Matt D

Oh good. Vince losing 350 Million is now the top trending thing on facebook. That should be fun.

I still think it's how you watch Raw. I did it in maybe an hour this morning on youtube. I fast forwarded through the singing in the Bray promo to the real thing. I heard Steph. I watched Adam Rose. I watched the Rollins match and the Cena match. I caught Bad News Barrett's promo. I saw Paige's entrance and Alicia's post match antics. I saw the Mark Henry match. I saw Cesaro. I saw R-Truth's entrance because I was confused by it. I saw the Cena/Usos backstage promo since that felt kind of new, and that was it. No recaps. No RVD. In and out and thinking that it was a pretty fun Raw.

I think there are a couple of levels. One is that people do follow things on a business level. The other is something you can appreciate a bit more and that's build and payoff. Why do Austin vs Brock on a random Raw when you can spend weeks building up to it on PPV. I think most people would be fine if you spent weeks building up to it and making it matter for a well-hyped Raw. Sort of like the NXT specials, but it means less if you just toss it on TV without build.

There's a similar note over at DVDVR and the most interesting stuff there has focused not necessarily on WRESTLING appealing to people with money but instead the WWE brand doing so, creating an umbrella of product that appeals to multiple demographics utilizing all elements of their brand that they can then market together. Basically, more Total Divas and Blackman's Bounties and Scooby Doo. Not necessarily the WWE movie brand but instead something that utilizes their colorful characters in completely non-wrestling settings. Use wrestling as a R+D engine to debut and create characters and then spin them out into non-wrestling venues which will be all that the broad public actually sees.

We'll know in a few hours.

In some ways, Bo's lucky that he's leaving NXT when he is. I think if he was there another two months, he'd be a total babyface.

They want Cole to do exactly what Cole is doing. Why? Because they're paranoid and very, very troubled.

So make it The Boondocks?

Dallas is already problematic since he only works as a heel after having been pushed as a face for months (years?) in order to end up with the "Rocky Sucks" heat that they were then able to run the delusional gimmick with. You start running with the delusional gimmick without the groundwork and it's going to float away into apathy-land.

The weekly television crush is a killer. Guys trading wins. Them hotshotting through things. They just have to fill content and it's hard to make anything matter in that scenario. It's not just the NXT guys who are flops now but people like Del Rio or even Sheamus. Everyone that's not Daniel Bryan or the Shield basically.

Yeah, to be fair, in the match I mentioned there was definitely a throughstory of all three guys bringing the hate and both Shocker and Casas especially hating Rush. If it was spottier and flashier and without the grudge feel, it probably wouldn't have been nearly as focused or good.

Vince standing next to Linda when she was doing her "I lost the race" speech would be way better.

I thought the Rush vs Negro Casas vs Shocker triple threat was pretty effective. Guys dropping out of matches is sort of an expected thing in lucha and part of the usual narrative of trios, so it didn't feel so out of place here. I wrote it up not that long ago. I'll have to see more lucha triple threats at some point.

It's funny. They hire TV writers but they don't seem to use any real narrative ploys. For instance, I watch Revenge with my wife. In the last two episodes of the third season, which just happened, they paid off a few big story arcs, set up 2-3 new things for the next season, had a couple of character deaths to help build up either new/returned characters or to set up a grudge, and introduced both new mysteries and new character problems for the next season. And this isn't exactly a brilliantly written show. WWE almost never manages to do those sorts of thing in any meaningful way, and when they do, and we can find examples of such things, that's when we go nuts about the product. The long term planning is pretty nil. People are so afraid of watching new shows right now because fox is going to cancel them within a season or whatever. WWE is there. It's not going anywhere. It can be a fix and something to follow, but they rarely play up the strengths of the serialized storytelling.

I think they're frankly better off continuing to try to tap into growing foreign markets, maybe?

There almost has to be a Hostile Takeover story in the next month, no?

I think a good corollary discussion to this is just how wrestling WILL Change, now that we have some idea about both the network and the tv rights. How is WWE going to react to this week? Etc? What do we think will really happen?

Alright, here's what I think they should do with the belt: -Strip Bryan -Turn the Cena vs Wyatt match at Payback into a title match -Put Wyatt over after Cena loses his cool, does not rise above hate, and makes a stupid mistake which gives a good mind game payoff to this whole storyline, one that it sorely needs. -Put the Wyatts over the Usos so they have three+ belts on the chair -Put Wyatt over a few babyfaces -On the July PPV Have Cena/Bryan beat the Wyatts for the titles -The Main Event of Summerslam is Cena vs Bryan for the #1 Contendorship (or at least that's the big match). Have it like Summerslam 92 where one or the other seem to have gone with Wyatt maybe? Have it end in dispute. -Then, to get people to renew their subscriptions since Night of Champions is now key, run the blowoff Wyatt vs Cena vs Bryan there as the main event and culmination of the story.

I want to see Vince pissed off about all this news and put the belt on himself.

I was wishing on a star, big guy. Johnny Sorrow explains New Japan booking using the TV show Rhoda is high art waiting to happen.

I think it's more of a business analyst/intellectual exercise. Past "Better storylines" I don't think most of us would be happier with a more mainstream product. But here we're crafty enough to put that aside for the sake of stretching our brains.

Monday should be pretty interesting. It's a shame it's a taped show.

Isn't the mindset that Brock left THEM? That he turned his back on them and on the thing that they love? They invested their time and attention and fandom in him and he spurned it? And for what? Football which he failed at? MMA which a lot of them resent? Living with Sable? I don't mean to say that any of this is particularly reasonable, but let's understand why they feel like they do. A lot of these people are so caught up in wrestling that for someone to decide to leave it after being pushed to the moon, well, weird things happen.

Also, I wasn't saying the work done over the last couple of months wasn't useful, even if WWE didn't get their way. In some ways, it shows how amazing it was that things ended up as low as they seem to and can be a case study for value vs perception or who knows.

Just ask Johnny Sorrow. You would have never guessed that what's going on with Okada right now is based on an old episode of Welcome Back Kotter.