AEW: The Early Years

[Lorne Malvo]

24 minutes ago, The King of Old School said:

I think Mox/Omega happened later than All Out, pretty sure that was headlined by Jericho/Hangman to be the first champ?

JR said during Fyter Fest it's Mox/Omega at All Out, but I had no memory of it either - I could only recall their Lights Out match at Full Gear a bit further down the line.

I've just checked and it turns out Mox/Omega was scheduled to take place at All Out but Mox was injured. Mox gets replaced by Pac at All Out.

Edited August 21 by Lorne Malvo

[Chili]

23 minutes ago, The King of Old School said:

I think Mox/Omega happened later than All Out, pretty sure that was headlined by Jericho/Hangman to be the first champ?

Yeah it was a sort of last minute change, Moxley got a staph infection and PAC was drafted in.

EDIT: @Lorne Malvoposted it just a few seconds before me.

Edited August 21 by Chili

[Lorne Malvo]

2 hours ago, Chili said:

Yeah it was a sort of last minute change, Moxley got a staph infection and PAC was drafted in.

EDIT: @Lorne Malvoposted it just a few seconds before me.

Pac filling in for Mox could be seen as him making amends for missing the first show where he was supposed to face Hangman. 

I'm absolutely certain this is an outlier, and Pac will be a consistently featured top act going forwards. I certainly can't see him disappearing constantly meaning all of his programs suffer from momentum killing pauses and stop start booking. No sir, not at all. 

[Lorne Malvo]

Fight For The Fallen 2019:

- It's a fairly dull show on the whole, this. There's nothing on here as offensively bad as Nakazawa/Jebailey, but none of the matches ever seem to get to that next gear, and nothing really gets the blood pumping. JR and Excalibur keep banging on about how hot it is so maybe that has something to do with it, but it all has the vibe of 'we need to get through this show to get to All Out'.

- Hangman Page goes 19 minutes with Kip bloody Sabian in a match that is genuinely quite boring. They do a pull-apart Hangman/Jericho brawl later in the show that was desperately needed to inject some intensity and momentum into the All Out title match, as otherwise Hangman would've been going into that title match pretty cold coming off this effort.

- Omega/Cima is decent enough. They chose a weird story to tell with Omega during these early days though, positioning one of your main guys as maybe past his best and struggling to get wins. Thinking about it, it seems like they're planting the seeds early so that a year later when Omega sides with Callis to win the title it makes sense, but you would've thought they might showcase Omega a little better during these first few shows. 

- To keep the theme going, Young Bucks vs Cody/Dustin never reaches anything more than 'good'. I think a lot of these matches suffer from being face vs face - I always find it hard to get too invested when there's no clear baby/heel divide. Thankfully when Dynamite arrives they work on building up the heel roster more.

- The show ends with a anti-gun violent charity promo and you can see why Cody was such an important part of AEW in the early days. His fiery babyface promos and plugging the company rhetoric are night and day with the Bucks/Omegas sheepish awkward interviews. It's a good job Omega quickly got better at this stuff as he's pretty useless here.

- Brandi Rhodes vs Allie isn't as bad in-ring as I expected. The story is all over the place though. Brandi actually isn't terrible in-ring - I've seen a million WWE swimsuit models who are much worse - but her instincts are absolutely horrible and her character is all over the place. She does a teary promo before this match about how she never thought she would be good enough, then immediately reverts back to heel. I understand they're trying to do some 'Brandi tricked Allie' shit but it's all very much running before she could walk. Let's get her half-decent in the ring first before trying to do 4D chess shit. 

- Brandi/Allie made the main show while Britt Baker & Riho vs Bea Priestly & Shoko Nakajima was on the preshow, which seems arse about face. I'd forgotten how stiff and dangerous Bea was, she absolutely leathers Britt with a kick to the head here which seems to knock her loopy for the rest of the match. Nakajima gets the win but I don't remember them ever using her again strangely - shame, as she's a lot of fun.

- MJF/Guevara/Spears vs Janela/Darby/Havoc was probably my match of the night. Just 6 incredibly different unique guys who seem to have a spring in their step which the rest of the roster lacked on this night. If I had one complaint it's that Spears pinning Darby feels like a misstep when he's got far more upside than Janela and Havoc, but Darby is the kind of character who can eat a few losses without it hurting his support too much

- In an early example of AEW having nonsensical convoluted stipulations, Dark Order beat Jurassic Express & Hybrid2 here to go on to All Out to face Best Friends (who had to win at Fyter Fest to get to All Out) and the winner of that match gets a first round bye in the upcoming AEW tag title tournament. That's right, you have to win two matches to get a bye to the second round, where you will face a team who presumably won one match to get there. Something tells me Tony Khan is new to this booking lark.

 

[TheBurningRed]

I remember the Bucks vs Rhodes match should’ve ended a couple of times and they just kept going. Think they lost the crowd with that. Not as good as it could’ve been either. 

[LaGoosh]

1 hour ago, TheBurningRed said:

I remember the Bucks vs Rhodes match should’ve ended a couple of times and they just kept going. Think they lost the crowd with that. Not as good as it could’ve been either. 

It was a bit of a dull mess. The Bucks were trying to do their usual textbook Young Bucks big match but Dustin Rhodes had no idea how to wrestle that kind of match and Cody was as clueless and all over the place as he always is. A complete styles clash.

[The King Of Swing]

Pretty sure Shoko Nakajima had a fun match against Riho, on Dark. 

Looking back it felt like the TJPW deal was Kenny's thing, where as TK leaned more towards Stardom but was probably being blocked by Rossy Ogawa. 

[LaGoosh]

Yeah in the early days the booking was very clearly partitioned with Tony Khan overseeing.

Kenny - the womens division w/ the TJPW angle

Young Bucks - tag division 

Cody - his feuds and a lot of the singles roster

Jericho - his feuds

But it was clear pretty quickly that wouldn't work because the shows were all over the place tonally and you'd have multiple repeat angles/stories going on at once. It wasn't until Khan stepped in and basically took away most of their booking power at the end of the year that the shows started to improve.

[BomberPat]

On 8/21/2026 at 10:05 AM, Lorne Malvo said:

- Thank god for Darby Allin. On a show with a lot of rough edges, he turns up fully formed, instantly watchable and believable and just has an intense unique quality to him that most of the roster lack. Him vs Cody is a pretty good match which never quite reaches 'great' status, but Darby comes out of this show as the one talent to keep an eye on. Him getting a time limit draw with Cody is pretty big when you consider he was a relative unknown back then, and you can tell Excalibur and JR have bought into him too as they put him over a lot on commentary. 

- This was the show with the infamous Shawn Spears chairshot to Cody. It was meant to be a gimmicked chair and they accidentally used a real chair, so Cody gets split open hardway. It's a very early example of AEW being slack when it come to safety, and how sometimes they don't help themselves in giving the pitchfork-wielding mob ammunition against them. 

This was the point that Cody already started really grating on me. Cody works as a heel for the whole match against Darby, but then has Shawn Spears attack him in what's set up to look like a heel turn, because we're told that Spears is Cody's friend (something never actually shown to us on the show). So a guy who may or may not have already been a heel turns heel on a guy who just worked heel. It's the problem with wrestlers thinking they're really clever and beyond working face or heel, when actually it's just chopping and changing which they are in the moment to diminishing returns. Cody got away with it for a long time because he was the public face of AEW and had a lot of goodwill from the audience, but it was no surprise to me that crowds were turning on him when that goodwill ran out.

[Lorne Malvo]

@BomberPat From memory, I feel like when Dynamite starts Cody settles down into something resembling a traditional white-meat babyface, and it's no coincidence this is probably the best period of his career too. Of course, this being Cody it doesn't last forever and within 12-18 months he's already back to doing shades of grey/flitting between heel and face bullshit. 

[BomberPat]

even then, while Cody's doing great traditional babyface work, he still has Brandi as his manager, who within the space of one show goes from defenceless babyface wife of the star to bad-ass wrestler who won't back down from Cody's opponents, to conniving (and occasionally) spooky heel wrestler/manager. She was truly the Death Riders of her day.

I think it's All Out 2019 where Brandi is managing Awesome Kong, and they're both in a Battle Royal. It's perfectly set up for Brandi to just hide behind Kong while she does the work, but instead they barely interact and Brandi's the one doing all the work. And then of course she's back managing Cody as the babyface for his match later on.

[LaGoosh]

WHO THA HEYALL TOLD YOU IT WAS OPEN MIC NIGHT, BITCH?!

Brandi's wrestling career is absolutely bonkers. It's just her and Cody sitting around saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." backstage then doing it on TV immediately regardless of whether it makes any sense or not.

Enjoying your posts @Lorne Malvo. It's great fun being reminded of all the scrubs and weird one offs AEW had back in the early days.

Edited August 26 by LaGoosh

[Lorne Malvo]

2 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

WHO THA HEYALL TOLD YOU IT WAS OPEN MIC NIGHT, BITCH?!

This has just bought to mind the Dan Lambert / Brandi promos where neither one of them sold anything and it just turned into a comedy roast. Terrible stuff.

2 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

Enjoying your posts @Lorne Malvo. It's great fun being reminded of all the scrubs and weird one offs AEW had back in the early days.

Many thanks. I watched the All Out preshow battle royale last night and there's a fair few of these. Shalandra Royal, Shazza McKenzie (??), Nicole Savoy, Teal Piper and their very early pet project Sadie Gibbs. An eclectic line-up to say the least. 

[Supremo]

No-one will ever admit it, but I’ll always be convinced a big reason Cody left AEW is because Tony Khan refused to pay Brandi a single penny going forward.

All the shite pro-wrestling has pumped out over the years, is The Nightmare Collective the only thing bad enough that they explained it away with, “it was all a dream,”?

I’m sure that’s how I remember it. Brandi explaining it to a therapist and, “snapping out of it.”

Edited August 26 by Supremo

[gmoney]

Yeah, he let her do whatever she wanted on TV, be the face of a reality show and handed her prominent backstage roles, then suddenly grew a backbone. Great theory!