AEW: The Early Years

[Lorne Malvo]

As I haven't watched any wrestling in about 6 months, and I'm really struggling to re-engage with modern-day AEW, last night I decided to start watching the promotion from the beginning again and thought I would create this thread just to make little notes on each shows. Hopefully it pulls up some great matches/angles we'd all forgotten about and leads to some discussion about those first few years of AEW. 

Their first show was;

Double or Nothing 2019:

- Starting with a Casino Battle Royale is one of the odder choices they made. They never really bother to explain the convoluted rules, Excalibur can never decide if there's 20, 21 or 22 people in the match and it's just a bit of a clusterfuck. Hangman Page and MJF being the main two guys here is a good sign of things to come though. I smiled at seeing some of the early talent I'd forgotten about like Marko Stunt and Sonny Kiss. I didn't smile when Tommy Dreamer and his fat fucking arse waddled down the ramp. Shawn Spears comes out with contact lenses in and looks a right knob.

- Cody's character is all over the show here. Hoo-rah promos on the ramp with the rest of the babyface Elite, a babyface entrance where he smashes the throne (despite coming out of the heel tunnel), plays heel all match against Dustin then immediately reverts to face after the match. Still, the Cody/Dustin match is so good that none of this matters too much. 

- Hybrid2 made the main card while Hangman and MJF were on the preshow. Man Jack Evans was rubbish.

- Talking about rubbish, Alex Marvez is brutal on commentary. I don't want to be too harsh as he seems like a nice guy, but thank god that didn't last long.

- Young Bucks vs Lucha Bros is a pretty good example of putting on a mad spotty tag match you wouldn't see in WWE, but not going too far overboard on the madness/near-falls so they've got something to build to in future shows. 

- Omega/Jericho is a fine main event, but after a show full of fresh exciting talent and match-ups, having Jericho main event and win did feel somewhat deflating. Luckily, Mox comes out immediately afterwards to a monster pop so the show didn't end on a bum note. They do a lot of smart little things to differentiate themselves from WWE - the 'E way to finish the show would be 'Mox hits his finisher on Jericho then Omega, show ends', but instead they have Omega block the DDT and fight back which got a pop out of me. 

- There's a vibe to the Elite segments which I can only describe as 'internet bullshit'; like Kenny Omega deciding this would be the best way to introduce himself to a new audience;

What on earth was he thinking?!

- All in all, this is a pretty perfect microcosm of the first few years of AEW. A lot of good stuff in here, wrapped up in an amateurish production with some absolute dog rough moments threatening to bring the whole thing down. 

Feel free to share your memories of the show!

Edited August 20 by Lorne Malvo

[Chili]

If Cody/Dustin wasn't so fucking amazing and convinced me this new promotion wasn't fucking about, I'd have very much been exclusively just watching old shit forever. I've never really got on with Indies or following what's going on in smaller or foreign promotions, so another appeal was hearing they had a TV show and the online content. I think All Out was the only show I caught between this and the Dynamite debut. What I liked was getting a new cast of characters as 75% of the roster I'd never heard of seen before so acts like Best Friends, Darby, Jurassic Express, Lucha Brothers, Santana & Ortiz, even shitty original Dark Order was interesting to me, throw that in with a singles pool of Mox, Kenny, Hanger, MJF, Cody, PAC and Jericho and I was willing to give it a go. I think the aesthetics of the product helped too. It didn't look cheap, it was on TNT, which felt like a very important thing too.

Some of the original booking and pacing is a bit arse over tea kettle, but Jericho really shines in that early period and quite rightly should be happy at being that established name to start with, there really was a time without a hint of irony or nostalgia goggles that Jericho and Sammy Guevera were genuinely funny, not WWE funny either, but wrestlers with a toe into real world humour. 

Of course it's January 2020 when shit gets really cooking, it's when the booking gets streamlined, and also when you really start to notice what they've got especially in Hangman Adam Page and their core cast. It could NEVER stay like that, but I genuinely loved just having the little roster of about 40 or so people.

That very early period is a nice primer for mid to the end of 2021 AEW. Very much their Raw 1997 era where I genuinely was hooked every single week and what was happening next and who might randomly cameo. It was the absolute bloody best if times post pandemic (an era they handled much more enjoyably and less bombastically as daft as WWE with that Thunderdome bollocks)

Edited August 20 by Chili

[Dr. Alan Grant]

I signed up to MyAEW with the intention to do the same thing and watch from the very beginning, at least for the first few years. Got as far as Dynamite episode 6 and they removed the 2019-2022 episodes. When I emailed them to find out what happened, I was told they had been removed from the homepage but you can search for the episodes by date. Which turned out to be a lie, it doesn’t work.

Anyway, I was enjoying being reminded of some absolute dross I had completely forgotten about, like Peter Avalon, Joey Janela and Nakazawa. There’s far too much SCU and Riho for my liking, but I’m loving Pac and the Lucha Bros. I don’t really remember much about the Covid era shows, I’d be interested to see if they’ve held up over the years. 

If MyAEW sorts their shit out, I will crack on with hate-watching Joey Janela.

[Lorne Malvo]

16 minutes ago, Chili said:

even shitty original Dark Order was interesting to me, 

Watching this show reminded me they were the first recipients of Tony Khans beloved 'lights off' trope. And weirdly, the crowd who have already popped for Peter Avalon, Dustin Thomas and Brandon Cutler have no idea who they are. I thought Super Smash Bros were a fairly popular tag team on the US indies so it's a weirdly muted response.

@Dr. Alan Grant has just reminded me that Joey Janela takes an absolutely sick bump in the battle royale - a chokeslam from inside to the ring to the outside through a table, and the daft sod lands head first!

Edited August 20 by Lorne Malvo

[tiger_rick]

44 minutes ago, Lorne Malvo said:

A lot of good stuff in here, wrapped up in an amateurish production with some absolute dog rough moments threatening to bring the whole thing down. 

I fucking love this. Wrestling desperately needed an alternate product. Something big-time, full of the biggest name talent not signed to the 'E and the sort of guys and girls you could follow on their way up in the world. But the last thing it needed was a perfectly polished show that felt like WWE and took their style. It needed to be a company that took risks. A company that would try Alex Marvez as a roving reporter, that would put Sonny Kiss and Nyla Rose on TV, that would put 20-odd people in a gauntlet and let the commentators catch people up and overall treat fans like adults who knew some stuff and knew how to find out what they didn't know. 

I have always loved the foibles of AEW and still do. It's perfectly imperfect.

I watched some of the first Dynamite recently and the biggest thing I miss is how much it felt like good WCW back then. They really, really need to get that back.

[TheBurningRed]

I actually quite liked this promo from the Dark Order where they acknowledged the muted reaction. Could do without the creepers and glad that got nixed. Had to look up what they were called as I thought they were called the freaks. 

[Supremo]

At the time, this did not feel like a pro-wrestling promotion that would break attendance records at Wembley Stadium.

[LaGoosh]

Double or Nothing is such a rubbish show in hindsight but at the time it didn't matter at all because the concept felt so fresh, everyone wanted to see it succeed and they had two great talking points coming out of the show - 1) Cody/Dustin had a great match (the match is actually ropey as fuck but Dustin bled a gusher which no one had seen in mainstream wrestling for years so overrated the match hugely) and 2) an excellent Mox debut. It was eaay to forgive everything else.

[BomberPat]

the build for Cody vs. Dustin was mental as well, even accounting for the fact that it had to all be built up online with no TV.

Nobody knew Dustin Rhodes had left WWE, so the announcement of the match felt pretty massive. Initially, there was an obvious, layered story to be told there - it's brother vs. brother, a match they never got the opportunity to have the way they wanted in WWE, and there's a lot of real drama to build on there; Dustin's the old hand, Cody's the little kid, Dustin had a rocky relationship with Dusty, and then got to see Cody come along and be much closer to the old man and get the benefit of having Dad around all the time that Dustin never got, Dustin made a ton of mistakes in his career that Cody didn't, and, going back to the Goldust/Stardust rivalry days, Dustin could warn Cody of the dangers of getting trapped in a gimmick. Instead, you got the first glimpse of Cody's wacky creative instincts when he started doing promos about how he wanted to defeat Dustin because he was the last bastion of the Attitude Era and he wanted to put the Attitude Era to bed as if that was the story anyone wanted from that match! That the match itself also featured Brandi having to get a spot in, the first warning that she would always be a part of Cody's stuff, and have even worse instincts than him, is something I totally forgot.

That first show definitely felt like trying to scale up PWG and GCW style wrestling to a stadium and TV level of production, with predictably mixed results, but it survived so much on vibes and just the buzz and excitement of something genuinely new and massive. Something I really miss from the early days of AEW is the sense that just anyone could show up - that really felt like it ended with CM Punk, understandably. 

There's stuff I really loved on there - the women's trios match, particularly getting Emi Sakura a spot on a major US show for the first time, was really cool, and it's a shame that some of the direction hinted at by that match (including Aja Kong vs. Awesome Kong) never really went anywhere. There never would have been scope for Aja to be a regular, but I'd have liked to have seen her utilised a bit more early on as a kind of end boss for the women's division, to lend it some credibility while they were building up more relative unknowns. If Covid hadn't happened, I wonder how much the women's division would have continued to rely on Joshi talent from other promotions.

Similarly, I liked the Strong Hearts guys getting a match, but they were coming in with the promise that a load of CIMA's Chinese students from OWE would be part of the promotion, and those guys were bonkers - I remember saying at the time that putting some of them on TV would represent the biggest quantum leap in a mainstream's audiences idea of what wrestling could look like since Rey Mysterio showed up in WCW, but they never even made an appearance in the end. 

I liked that the Lucha Bros/Young Bucks match was for the AAA belts; there's something cool about platforming the partner promotion's title belts when the company doesn't have its own yet, and it was such a point of difference from WWE to be presenting another promotion's titles as something worth fighting for and worth putting on your PPV.

 

I just looked at the entrants in the Casino Battle Royal, and gun to my head I could not have even told you who Sunny Daze was let alone that they were in this match. Who the fuck is that?!

[LaGoosh]

2 hours ago, Lorne Malvo said:

There's a vibe to the Elite segments which I can only describe as 'internet bullshit';

The BTE stuff was what got them there and was big at the time so understandable that they stuck with it. It was their audience. Once AEW was really cooking by the end of the year they had dropped most that shite.

[tiger_rick]

If I'd had to place a bet on what would come up in this thread, it would be the Dark Order and @BomberPat mentioning the Chinese lads!

[Lorne Malvo]

6 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Similarly, I liked the Strong Hearts guys getting a match, but they were coming in with the promise that a load of CIMA's Chinese students from OWE would be part of the promotion, and those guys were bonkers - I remember saying at the time that putting some of them on TV would represent the biggest quantum leap in a mainstream's audiences idea of what wrestling could look like since Rey Mysterio showed up in WCW, but they never even made an appearance in the end. 

I really liked StrongHearts during these first few shows - one of my first AEW disappointments was those guys disappearing fairly soon after commentary had been trumpeting the AEW/OWE relationship. I especially liked El Lindaman who always reminded me of Cotton Hill from King Of The Hill.

12 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I just looked at the entrants in the Casino Battle Royal, and gun to my head I could not have even told you who Sunny Daze was let alone that they were in this match. Who the fuck is that?!

This guy; I did some Googling around him earlier coincidentally and apparently he's a friend of DDP which got him an in. 

[BomberPat]

Fantastic. Still no idea who that is!

Criticism of Brandi Rhodes aside, I do admit to having a bit of a soft spot for the days when AEW was clearly just a matter of the top guys getting jobs for all their mates. Getting some random schmuck into a PPV battle royal because he was mates with DDP who was mates with Cody is just brilliant. Why not? What's the point of running a wrestling promotion if you can't indulge in a little bit of jobs for the boys? Luther getting his first proper mainstream wrestling gig at what should have been well past the arse-end of his career is brilliant.

[Chili]

It should be noted for my own personal view, a lot of the shit found a place where it became quite fun. Peter Avalon was shite but when he became Pretty Peter Avalon, exclusively on Dark and fucking about with Brandon Cutler in a battle of the losers who never win, I found it all rather charming. Even more when Christian Cage apparently laughed his head off backstage at how much of an odd bunch Avalon, Cesar Bononi, Ryan Nemeth & JD Drake looked together and pushed for them to be an onscreen group of funny misfit jobber heels. Loved a bit of The Wingmen.

Same for Alex Marvez. Simply not cut out to be on the announce desk, but around 2020-21 found a niche as a rather enjoyable backstage reporter, there's that great promo where Darby basically says CM Punk is coming without using the name and Marvez gives a brilliant little glance to the camera, he might as well wink like he's Eric Idle. Lovely stuff.

Pandemic era AEW Dark is one of the best things too. A modern take on the old syndicated squash match shows with the added Excalibur and Taz in various states of tiredness given whatever time at night it was recorded doing their Mystery Science Theatre announce team routine.

And finally I genuinely think something that just made AEW feel so WTF and different was hearing Tony Schiavone week by week exorcising the nearly 20 year ghost that he was a shit announcer by sounding like the most motivated he'd ever sounded and his genuine marvelling at all the modern wrestling. Like a caveman thawed from ice or someone who fell into a time machine and was having his mind blown.

Edited August 20 by Chili

[LaGoosh]

Whatever happened to the OWE lot? (The Chinese...a great bunch of lads.)