will probably debut some redesigns of all their existing blets, because with the unifying of their UK counterparts, now seems like as good as any of a time for them to drop the old Hunter-era NXT logo’d blets, and debut some brand new, 2.0’d blets.  Especially since the WWEShop really has caught up to every single active blet being available, and they need something to drop to keep blet nerds like me wet.

I guess I should get back on the survey train and start trying to earn back up some more blet money, because I feel like we’re on the cusp of some new shit being available sooner rather than later.