AEW Double or Nothing

[The Dart]

2 hours ago, Supremo said:

 

How fucking fresh does that feel? The head of the company immediately fielding open questions from the press and gushing about his show and performers. Imagine Vince ever doing something like that.

To be fair, Triple H does do that after every Takeover.

[DavidB6937]

It'll be interesting to see how many people leave WWE, slag them off to no end and then go back in a few years. I'd assume the Moxley stuff will be a little more subtle than that. At least I hope.

[Supremo]

1 hour ago, The Dart said:

To be fair, Triple H does do that after every Takeover.

Oh really? Is that the thing they advertise on Takeover shows? I always just assumed that was a quick interview with staged questions. Cool, if true. Still feels like AEW is a far more open book than WWE and their weirdo ways though.

Sorry if this has already been posted, but fucking hell. This has me tearing up. Unbelievable emotion. 

 

[King Pitcos]

It seems like they’re happy just going for the audience that’ll eat up the small time, anti-WWE stuff. In which case, “Unscripted Violence” Moxley needn’t be subtle with bitching about WWE. Although his first appearance and post-show promo was total Dean Ambrose stuff, so unless he evolves the act soon, people might turn on him. 

[IANdrewDiceClay]

That is quite sweet from Omega.

 

[Devon Malcolm]

The only time Ambrose has ever been slightly convincing was when he was in FCW feuding with William Regal, and even then it was probably more to do with Regal elevating him. Even in The Shield he was always the gurning comedy relief who it felt like Rollins and Reigns were just tolerating.

Edited May 27, 2019 by Devon Malcolm

[The King of Old School]

So the next two events, Fyter fest & Fight for the Fallen are not PPV's, does this mean we'll get them "for free" on ITV4?

I'm glad they said they will only be having around 4 PPV's a year with "special events" inbetween, it will hopefully make the PPV's a big deal.

I'm guessing the main matches for All Out will be Moxley/Omega & Page/Jericho.

[Winston]

I never felt Ambrose was completely comfortable in any role he played in the WWE, he always looked kinda restrained walking on WWE egg shells. He looked by far the most interesting character during the first few weeks of The Shield but they kinda gave up on the Hounds of Justice mystique after a few weeks.

Fans obviously expected something different from him after seeing the Foley angle and other FCW stuff but nothing truly connected with him no matter what title he won. 

He's in the right environment to flourish now.

[Otto Dem Wanz]

I always felt the best he looked was when he was either getting out of that taxi or "winning" the WWE title against HHH just before 'Mania 32.

[FLips]

2 hours ago, The King of Old School said:

So the next two events, Fyter fest & Fight for the Fallen are not PPV's, does this mean we'll get them "for free" on ITV4?

I'm glad they said they will only be having around 4 PPV's a year with "special events" inbetween, it will hopefully make the PPV's a big deal.

I'm guessing the main matches for All Out will be Moxley/Omega & Page/Jericho.

Neither of those are AEW shows are they?

[Accident Prone]

21 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

Neither of those are AEW shows are they?

Yep, the are indeed. No word on streaming or distribution for the events yet though.

FFTF has CIMA vs Kenny Omega and, stemming from D.O.N, The Rhodes Brothers vs The Young Bucks.

Fyter Fest has The Elite (Omega and The Young Bucks) vs PAC and The Lucha Bros, Cody Rhodes vs Darby Allin and Nakazawa vs Jebailey.

One of those cards will also presumably have Moxely vs Janela, and I assume MJF vs Jungle Boy and/or Jimmy Havoc.

Edited May 28, 2019 by Accident Prone

[Hannibal Scorch]

5 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

Neither of those are AEW shows are they?

They are advertising them as such. Both were mentioned on the PPV as well

[BomberPat]

On 5/26/2019 at 6:04 PM, Cod Eye said:

Can anyone explain the randomer who sauntered into the rumble thing and did the daft kick thing with Tommy Dreamer please? The crowd seemed to like it, but it went so far over my head it's unbelievable...

Orange Cassidy. He recently described the gimmick as "a wrestler who doesn't really want to be a wrestler", so he never puts any effort in. More broadly, he's perpetually hungover, so tends to spend a lot of his time in matches falling asleep, or moving very lethargically, with the odd burst of energy - hence him spending most of his time in the Battle Royal on the outside not bothering to get in. He works elsewhere under a mask, and Orange Cassidy was a comedy gimmick he'd mostly do on the side, but it's really taken off in the last couple of years. 

As with a lot of things on this show, pre-show in particular, they could have done a much better job of explaining who he was. My biggest criticism of the show as a whole is that they assumed far too much prior knowledge.

On 5/26/2019 at 8:36 PM, FelatioLips said:

My missus rightly pointed out to me “how can he lose if both feet have to touch the floor?”

I've now seen three Dustin Thomas matches, two of them battle royals/rumbles, and asked the same question each time.

On 5/27/2019 at 12:08 AM, Vamp said:

Bryce Remsberg could do with a bollocking. 

For what? He's one of the best refs in the business, and was on form all night, what did I miss?

 

Right...overall thoughts - it was a show that was absolutely greater than the sum of its parts. Not a single match that will make my Match Of The Year shortlist, or that I'll feel particularly compelled to come back and watch again, and hard to pin down what I enjoyed about the show overall, but it all came together into something exciting and enjoyable to watch. I ended the show excited and enthused about the future of American wrestling, and that's not happened in a long time.

 

The pre-show was dreadful, for the most part, though. Opening your show with a ring announcer explaining the rules to a needlessly convoluted Battle Royal is probably not the best idea. The timed entrances gimmick needed more star power to be worth a shit. The upside of this match is that near enough everyone got a chance to showcase something, but the camera work made a lot of that for naught. For a company staking a claim on "clean finishes on PPV", doing a fake-out bell ring and a borderline Dusty Finish in the opening match is an interesting choice.
They're clearly extremely strongly behind Hangman Page, and look to be setting him up as something of a Magnum TA type, but I find him wholly forgettable. During his time in Bullet Club, if you'd asked me to name every member of the stable, I'd remember that Meng and Jeff Jarrett were in there before getting to him. I wouldn't be able to tell you who was who out of Adam Page and Chase Owens (I just had to Google Bullet Club to remind myself who he was). If I'm not actively watching him wrestle, I forget that he exists. He's a bit like Randy Orton in that I can recognise everything he does very well, and that he's a very smooth worker and a good looking bloke, but I just have no interest in watching him wrestle. I laughed when JR said "I've seen a lot of guys who have "It", and Hangman Page has "It"". It's the one thing he doesn't have.

The Librarian skit was the worst. Utterly unfunny, amateurish, badly shot, and, again, reliant on prior knowledge with absolutely no explanation of who anyone involved was. Particularly on a pre-show designed to sell you the PPV, it's borderline unforgivable. Similarly with the backstage skit of the Young Bucks wandering the corridor and Nakazawa (who we'd already seen in the Battle Royal) introducing himself. I don't get the joke, and they did nothing to explain it. 

Kip vs Guevera was the most forgettable match of the night. A perfectly solid example of a style of wrestling that doesn't interest me much. I'm guessing Kip got given a singles match for the ITV connection, but a bizarre choice of singles match to hype you on the show.

Hated that the big show opening promo from the Elite was largely goofy comedy stuff. Pick a tone and stick with it. It's especially egregious from Cody, who can't make his mind up what his role is. Promoter Cody is an affable bloke who cares about the fans, and wants to put on a good show for them, while wrestler Cody is a diabolical heel who only cares about his legacy, to the point that he's prepared to brutalise his own brother to that end. Wrestler Cody is obsessed with destroying the Attitude Era, whereas Promoter Cody excepts you to be excited that his promotion is booking Chris Jericho, Billy Gunn, Dustin Rhodes, Tommy Dreamer, Earl Hebner and Jim Ross. It's NXT Triple H vs. Authority Triple H, but within a single show. 

SCU vs. Strong Hearts was good, but indicative of a problem with the whole show in that it's very much in "super show" territory. Outside of Cody vs Dustin, it didn't feel like there was a story behind anything, or defined heel and face roles. It's the first show, so I won't dwell on that too much, but the sooner AEW can get away with self-congratulatory "it's great to be here because we do the best wrestling" bits and into actual stories, the better. As much as I like Strong Hearts, I felt this spot should have gone to some of CIMA's OWE lads. Some of them are incredible athletes, doing stuff I've honestly never seen done before in wrestling, and with the right platform could represent the biggest forward leap in what the audience sees as possible in mainstream wrestling since Rey Misterio Jr in WCW. It would have been such a statement of intent to open a show with something like that.

I, and everyone I was watching with, was 100% worked by Brandi Rhodes looking like she was planning to enter the match, and we all popped for Awesome Kong. Brandi very much her husband's wife here, though, doing a heel authority figure bit at this point but also being a babyface promoter earlier in the show. I don't think you can be the face of inclusivity and diversity as an executive on the same show that you're a heel boss and a heel valet. It doesn't work when Stephanie tries to do it either. 
No real comment on the women's match, as my stream shat the bed during it and was only resolved for the announcement of the winner, who was the least surprising but probably best choice.

Don't remember much about Best Friends vs Angelico & Jack Evans. Probably the weakest match I've seen from Angelico, and too little character work from Taylor. What I was most looking forward to was the amount of shit-talking potential between Evans and Chuck, which never really came to fruition. Not enough of either of them being a cocky shithouse for my liking. 
The visual of the SSB debut was great, with the minions surrounding the ring, but on a show where fans have convinced themselves that anyone from Jon Moxley to CM Punk to The Revival to half the WWE roster might show up, doing a "lights out" debut for a team with limited exposure in recent years was a gamble probably not worth taking. The announcing was bungled big time here, as it really wasn't clear if they were supposed to be selling the team as an unknown entity, or if they just genuinely weren't prepared and didn't know who they were. 

I loved the Joshi trios match - it was the match I was most looking forward to; Aja Kong is one of my all-time favourites, I adore Emi Sakura and was over the moon for her getting a spot on this card, Yuka Sakazaki is a world of fun, Riho's solid, and the wrestler I was least familiar with was getting presented as a star, so I knew she'd get a shine as well. Emi taking the opportunity of maybe the biggest match of her career to cosplay as Freddie Mercury was delightful, and that the crowd bought into her Queen schtick was fun. I watched with someone who knows and has worked and trained with Emi, so we were beyond biased in this one, admittedly, but I loved it. If AEW are serious about utilising Joshi talent as a means of distinguishing themselves from WWE, this was a great start.

The throne spot at the start of Cody/Dustin was awful, cheap and corny. I said after Cody's promo that it was ridiculous that he neglected a literal lifetime's worth of background to a Cody/Dustin match in favour of a "kill the Attitude Era" angle that, really, Cody was the only person in the world invested in. It felt like he had fantasy booked himself against Triple H, and just slotted Dustin into that role, and the throne spot just cemented that. Audible groans for the sledgehammer.

The match was a great brawl. The amount of blood felt like a real old school NWA blood feud, and people watching were genuinely uncomfortable, because of how little you see something like this any more. Dustin knew exactly how to work with it, though - I don't think a lesser worker, bleeding just as much as he did, would have garnered the sympathy that a babyface as good as Dustin did. Cody is a bang average wrestler with a great grasp of character, and with a match he can get his teeth into, can usually elevate it to something special, while Dustin is an all-time great. I hope he sticks around in the ECW Terry Funk role, because he has so much left to give. Only downsides of this match were that it felt in places like they were trying too hard to consciously do things WWE don't, and that the ending stretch was a bit too WWE in that it relied on the repeated finishers and kick-outs trope. In general, a "finisher" feels like an odd thing to do in a match like this - it's a match that should have ended with a desperation move, with one guy just physically incapable of carrying on, just a war of attrition coming to an end. Finishers feel kind of absurd in this concept.

I liked Cody's promo, it felt like a conscious echo of Dusty's "The View Never Changes".

Young Bucks vs. Lucha Bros was a spotfest, but a great example of the genre, and utterly exhausting. I agree with whoever said that the Lucha Bros are better served as singles wrestlers, though. When I first saw them live, I felt Pentagon had an incredible presence, and was able to manipulate the crowd with small gestures and looks, and just removing his glove prior to a chop got a bigger pop than some of the big flips and high spots. He then followed up, moments later, by hitting a Canadian Destroyer on the ring apron. He's at his best when slow, methodical, and violent, but Fenix brings out the worst in him.

Omega/Jericho was perfectly fine with brief bursts of greatness, but not a patch on their first match, nor did it have that match's appeal of the intrigue of Jericho outside of WWE, or the shock value of him reinventing himself. If he's going to start using an elbow strike as a finisher, he really shouldn't still be using back elbows as transitional moves throughout the match. 

Jon Moxley's debut was executed really well, and felt really exciting and organic. The closest wrestling has come in a long time to capturing that "anything could happen" feel of the Monday Night Wars, and if they don't overdo it, that could be the ongoing appeal of AEW. It was also the only bit of the show that really felt like it had forward momentum, and made me really excited for what comes next - it'll be interesting to see if they can keep that momentum up given the amount of time before their next show, and before TV starts.

Moxley's promo after the show was solid, but at odds with what we just watched. He does the NXT 2015 "I'm here because it's great, and this is where the best wrestling happens" babyface promo bit - but we just saw him crash the show, beat up two top stars and a referee, so why he is now swearing his allegiance to AEW as a whole and talking them up?

 

Long-term, people have mentioned Tony Khan's press work - that sort of thing will be what makes AEW. They're considerably more accessible and more amenable to the press than WWE have been for decades. WWE's obsession with controlling the narrative means very limited press access - going back to outside photographers being banned from shows because they were launching WWF Magazine and didn't want the likes of Bill Apter getting shots for competing publications at their shows. 

AEW are crediting individual photographers in photos they send out, and asking that outlets using the photos do the same. They do media scrums, they do open press conferences, they treat the media well, and do PR more in line with any other entertainment event than how WWE do things. That degree of openness and goodwill towards the media will pay dividends.

[IANdrewDiceClay]

3 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

He recently described the gimmick as "a wrestler who doesn't really want to be a wrestler", so he never puts any effort in.

Are we still talking about Tommy Dreamer?

[BomberPat]

To be honest, I thought Dreamer put a decent shift in. Bloke's game for anything, and was mostly used to put over younger talent. Largely inoffensive, so long as he's not popping up every show.