El-P

I'm all for Jesse James singing "With my baby tonight !" to introduce Jarrett. I legit *liked* this song back then.

What about them doing a women's Royal Rumble instead ? I mean, they're all about #womensEvolution and shit...

I hope they bring back Tiger Ali Singh & Ahmed Johnson for this.

Or like twenty years ago. When no one gave a fuck and it wasn't even televised.

The Kuweit Cup. Sort of.

That's the craziest thing to me. Things are moving so damn slowly now. This is why things seem so dull. 5 years used to be a long damn time in pro-wrestling. Compare WWF in 92 and 97, WCW in 92 and 97...

If you believe the description of this week's episode, this thing is getting close to the end. When, it was fun while it lasted. Going through Superbrawl 98 live watch, and it's pretty good thus far.

The Lesnar vs Roman match at Mania could very well end up be a redux of the infamous Goldberg match at Mania 20, with the crowd hating on both guys. Fun times ahead.

The one thing really bad about this is the awful bump Kane takes of the F5. For the rest, blame the booking, not Lesnar (not that I want to defend him, I have found him mostly dreadfull forever now unless he gets thrown around by Braun).

Golden Lovers screams Golden Showers to me. Maybe that's just me.

I finally endeared himself to me after a while in LU for the insane amount of beating he would take, but yeah, this is garbage. And his reply is really pathetic.

We don't get the three hours in France. It's already a digest version. And by digest, it doesn't mean most of it isn't vomit inducing.

One of the best, without a doubt.

Of course it is. I've been vocal about Nia Jaxx being ok at best in her role and getting way to much credit for the little she brings to the table. Not every WWE women match is great, very far from it. The Rumble and the EC matches surely were though.

Pretty sure no one is saying those matches suddenly became great, what kind of strawman is that? The Women's Rumble was indeed great, and if anything, it only drew MORE criticisms to those eras you mentioned, because the Rumble made it very apparent that they *had* quality in the Women's roster back then, but they chose not to treat them seriously. This. No one ever said that all of a sudden, the WWE had been that great haven for women's wrestling forever. The Rumble match itself ? Considering who they had work with (by that I mean, all the "legends" that included a lot of mediocre to legit terrible workers like Kelly and Wilson), it was most probably the best booked Rumble since the 1992 one. Yeah, great match.

The three hours show was the death of Nitro. There's already way too fucking much WWE on TV for anything to seem fresh or special. There's no point of doing these boring-ass, poorly written 3 hours shows except, well, the sweet TV rights money, which they badly need.

Hum… My guess is that he would have been awesome. There's no reason why not, really, considering how out of this world great he was. Plus his selling and maneurisms were super dramatic and quite pro-stylish-friendly. Yasuda sucked at both shoot-style and pro-style. For now, Bazsler is basically Don Frye, which is good enough if she's booked right and got the right girls with her inside the ring. She's not young either, so with her it's all a matter of how she's presented and handled. Well, actually, the same goes with Rousey. I wonder if her act won't be hurt by the fact Rousey got signed actually, or if she'll get forgotten about a bit because of this.

That's good to know. February/March as been basically as good as TNA has been since the peak days of 2005. I really don't want to invest time to make giant yearly threads like I used to, but most of this stuff remains under the radar and it really deserves some attention. Probably the best era/product Russo has been involved with (although you can guess which part he's responsible of, and these are obviously the worst). Credit goes to Mantell (and some to Corny I guess).

Well, the whole "Sasha Banks is a top 5 worker in the world" talking point (or something of that ilk) certainly was taking things a wee bit too far indeed. But then again, everything fresh will benefit from that very fact. Right now, the women really are the only interesting thing to me on WWE TV (excluding some NXT stuff). I admit I wasn't the biggest fan of Niven from what I've seen in the MYC, but she's so much better than Nia on every level. Good call about Baszler. For now, she's a bit like Murakami to me : all attitude, not much depth in term of work. Funny Meltz would defend her work of all people. Well, we can guess why...

I have had shitload of joshi exposure but I consider the HitC between Charlotte & Sasha last year as a comfortable MOTYC (and I'm not easy with throwing that moniker around). The Royal Rumble was great. The EC match was terrific. Some TNA stuff from 2008 was great too BTW. The current US women don't work like in the glory days of joshi but they have delivered legit great stuff, by any standart. That being said, Bazsler is nothing special as far as in-ring work goes thus far (great character, ok in-ring especially for a so-called "shoot-style" worker). And Nia Jaxx is a second rate Eagle Sawaii (who herself was a tenth rate Bull Nakano) at best.

That reminds me those old DVDVR reviews where Dean used to make his own storylines. Gotta do that too with WWE. Since I realized Eric Young in TNA circa 07/08 is actually Butters from South Park, it's way easier to watch.

I'd have her make Nia Jaxx cry like a bitch in two minutes, Ken Shamrock-on-Billy Gunn style.

WrestleMania Momenttm >> any title ever. (which, in a way, kinda makes sense as WM is the only time of the year the promotion appears to be hot, although it's all make-believe at this point, Mania is its own beast)

Great post, that one. (and really, chances are that Nak vs Styles won't be nearly as great as what they used to do in NJ a few years back, so it's a dream-match-in-WWE-Universe only, as it's already been done) Cena's "I have no Road to Maniatm" stuff is another level of idiotic though. Yeah. There's a risk John Cena won't be at Mania. Sure. Really compelling stuff. At this point, the only compelling thing about the main event are : could Lesnar take his ball and run back to MMA ? could Roman be involved in that steroid stuff ? Where Braun could fit in this, in either case ? Which, of course, has nothing to do with the WWE writing.

It's funny, because people always talk about the "great production value" of WWE, but in fact, it's not true. The camera work and live editing is god awful. The backstage stuff is embarrassingly badly shot and paced, with those awkward pauses. There's a lot of money on the screen, but the director really sucks.