Is TNA the worst wrestling promotion in history?

[EricR]

http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2016/06/is-tna-not-entirely-terrible-now-small.html?m=1

 

I watched TNA last night for the first time in maybe a year? 2? And I actually really enjoyed it. Hardy vs Galloway was real good, fun Trevor Lee match, fun 10 man tag, actually overall enjoyed the vibe of the show. Granted there was fat forward aplenty, but you just can't watch modern wrestling tv or porn without FF. Still, pleasantly surprised.

[Rah]

This all feels like a swan-song of wrestlecrap, but I hope TNA never stops with the classics

 

https://twitter.com/PopTV/status/740260052871741440

[Alucard]

I watched TNA last night for the first time in maybe a year? 2? And I actually really enjoyed it. Hardy vs Galloway was real good, fun Trevor Lee match, fun 10 man tag, actually overall enjoyed the vibe of the show. Granted there was fat forward aplenty, but you just can't watch modern wrestling tv or porn without FF. Still, pleasantly surprised.

 

I have also really enjoyed Impact a lot for the past several months and think they have done a great job building up to Slammiversary.

 

Lmao at the video above. Awesome.

[Lee]

[Migs]

The video he uploaded is spectacular., Just five minutes of him glaring at the camera with different faces.

[C.S.]

Matt Hardy is the best Hardy, both as a character and in the ring, and he always has been. I'm glad other people are finally beginning to realize that.

[SomethingSavage]

Err, I wouldn't exactly call it an "aha" moment of clarity or realization with Matt. Wasn't that pretty much the common consensus back in the Mattitude days, too?

 

Looking back at their career paths now, it's pretty crazy. Jeff really seemed to hit his stride around late '08 and early '09 - and that leads in perfectly to the period wherein Matt drops the ECW Title, picks up the pounds, and just goes absolutely bat-shit bonkers with the online videos and whatnot. Matt's in-ring work took a big dip after the ECW run, too. He had moments here and there - like the series with Drew - but Jeff was killing it on both fronts as an outstanding character babyface, as well as a big-bumping in-ring babyface.

 

And this is much further under the radar, but there's also the time in TNA when Jeff came back clean & sober and really seemed to be on fire again. He had some stellar singles matches with Bobby Roode, a peak heel Bully Ray, Angle, Aries, and an overall solid main event run there.

It was right around that same time - perhaps just a bit later - that Matt really redesigned himself and transformed into a treeeemendous heel for ROH. And it didn't take too long for him to take the lead (again) as the better overall performer.

 

Jeff's usually enjoyable enough in his role. But, over time, Matt has shown that he's so much more versatile in every aspect of the game.

 

With all that being said? The Slammiversary buildup has been 'nanners. It's a shame that so many people are shitting all over the product as a result of this stuff though.

 

The weekly TNA show isn't all that bad, to be honest. The actual action is usually pretty damn good. The angles feel outdated and incredibly cliche at this point. But there's a lot to like when ya strip away the nonsense and the company's complete inability to book or promote ANYTHING worthwhile.

 

TNA works for me in a vacuum. I can enjoy the majority of the matches in isolation, but the company has been on a fucking treadmill - going nowhere fast - forever now. Matches on top of rematches (with gimmick matches and blow-offs included) are thrown away for free on TV, week in & week out. That works fine for Lucha Underground, but - when they're still trying to sell super card events as PPVs and whatnot - I just don't get it. And that's another issue with them. It seems like there's no strategy or plan in place outside of, "stay afloat to see another day."

 

There's just no sense of forward momentum or true progression, even when they've actually handled A LOT of things well when it comes to booking guys like winners and standouts.

Destroyer Lashley's dominance, the rise and redemption of EC3, Drew's ascension to the title, the Decay as a fun sideshow act, and (up until just recently) the heel "family values" Matt Hardy have all been handled surprisingly well.

[NintendoLogic]

So apparently they're going to be using Billy Corgan as a heel authority figure. Between that and Big Money Matt, it's safe to say that TNA is in glorious trainwreck mode right now.

[El-P]

Sounds amazing. 12 years to catch up and I'm all for it.

[topropepodcast]

The Final Deletion was a pretty amazing piece of performance art.

 

Typos, drones, holograms, and fireworks.

[sek69]

It's like the Hardys' whole careers built up to this moment. It's almost a shame TNA still is going forward since that will never be topped and would have been the perfect way to go out.

[El-P]

Care to give any details ? Corgan's TNA sounds fascinating.

[funkdoc]

Care to give any details ? Corgan's TNA sounds fascinating.

 

it's basically the heir to the WCW mini-movies in every way, with no Cheatum but even longer i think

[Death From Above]

I just watched it and I feel like I've seen the likes of something that will never come again.

 

What a time to be alive. We have passed into a completely new dimension of existence.

[Death From Above]

Care to give any details ? Corgan's TNA sounds fascinating.

 

It's already up on Youtube just look for TNA Final Deletion Director's Cut. Join us.

[El-P]

Ok,I know it's been overused but : What The Fuck did I just watched ? I lost my shit three times, first with the jump from the.... tree !!!! Then with the... fireworks battle !!! Then with the creature from the deep. When did Matt Hardy officially go crazy ?

 

Say what you want, the finish actually made sense, they planted the seeds earlier on. ***** for the sheer insanity. Up there with the IWA Bathhouse Deathmatch.

 

Why is this a promotion with barely any TV and ressource that is producing crazy shit like this, while the WWE is still plodding through KevinDunnMania drab production ?

 

I've seen the future.

I think I'm gonna drop the "Brother Nero" creepy drawl for no reasons in the days to come.

 

I want this to go on in LU.

[sek69]

During the fireworks battle all I could think was "I bet this is how Jeff sees the world all the time".

[topropepodcast]

The drone promo was maybe my favorite thing all year. The typos only seemed to add to it.

[Johnny Sorrow]

"A dilapidated boat!"

[raul]

i think this is the top moment of 2016 for me. can't remember the last time i had this much fun watching wrestling..probably july 2011

[S.L.L.]

I said this on Twitter, and I think it bears repeating here: whatever else you take away from this match, I think we should all be able to agree that this Christopher Guest-style mockumentary version of pro wrestling is a billion times better than anything Vince Russo has ever done in his entire pathetic career. Like, if Guest had ever made a movie about wrestling, I imagine it would've culminated in a match a lot like this between between #BROKEN Fred Willard and "Brother Nero" Eugene Levy, and I would've thought it was genius and made all my friends watch it. You could argue whether that technically makes it good or bad - and it was probably a bit of both, in the best possible way - but it certainly wasn't lacking in entertainment value, creativity, and even coherence, which is more than I can say for 99% of the garbage this promotion does even at it's best.

[Matt D]

Write up:

 

The pre-match antics stressed Matt's heel advantage, having picked the time and prepared the place and gotten into Jeff's head by destroying his precious lawn. Even though this is, for the sake of comparison, an empty arena match, they played to the crowd at home the whole time, starting with Matt intimidating the referee and then with his heat-garnering violin rendition of "Cool, Cocky, Bad" for an audience that can't even boo him. Despite that, Jeff arrived, albeit sans theme music, to cut it off. Matt refused to show ass, though, keeping his back to Jeff until he made it into the ring.

Here, a brief note about the early camera work. Matt's stable at this point consists of a 90s-esque WWF gardener gimmick elderly Virgil of sorts, his wife as an annoyingly supportive valet in multi-colored garb, his baby as a mascot, and a legion of nameless drones. In order to suspend disbelief on why the drones (bruised from an earlier pre-match assault on Jeff which he fought off with his own symbolic instrument) aren't interfering, I think we're supposed to imagine that they're the ones flitting around the ring managing the camera work. What we got out of that, at least in the early going, were a lot of Dunn-ian quick cuts. Instead of the usual WWE style that whips about right at the point of impact so that the moment of it is dulled and lost, this switched right before, so that we almost fell into the impact of the blows.

On to the match itself. Matt ambushed Jeff first with a quick punch, winning the first few seconds of exchange until he was shrugged off of a bulldog. Jeff was too quick to rush in (obviously thrown off his game by Matt), and ran into a foot, but since we're in the shine, he recovered quickly and hit a far too early superplex, which, in the context of this match, was basically an overglorified armdrag. Due to the TV format, and presumably the production costs for a company that may or may not be funded by racist corporate biker twins and/or over the hill (also) bald, moody artiste types, they only have around ten minutes of actual in-ring work that they can show. By symbolically using the superplex in this function during the feeling out process/shine, they define the initial scope of the match immediately at a higher point, which will allow for the later explosive escalation. Jeff followed the superplex by bouncing off the ropes and hitting a bit splash for a nearfall. While a strange move for him, it's also a heightened version of a normal pinfall which hits the higher tone that they were in the process of defining.

Immediately thereafter, Jeff pulled out the trellis, a table stand-in given the setting. While yes, this wasn't just Matt's homefield advantage, but also the strange redneck distopia that Jeff was used to, the fact that he didn't even sell, as a character, the strangeness of finding the trellis under the ring, took me out of the match a bit. Matt was going out of his way to react to everything and, at times, it felt like Jeff was just moving on to the next spot. He could make it work as a flustered stoicism at times, but here I was half expecting for the spot to fail, and for him to simply continue to pull out multiple trellises until he hit it correctly as Matt just had to lay there, like a modern-day Sabu at his very worst. Regardless, the spot did work correctly and led to another nearfall.

Much like the superplex functioned as an armdrag, however, Matt's twist of fate out of nowhere, his full on finisher, were this not a gimmick match, served as a TRANSITION. Once again, it's a precarious balance. If at any point of the match, they lost the beat, lost the tenor and tone, failed to symbolically level out the point where they were at, the entire structure would collapse and the match could never build to the later points it was trying to reach. The ladder would be missing a number of rungs. Instead, due to the lack of time alotted, and the dramatic end point, they started higher up the rungs and as such, Matt's finisher served as a transition and a transition only onto his well-scouted (inoculated?) brother who was not nearly worn down enough to be put away by it.

This allowed Matt to get back into the match, the escalation continuing now with the kendo stick shots and the introduction of the actual ladder, the images of violence climbing further up those proverbial rungs, with the choking in the corner and the outright biting. It's only when Matt stumbled back towards reality and went for an actual move, in this case, the side effect, that Jeff was able to elbow out and, in a stroke of synergy, used the phony Twist of Fate and his own Swanton finisher as yet another transition, though really one that would be an extended hope spot, not cut off by any quality of Matt's, but due to Jeff's own reckless abandon, which has been costing him matches and momentum within matches for well over a decade. He climbed the tree (ladder-assisted) and went for the Swanton onto Matt who was prone on a ladder; Matt moved, though this wasn't as definitive as it should have been. Jeff still went for the pin after this and Matt had to scramble to regain some distance and the advantage. They could have punctuated that moment better, especially considering what was to come.

Now, as the third act began, and the hope spot was cut off due to Jeff's own recklessness, Matt, having seen his brother's resolve again first hand and knowing he couldn't defeat him through sportsmanlike means (especially after the two defeats that led up to this match), brought the world's most destructive chain out from his tights. For a match that used a superplex as an arm drag and finishers as act break transitions and hope spots, the only place to go was to high explosives. Matt launched the fireworks across the ring as Jeff desperately defended himself with a trash can lid. It seemed all for naught as the smoke cascaded around them. Matt, limping, selling, calling out, with another weapon in hand stalked around the ring to finish the job only to find that Jeff, hulked up and in the midst of his babyface comeback had gotten the "chain." As fireworks flew back the other way, Matt ran from the comeback, only to get chased down by his brother, at the height of his righteous fury and power. Here, however, Jeff slipped on a banana peel (or a splotchy bit of mud) and Matt was able to put on the late match sleeper, assisted not by the ropes, but by a lake instead.

Companies have house styles. You know when watching a WWE TV Tag Team match when they're going to go to commercial. A TNA main event style match will, at this point of near-finish, almost always have some bullshit Jarrettesque run-in. Here it came in the form of a fake Sting, the Mountie's Stun Stick, and a false finish the valet. The confusion allowed for Jeff to recover from the sleeper and lock in one of his own. Once again, his hubris, always his failing, now mixed with that righteous babyface fury took over, and unsatisfied with a simple choke out victory, Jeff climbed up the Hardy Boyz symbol, meaning to leap off of it onto Matt one more time. The viewers were well prepped with this due to its call back nature. The first time he went up, it backfired, so wrestling conditioning told us this should work. Moreover. We'd already gotten the false finish on the Fake Willow, so Matt was thoroughly protected at this stage. There was every reason to see this as the blow off and for Jeff to win. They utilized the callback of Matt setting the scene earlier on however, and Chekhov's Gun went off, with Reby slipping him the hair spray (or well, something inflamed instead of flammable) allowing Jeff to get shoved off the top so that Matt could heelishly steal the win.

Good match that fit the feud so long as you could accept the shifted scale where they started higher on the rungs, allowing for a consistent climb towards a higher peak. Jeff dropped the selling of the situation a couple of times early on in a way that came off as more than pissed off stoicism, unfortunately. This, more than any match in history, perhaps, needed total commitment, but it's likely a problem we would have had with Jeff in almost any match. Matt on the other hand played his role perfectly. In general though, it followed the traditional structure for this sort of a grudge match that went around 10 minutes in a hardcore/falls count anywhere setting, just further along the spectrum with different tools used in the same old places.

[...TG]

This was certainly remarkable. I don't know if it's necessarily *good*. If I were a smarter, better writer I'd try to outline some parallels between this and the SyFy movie/Sharknado cheapo horror movie aesthetic. Wrestling is always been campy to an extent but I think this is something different I think.

[El-P]

TNA from 2004. And the promotion post awful-show with the ICP garbage brawl has been mostly pretty damn good (which is why I don't review it. I don't review good pro-wrestling promotions as a whole), despite Russo as a babyface character in which he's just as terrible but less obtrusive for obvious reasons (plus he wasn't booking by this point I believe). But yeah, pretty good stuff. They even manage to salvage what has been a terrible idea thus far, the American X Cup (well, it was not a terrible idea on paper, but the work of the first two had been pretty damn bad thanks to shitty indierrifc work, including by Juvy who's thankfully been replaced) with a brand new Team Canada which is now a fine heel faction. (Amazing how Bret Hart manage to make Canada a viable heel identity) Erik Watts still is pretty worthless, I have to say though.

[Alucard]

TNA from 2004. And the promotion post awful-show with the ICP garbage brawl has been mostly pretty damn good (which is why I don't review it. I don't review good pro-wrestling promotions as a whole), despite Russo as a babyface character in which he's just as terrible but less obtrusive for obvious reasons (plus he wasn't booking by this point I believe). But yeah, pretty good stuff. They even manage to salvage what has been a terrible idea thus far, the American X Cup (well, it was not a terrible idea on paper, but the work of the first two had been pretty damn bad thanks to shitty indierrifc work, including by Juvy who's thankfully been replaced) with a brand new Team Canada which is now a fine heel faction. (Amazing how Bret Hart manage to make Canada a viable heel identity) Erik Watts still is pretty worthless, I have to say though.

 

Glad to hear you're still watching (and enjoying!)