Well, I needed a bit of a writing break to recharge my batteries and that pesky hurricane gave me little choice in the matter. Anyway, I’m back and I’m ready to finish what I’ve started. In other wrestling news, Rifftrax has released a new video on demand where they tackle the Jesse Ventura early 90’s movie Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. It’s like a cross between Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, only completely and utterly boring. And with Jim Belushi as a principal only because the lead woman was his wife at the time!

Highly recommended.

Now back to the list.

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So, yeah, Summerslam was the other day. That ending sure was a thing that happened, eh? While the use of Kevin Nash is head-shaking, I’m okay with the split angles. Why? Because you aren’t allowed to beat Cena in a feud unless it’s unceremonious and he gets distracted by someone else to the point that he forgot about you. That’s how it’s worked for Sheamus, R-Truth and now CM Punk. It’s the best we can get.

The highlight for me was Sheamus vs. Mark Henry because I dig everything Mark Henry-related from the last several months. His matches feel like a Godzilla movie, only with better workrate. I absolutely loved the creative ending of Sheamus going through the guardrail and failing to crawl his way to the ring in time while Henry stood triumphant. It also led to this gif from Jerusalem:

Linked due to size.

Other than that, Orton’s match with Christian was so good that it makes me forget that I like Christian as champ better. Barrett going over Bryan is how it should have been and the opener was good fun. Really, WWE should have just stretched everything out with this angle. Summerslam should have been Cena vs. Mysterio, which I still believe to be a money match that they wasted by throwing on Raw with no hype. The disappearance of CM Punk could have lasted up until after the main event, where he would have made his big appearance to mess with Cena. Then save all the champion vs. champion drama for Night of Champions, which works great because of the goddamn title. All the Nash/Del Rio stuff would have made it a bit easier on a lesser PPV like that.

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Summerslam was last night and I’ll review that one in a later post. First and foremost, I want to discuss the hilarity that is NBC’s Wrestlemania 27 special. Every year, NBC does a one-hour special that condenses Wrestlemania into a bunch of highlights. Not sure of the appeal, especially since this year’s was so bad, but it’s there.

At Wrestlemania, the big match was Triple H vs. Undertaker. Triple H had a badass entrance with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica playing. Undertaker also walked down like a badass to Johnny Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave”. Herein lies the problem. NBC decided that ponying up the cash to play the Metallica song on their broadcast was fine and dandy. But Johnny Cash? Nope. They weren’t going to waste a dime on that.

It happens. Throughout all these DVDs I watch, they remove a lot of music due to rights issues and replace them with other stuff. Undertaker’s Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock themes are replaced with his Big Evil “You’ve Done it Now” theme. It would make sense that NBC would just put his regular theme over the Johnny Cash one. Right?

Nope. Instead, they decided that the perfect song would be “ET” by Katy Perry. I’m not joking. What were they thinking?!

I kissed a ghoul and I liked it.

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With Summerslam just a couple days away, it’s not hard to notice that there are so few matches announced. One of those guys who has nothing going on is the Miz and that brings up an interesting pattern. See, the Miz has never wrestled a single Summerslam in his entire WWE career. Check it out.

2011: Rey’s injured, so the possibility of Rey vs. Miz is down the tubes. Will most definitely appear on the show in some way, but having a match is up in the air.
2010: Was going to cash in his Money in the Bank briefcase, but decided not to as he would be joining Team WWE in the main event. Was going to wrestle in the main event, but Cena had him replaced with Daniel Bryan.
2009: Got fired and banned from Summerslam (Summerfest?!) by one of the guest Raw General Managers.
2008: Even if he and Morrison were still tag champs, it wouldn’t matter. The only tag match on the show was a mixed tag.
2007: Is too busy feuding with Balls Mahoney to be of any importance to the big picture.

The dude just can’t catch a break. I’m pretty sure that the Hurricane never got a Summerslam match either, which is kind of weird. See, the big DVD box set of the first 20 Summerslams are split into four packages and each package has this awesome collage of stuff from those five years. Stuff like posters, Dibiase angrily pointing, Cena punching Jericho, Diesel and Michaels posing, etc. One of them features, rather prominently, a picture of a guy in a Hurricane mask in the corner. I don’t remember seeing such a thing and I can’t remember the Hurricane doing anything of note, let alone appearing, yet there it is.

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So I’m watching last night’s Raw and I’m thinking about this whole CM Punk/Cena angle and it hits me.

– CM Punk is a guy who felt the need to retire.
– CM Punk unretired because he feels he’s needed and has an obsession when it comes to beating people up while wearing tights.
– He’s sick of an unbeatable, wholesome, insufferable superhero of a man who appears to be a tool for the system.
– His actions lead to a massive cult following with people dressing like him and pumping their fists in the air in his name.
– For standing in the face of the system and going too far, they end up sending that unbeatable super dude after him.
– CM Punk feels that they could have changed the business, but he’s a political liability and John Cena… John Cena’s a joke.
– In his most private moments, John Cena will have to remember the one man who beat him.

In other words, the CM Punk angle is Dark Knight Returns.

“The rest of us learned to cope. The rest of us recognized the danger – of the endless envy of those not blessed. Jericho went back to his band. Brock went to the octagon. And I have walked the razor’s edge for so long… But you, Punk – you, with your wild obsession.”

“I will never forget Colt Cabana. He was a good soldier. He honored me. But the war goes on.”

NOW BACK TO THE GOOD PART!

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Um… hm… This post is late as it is and I’m still having trouble figuring out an intro to show before the link jump. Lesse…

Austin Roll it is!

Austin discovering the beauty of the internet is an exhibit of evidence that God exists.

Now back to the regularly scheduled list.

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Yesterday, WWE released a handful of wrestlers. There’s Gail Kim, who just eliminated herself within seconds during a Diva battle royal just because she wanted to see if anyone would notice. Then there’s Melina, who I wouldn’t mind not having to see ever again. David Hart Smith is gone and… yeah, that was a long time coming. Then there’s Chris Masters, which is the biggest shame because the dude actually went to Japan to improve his craft only to get completely underpushed. Seriously, he’s good in the ring these days!

The one that wounds me the most is the loss of Vladimir Kozlov. Sure, he isn’t the best wrestler by any stretch, but I enjoyed him for the most part regardless. Here is his finest moment.

Second best moment is when he dramatically delivered the line, “Then it is settled. Next week I get what I want… OR I will destroy MacGruber.”

Oh well. Maybe he can go back to Baltimore and work with the Greek again. What? You didn’t know he showed up on the Wire for like two seconds?

Anyway, the list.

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It’s kind of a bad time for my writing. All my go-to articles have been running dry. Jeph Loeb stopped writing Ultimate Marvel comics, so no more of that. I’ve finished writing about Venom. I don’t have too many wrestling PPV shows to rank and review. Just as bad, Marvel has stopped releasing novelizations of their movies. I can no longer know the story of movies in the Avengers Saga a month or so before they’re released. Because of that, I can’t do any informative lists that show all the scenes that were taken out of the original version of the screenplay.

Or can I? While yes, it appears that there isn’t any novelization for Captain America: The First Avenger, that doesn’t mean I’m empty handed. I called in some favors and got to see the extended original cut of the movie. Oh, man. You won’t believe some of the stuff they got rid of! Mostly because it’s all lies.

An entire hour was cut. Removed scenes include:

– A scene where pre-experiment Steve Rogers gets sand kicked in his face at the beach. He meant to gamble a stamp and send a couple bucks to Charles Atlas to make him a man, but got distracted by news of Pearl Harbor.

– When playing hangman with Bucky, he had only one turn left and only the first letter revealed. After biting on his pencil for a moment, he asked if that letter stood for France. Lucky guess.

– When talking with Erskine, the two of them had a long, hearty laugh about how Disney had released a cartoon where Donald Duck was a Nazi. Steve kept insisting, “This is a thing that actually exists! Look it up! Donald is saluting Hitler and everything!” He later had this same conversation with Colonel Phillips, Peggy and even Red Skull. I’m not sure exactly why Marvel would remove this reference.

– When Red Skull steals the first Cosmic Cube and shatters it on the ground for being a forgery, he then curses a blue streak and realizes that he just busted up the real thing after all. Much of his villain plot is based on him trying to find glue and tape, which was scarce in Nazi Germany.

– Much like Arnim Zola was introduced via his face reflected off a monitor, the character of Helmut Zemo was there too. He was introduced by putting his hands behind his back and his shoeless feet on the table while the shot lingered on his purple socks.

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David’s been doing his musical articles for a while and I figured it was about time I stepped up to the plate. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly as well-versed in music as he is. Then I realized that Alpocalypse, the new Weird Al Yankovic album, is coming out in a couple days. Hey, I know Weird Al pretty good!

Weird Al is someone I grew up listening to that I’m glad to see is still at it. I got into him at age 7 with Even Worse, which gave us the Michael Jackson “Bad” parody “Fat”. It took me years to even realize the joke about the album’s name. While I stuck with Weird Al for years (he used to come out with a new album every year or two back then), I don’t think I really got a lot of it. I only caught the absolute outer shell of his work and ignored the rest. I’d listen to his parodies, but fast forward through the originals.

As time went on, this changed. Like with watching Adam West Batman, the older I got, the more I got. The more I was able to see the actual talent and genius that my younger self didn’t notice. It became a thing where I’d come for the parodies but stay for the original music. Now we’ve reached a point where I look at the sources for the parodies on his new album’s track list and I don’t recognize a single one (I know “Born This Way” now, but only after the brief controversy with “Perform This Way” momentarily not being released). It doesn’t matter for me because even if I’m unfamiliar with a lot of it, I know I’ll still be fully entertained.

I wanted to pay a little tribute to Weird Al’s catalogue. I thought I’d cover only his original songs. No direct parodies (style parodies are more than fine), no polka medleys and no covers. Doing the research was a complete blast. I listened to favorites, old tunes I never gave the time of day to and even some older ones off albums I never heard before.

For the record, if I had been doing a list of his best parodies, “I Think I’m a Clone Now” would win.

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I had seen the movie Thor recently and I enjoyed the hell out of it (Iron Man > Thor > Incredible Hulk > Iron Man 2). For longtime readers of this site, you usually know what that leads to. Ever since Spider-Man 3, I’ve had a tendency to pick up the novelizations of Marvel movie properties before the movies come out. When I see the movie, I then go home and write up all the stuff that was in the book, yet never made the on-screen transition. These always lead to interesting differences between early versions of the draft and later ones. Like how Iron Man 2 was going to be a total piece of shit rather than just being simply the lowest rung of the Avengers Saga movies.

Here’s the problem, though. The Thor and Captain America movies don’t have novelizations and won’t be getting any. Oh, sure, there’s the junior novel, but those things are always too cleaned up and they overly abridge chunks of the story. I guess I’ll just have to kiss my bread and butter goodbye.

But then, I figured, what’s stopping me? Sure, I haven’t read the original script for Thor. Sure, I don’t know how earlier drafts of the story went. But YOU don’t know that!

…shit, wait. You do. Pretend those above three paragraphs never happened. I want to tell you about all the scenes from Thor that never came to be. The ones that were left on the cutting room floor, for better or for worse. Let’s go.

– In the opening scene, when Jane and friends are driving through the desert, they briefly spurn a hitchhiker and drive past him. Bruce Banner puts his hands back into his pockets and continues down the road, accompanied by sad piano music.

– The real reason those frost giants snuck into Asgard isn’t because of any magic or trickery, but because Heimdall was too distracted from doing that thing where you point your index fingers at each other and cross your eyes and see a little floating hotdog finger in-between.

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