News to Start Your Weekend 11.03.06
Posted by Nick Marsico on 11.03.2006
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I'm lazy, hungry and waiting for my Chinese food. I guess I have to write this thing, though. So here it is. I'm going to the ROH show in Philly this weekend and get to see the end of the Homicide/Corino feud and the return match of Aries and Strong against the Kings of Wrestling, and I was there in September when Claudio and Hero stole those titles, and it made me sad. I'm pulling for Aries and Strong, damn it. Homicide too, even though I love the Kings and I love Corino. Homicide's my boy, though, and I'm following him to Philly for the Corino match and staying right here in NY to watch him win the damn World Title on December 23. Here it comes, folks, my first plug of Ari Berenstein, the writer of the Column of Honor, and one of my favourite Jewish fellows of all time. Maybe even more than Jesus! J-Christ was a cool dude, though. I'd totally give him a high five if I met him. That would rule.
(Note: I was gonna post a picture of me high fiving Jesus, but I got lazy. Make believe there's one in place of this lame-ass note.)
Oh, and in the time between writing about going to the Philly show tomorrow and the NYC show in December and my plug of Ari, I got, and ate, my Chinese. Sesame chicken, fried rib tips and white rice. The rib tips sucked, though. That was a waste. And it came with a Diet Pepsi – are those damn Chinese trying to not-so-subtly tell me something about my weight? Damn, just give me water, at least that doesn't taste like flat Pepsi. YUCK. Not that I'm not drinking it… it's here and I'm thirsty and too lazy to get up and get something else, so that's what I'll drink. I don't have to like it, but I'll drink it.
So yeah, since it's some big news and I was just talking about him, Mister Claudio Castagnoli has officially been offered a developmental contract by WWE after being evaluated in Deep South a couple weeks back. It's certainly a really good thing for him exposure and money wise should he decide to take the deal and makes it to the big time, which one would assume would be inevitable if he were to take the deal. It would be a big hit to a lot of independent companies, but it's not like he'll leave with the belts he has, and as we've seen in the past, Claudio would be allowed to honor all of his prior bookings before joining the E. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Elsewhere, Kurt Angle's first opponent in TNA will be Abyss, who he will be wrestling on both the 11/10 and 11/11 in Philadelphia and Hartford respectively. His first televised opponent (well, PPV, but you watch it on a TV) will, of course, be Samoa Joe. Angle/Abyss is definitely a match I'd like to see, as Kurt was able to do some really good things with Kane, and Abyss, at this point, is better. At the same time, though, Kurt right now isn't as good as he was 3-4 years ago.
Colt Cabana's friend Kip told us that Colt lost a toe. Colt said Kip was lying. Excalibur says that Colt is covering it up. I don't know who to be loyal to!
--OR--
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VOTE NOW~!
The next WWE Films project will be released on April 27, 2007. The movie stars Steve Austin as Joe Conrad. IMDB's synopsis: "'The Condemned' tells the story of Joe Conrad (Stone Cold Steve Austin), who is awaiting the death penalty in a corrupt Central American prison. He is 'purchased' by a wealthy television producer and taken to a desolate island where he must fight to the death against nine other condemned killers from all corners of the world, with freedom going to the sole survivor."
It definitely seems like and interesting premise… if the trailers look good, I might see this movie while it's in theatres. I'll be vague about it, though.
Chris Hero says:
"The ROH "office" isn't too pleased with the KoW. We decided to put the ROH belts on the line at CZW and I see no problem with that whatsoever. WE won the belts so they're OURS. We can do with them as we please. If we want to defend them against DeeJay Hyde and Rick Feinberg, we will. We do what we want, when we want. Especially this weekend. We're in OUR home. Philadelphia....Philly wants to see the KRS-1 and who are we to let them down? It's gonna be an electric atmosphere that only WE can bring to ROH in Philly. Get your tickets, bring a friend. You don't wanna miss when the best tag team in all of wrestling delivers the best tag team finisher in the HISTORY of wrestling to Aries and/or Strong. Do yourself a favor, see it live."
I hate you Chris Hero. Win one for me Austin and Roderick!
The Television Section
The booking of RAW fucking baffles me. Granted I don't care about anybody on the show (because nobody's giving me a reason to care), but holy hell at least try! I like John Cena, but I don't care about him. He doesn't have a legitimate challenger set up or even being foreshadowed or built up in the background for after Cyber Sunday, although at this point it looks like he's not even going to need one until December anyway, as he'll likely be busy as the "war" between ECW, RAW and SmackDown continues (I assume, at least). Who can it be? There's NOBODY. Triple H and Shawn Michaels are busy masquerading as DX and they're faces anyway, his feud with Edge has been going on and off for the past year and just hopefully ended for good, plus he's busy teaming with Orton, who is nowhere near ready to challenge for the WWE title (and if you ask me, not even ready to be on television at all – the man fucking sucks). Umaga? I can't wait for that blow away feud. Way to book for the future!
Speaking of Orton, the feud with DX may as well be over. Triple H no sold Edge's finisher and a couple of friggin chair shots and basically outsmarted and dominated both men with HBK nowhere to be found. Not that I give a fuck about any of them (and why would I with the shitty booking?), and I despise Orton and don't understand how anybody sees anything in him, they're not doing anything right with this feud. Not a single thing. Not one. There just hasn't been one, and there doesn't look like there will be. Kinda like everything DX has done since reforming.
The IC title division has a bunch of talented guys, but there's no story for any of it. On a show that's supposed to be all about sports entertainment and be all kinds of story driven, they sure are lacking interesting stories. It's all a bunch of spotfests… it may as well be the cruiserweight division. It's a bunch of flippy-floppy guys flipping and flopping around in very short matches with no rhyme or reason, no stories, no character development and nothing to make anybody care.
I like Cena and I enjoyed his segment with GRISH~!, but I already spoke about his future with the title. He'll be the champ, but he doesn't have a credible challenger. Other than that, I enjoyed the Faarooq appearance and the Flair/Slaughter/Piper/Rhodes promo, but the rest of the show was shit.
ECW was a decent waste of 45 minutes. The matches were all inoffensive, pretty good even, and they even figured out how to use one of the pointless bikini contest segments to actually advance a feud. It certainly took them long enough to figure that one out. I don't care enough about it to talk about it, and nothing annoys me about it like RAW, so whatever.
I love how TNA's using a knockoff of the Beastie Boys song of the same name as the theme for their Fight for the Right tournament. It's almost hokey, but not quite. I don't know what to think about the Styles title win, but it appears that they're going to use it to both create some tension between him and Daniels (why they would do that I don't know, but it looks like Russo is trying to change everything that was going on in TNA before he came in, even the good stuff) and maybe as a catalyst for what looks like a Sabin heel turn.
Why did they give Bobby Roode one of Christopher Daniels' signature moves to use as his finish? I hate how they're making believe none of Roode's history with Team Canada ever happened.
So uh… what the fuck with the main event? Whoever retrieves each item or weapon gets to use it in the cage match in 2 weeks… what's stopping them from taking the weapon from the other guy and using it? This is the kind of nonsensical booking people were dreading when it was announced that Russo was rehired by the company.
All I can say is that if nothing else, the product certainly is a lot different from what it was before Russo got his job back, but it's really hard to determine if it's good or bad. Things seem to have a definite direction and they're actually doing episodic television, which is a good thing, but everything is too contrived with all sorts of unnecessary stipulations and silliness that doesn't really matter. The effort seems to be there, and if only they backed off and turned it down a couple notches, all of the concepts would be just about right where they need to be, and TNA would have a really good show on their hands. As it stands right now, though, they just went from being in a state where everything went left to right but there was no upward movement to a state where everything is moving right to left, but the upward movement is still yet to be achieved.
Like I always try to do, I'll give it a few weeks to see how things start developing, but the major problem was that with TNA, the more they touted that big, company changing, humongous events were happening, the more there was no change at all. Nothing that happened on PPVs mattered and nothing that happened on television mattered once the upcoming PPV passed. They just seemed to reset and do the same thing again, sometimes with a different couple names thrown in, but everybody stayed where they were. Nobody moved up or moved on and everybody just stayed on the same plane no matter who beat who or who won what. Maybe that will change. At least the way they're running TV at this point seems to be hinting that such a change might actually occur. We'll have to wait and see, I guess, although that seems to always be the story. Wait and see just becomes wait and wait and wait, because there's never anything to see.
I do like TNA, though, so don't read that as an attack. It's still nowhere near as bad as RAW, and I do care and want to care about plenty of guys on the show. They just have to start moving forward and things will start getting good.
Check this stuff out
I'm far too lazy and tired and sleepy to start getting links and writing out simple HTML, so just go back to last week's column and look up the new stuff from the guys I linked to last week. It's all awesome.
Anyway, I'm out of here. I don't give a damn about Cyber Sunday, so no picks from me this time. Did you realize that WWE is running 4 PPVs over the course of 6 weeks? Cyber Sunday is November 5, Survivor Series is November 26, December to Dismember is the following weekend on December 3, and then 2 weeks later is Armageddon on December 17. Oversaturated? Couldn't be. I haven't checked the schedule further than that, but I can only assume that New Year's Revolution is on January 7, 3 weeks after Armageddon, followed by the Royal Rumble only 3 weeks after THAT. Jesus Christ, Vince – you wouldn't need to make up for lower buyrates if you didn't have so many fucking shows and spent more time building to less shows. Fucking ponderous.
But yeah, who cares – I'm not paying for it, so whatever. See you next week; I'll tell you about being at Ring of Honor in Philly, which is where I'll be tomorrow night. Until then, love ya.
