Cobra Commander

it's possible that Teddy Hart was just being his usual self, but he really had a case of the "I'm jobbing tonight" face at times during that episode.

a 3 hour RAW is sort of an ordeal to make it through, and when there's no wrestling competition going up against RAW, they're sorta stuck between building to a match in the last 1/6th of the show, or trying to do that match earlier when the crowd is less dead. I've said they should just give the gimmick to somebody else. Catalina being around does present a reasonable storyline way to introduce a new Sin Cara. Like she can scout matches to find the new(est) Sin Cara. There's gotta be somebody who can fly who really doesn't have a lot of ways to get over in the WWE, right? Or hell, bring Fuego to the WWE and let him do his current schtick while in the Sin Cara outfit.

so the Andy Messersmith in this scenario will be somebody that gets overshadowed by history, but ends up working for Turner for a few years?

It would fit Sandow/Stevens' NWA Power gimmick for him to get a stunt double who gets beat up as Stevens flees the scene NXT finished 9k behind AEW on Wednesday night (822k vs 813k). Amazing what's possible if the NXT guys are put over on the big shows.

on-screen authority figures are super worn out by this point.. but some of the stuff they put on-screen makes no sense without some sort of authority figure

1. passive-aggressive shot by Rollins towards Daniel Bryan. ("I'll beat that guy, unlike Daniel Bryan") 2. "We've been told by the USA Network, the home of RAW and NXT, to mention that NXT is on the air because we don't want it to finish 25th in 18-49s" I mean, the body language of the announcers retreating as Brock bodybagged Dio was probably as questionable as "why would RAW mention NXT matches"

Well, the booking is the booking when it turns out you signed a guy who needs knee surgery before he can work a full schedule.. Having Cole standing next to HHH probably isn't doing him any favors for perception. RAW almost feels like a show that could use less wrestling. The commercial breaks subtract from the matches. The concept of having main events without the people involved getting interview time just seems like not making the most of having too much time to fill. USA won't give up the 3rd hour (which makes the show even worse), but at the very least, more talking is stuff that could be snipped out of foreign airings if the concern is about non-English speaking audiences not getting the promos.

wonder if "let's guarantee the shows in writing" just happened to speed up the process of fixing the mechanical issues.

a shame Vince doesn't have an extra 60 million dollars to spend on this IPO: Anyways.. i'm assuming Fury went from England to Saudi Arabia and back without flying with the WWE party. I'd guess Cain departed SA in a similar fashion without hanging around Riyadh for a day.

Members of the Top 20 start plotting to blame The Revival for their flight out of Saudi Arabia

if you're a leader of a foreign country who wants to give Vince McMahon $80M a year to hold wrestling cards in your country, this might be the time to send your feelers.

the Cain/Brock and Fiend/Rollins clips from Crown Jewel were more "let's eat up some time".. the Stephanie thing.. eh.. yeah. I'll invest my money in people saying that Stephanie did that speech because the Atlas Air flight hadn't taken off by the time she was out there. Who's the early leader in "first person from the Crown Jewel 2019 trip to do a shoot about it after leaving the WWE"? Ziggler or Ryder would be easy picks. Maybe Gallows or Anderson. Also, who's the betting favorite for "First person from Crown Jewel to get a raise to keep them happy and quiet". Refer to previous list.

"There were problems and the reason it took so long to resolve is because nobody wanted to work very hard and they kept taking breaks" "It's a Friday in the Islamic World.. let's find a way to not say that" "They worked as hard as possible given the circumstances" "That's probably better"

Wouldn't the issue involve how many people have to be moved out of there? The Atlas Air flight they took from Riyadh was a 747. Also this might be wandering in the weeds, would they be transporting a disassembled ring on the plane ride back or do they just keep a wrestling ring in storage in Saudi Arabia now? So while the Saudi government has amassed a private jet collection recently. Transporting that many people on a 12hr+ flight probably isn't something you do by flying every gulfstream possible out of Saudi Arabia.

are we sure that MBS isn't a NXT smark that wanted to see Adam Cole be on a network TV main event

Paul Heyman was one of the smarter guys in the room for getting a flight home as quickly as possible. I'm sure he didn't regret missing the opportunity to hear about a situation where a promoter didn't come through with paying. Anyways, i've seen a translation saying that Hugo used 300m as a "let's just make up a number for the story" number.. muchos gracias por eso, Hugo... The concept of pulling the show off the air in Saudi is disputed by at least one person in that country. So, maybe mechanical problems were actual mechanical problems. Maybe mechanical problems are "somebody took our keys and we can't start the engine to leave" The concept of Vince McMahon deciding to fuck around with a guy who has had people murdered would be a very Vince story. Only way this whole thing would be weirder is if the WWE was holding shows in Gaddafi-era Libya and Vince McMahon did something to piss off Moammar Gaddafi on the way out of town.

it seems like muting would be more effective than blocking if you're a blue checkmark account.. just cut them off and don't give them a "hey, this guy blocked me" moment

it's probably a little generous to Saudi Arabia to call it an empire. The whole wahabbi funded schools in various countries aspect would be the closest thing to an empire. Evil entity that hates the concept of other gulf states leaving the nest, yeah definitely. The problem with midweek Saudi cards is that the most obvious idea is to tape Smackdown which won't work as great for some obvious reasons (network not wanting canned shows and taping before an event and airing it afterwards). The pool of willing talent for future Saudimania shows is lower now.. but some would be won over by piles of cash and the whole fallacy of "well, it can't be any worse than that ever again". A Smackdown being held the day after a Saudi card somewhere in the area would have some challenges.. although I wonder if they could just go to some place like Dhahran (Saudi Aramco) for a Smackdown and have a mostly expat audience.

I suspect that having a live NXT on Wednesday night gave HHH a reason to stick around the USA instead of being in Saudi Arabia on Thursday. Also, the whole women's match in Saudi Arabia package is effective for the people in the audience who really don't know a lot about Saudi Arabia. There's probably more people in that country who aren't totally aligned with the fundamentalists than one would think and the crowd shots were neat (and also selective sampling) As for the "Fox should be mad that NXT was put over Smackdown"... 10 Smackdown superstars were involved in matches in some sense and 7 were women (Bayley, Cross, Sasha, the 4 women in the tag match whose names I forgot, and Bryan/Miz/Zayn).. to act like Smackdown got squashed when tonight was the equivalent to a Yankee loss where they only started like 3 of their opening day regulars and had the other 6 spots filled with either backup hitters or pitchers playing positions because most of their roster was unable to make it to the stadium due to travel problems of some sort. Not to diminish the aura of tonight, but it'd be a shocker if Smackdown took a loss in every confrontation next week too. If the roster wasn't near full-strength due to anything other than shit luck, then Fox could be mad about things. But I suspect anybody handling things for the network could be convinced that the storyline over the next 3 weeks was strengthened due to (as far as we know) a charter company fuckup and maybe it ends with Smackdown going over at Survivor Series. I'd think the network people do realize this is scripted and that there's the occasional adversity. The next 3 weeks really shouldn't have matches between the brands, but more sneak attacks or out of ring stuff. Whatever the plan was going into the PPV, it may have been improved upon through a happy little accident.

good characters/feuds have some level of relatableness to fans... Lana/Rusev might not necessarily be good, but it's possible that it's relatable to fans. Or at least it actually got crowd reactions during the 3rd hour of Raw, which could send an interesting message about what gets people at events to stop sitting on their hands.

yeah, to put it nicely, you can tell which people on the roster have worked on cable TV and which haven't.. obviously those who are just arriving on this stage will adjust over time. But it's a little different when you're on TV as opposed to indy shows where you can go longer for whatever reason. For reference, the Omega/Janela Dark match went 26 minutes and the Dynamite match went 13 minutes. so yeah, strikes can be improved, or they could just figure out the strikes that look good and focus on them.

Janela's chops vs Cutler were not very convincing. Might as well just slap the other guy on the chest to do something more credible than those chops

Bischoff and McMahon wrote their TV 5 minutes before the show started, for different reasons.

a CMLL split would be a mix of the CMLL/AAA split and a NOAH/AJPW split if enough CMLL people leave with Sofia. But yeah, owning the buildings is one of the smartest cost-saving moves done in wrestling, so it'd be amazing if the promotion that owned their buildings managed to mess that up anyways. Probably the best case scenario for both sides (and especially CMLL) is that a split ends up with a reunion where everybody makes money in the end.

Worth noting that the solution to get Rey past his look involved retconning his unmasking (which was a good idea because WCW had morons who didn't know the merch value of masks) and also having Rey visit the pharmacy even more often. Marko would just go from looking young/small to looking small with a mask. Not sure if a bodysuit top would help there either but it's worth trying. Penta's armbreaker finisher on a guy whose arms are that small was also an interesting visual