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.”
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?
I guess before I continue the list, I should do some kind of filler intro thing first. Maybe on a later day I’ll go through the matches of this year’s show or whatever. I can’t really think of much in terms of Summerslam trivia outside of an interesting factoid I noticed involving Hulk Hogan. Basically, Hulk Hogan is not only undefeated, but he’s never had a single title match his entire time at Summerslam. Check it out.
Summerslam 88: Is in a tag match with champion Randy Savage against Andre and Dibiase.
Summerslam 89: Hogan is champ, but he’s in a tag match with Beefcake against Savage and Zeus.
Summerslam 90: Singles match against Earthquake while Ultimate Warrior is champ.
Summerslam 91: Is champ again, but he and Warrior are in a tag match against Slaughter and his cronies.
Summerslam 05: Is brought in for the dream match of Hogan vs. Michaels. Neither one is champ.
Summerslam 06: Is challenged by Randy Orton. Again, neither one is champ.
Now that I think of it, Ultimate Warrior’s undefeated at Summerslam too. Hell, he even showed up more often than Hogan until all the post-WCW hoopla.
Good, that filled up enough space. Back to the list!
Before World Wrestling Entertainment oversaturated the pay-per-view market with too many shows per year, they were better about giving us more with less. We had four big PPVs. Wrestlemania was the granddaddy of them all, a major spectacle meant to be the show of the year where major feuds would meet their climax and they’d fit in as many memorable moments and matches as possible. The Royal Rumble would lead into that show with its own exciting and unpredictable 30 (now 40)-man match that’s fun to watch no matter what year it is. Survivor Series would use its gang warfare gimmick to fuel the fire between ongoing feuds while giving us new matchups and its own sense of unpredictability. I’ve coveredthosethree before. That leaves Summerslam.
Summerslam is the fourth corner of that equation and lacks the standout gimmick. It’s more like Wrestlemania Jr. than anything else. It’s a 3-hour show where things are a bigger deal than your average PPV or Saturday Night’s Main Event, but not QUITE as major as Wrestlemania. Comparing Wrestlemania and Summerslam is a lot like comparing WWE’s top shows Raw and Smackdown. One is more about flash and stardom while the other gets a little more freedom in its second place spot and usually tends to have better wrestling overall. I’m going to be honest, I expected this to be a bitch to go through because Summerslam was never all that interesting to me. Going down the list, only 10 of the 23 existing shows have I seen before, either via PPV or Coliseum Home Video. While, yes, there are a couple stinkers in there – as you’ll see here in this first update – the show tends to be quality. Even the #22 spot goes to a show that many would consider to be a quality outing.
With the upcoming Summerslam 2011, where we’ll see CM Punk face John Cena, it’s only fitting that I spend the next eleven days leading up to it by ranking and reviewing every Summerslam from worst to best.
A reminder on how the rating system works. I don’t want one single great match or bad match completely define a show. I rate each match one-to-ten. WWF/WWE Championship and WCW/World Heavyweight Championship matches as well as non-world-title main events count as two matches. The “atmosphere”, which means the stuff on the show that isn’t part of the matches themselves, such as backstage promos and the like count collectively as one match. From there, it’s averaged out.
So let’s get to it. 4thletter says… SLAM.
Wait, did they have a Tony Schiavone voice clip in that intro when he was gone from the company for several years?
WWE has been in a major rut lately. They have all the talent in the world and yet they’ve spent the last several months mismanaging themselves. So much time and effort has been spent on shoving Cena and Orton in our faces as overly dominant heroes that everyone else looks like shit. This is even worse when they bring in older top guys like Triple H to tell everyone that he and the Undertaker have to have a big, high-profile match because everyone in the back smells and none of them are on their level. Most attempts to build up new talent screeches to a halt because they’d rather see how said wrestler would react on a professional level if they started looking like a joke day in and day out.
I can only hope they hit rock bottom (no pun intended) over the past few months because the company should know better than to be this lousy on a regular basis. Luckily, they’ve started to get enough forward momentum in the last couple months. R-Truth has taken his character to another level. Christian and Orton are having good matches. Good wrestlers are still having good matches when nobody’s watching.
A major happening came from this week’s Raw. The next PPV, Money in the Bank, which is in Chicago, will have John Cena defending the WWE Championship against CM Punk in what is billed to be Punk’s farewell performance. The writing was on the wall with this one if you follow the backstage hijinx of the company online, but Raw’s ending added a new level of interest in it.
In a tables match between Cena and R-Truth, Punk interfered to help Truth win. With a weakened Cena selling something for the first time in maybe a year, Punk sat upon the entrance ramp and had this to say.
Was it legit? Of course not! Like they’d have him talk that long and choose only then to cut him off. But it was cool! It was really, really cool and does a good job of building up the PPV as a situation where something intriguing could happen. It was shocking and buzzworthy.
Some of the more hardcore fans (or “smarks”) out there have said that the promo alienates the casual fans because they don’t know what he’s talking about. Too many inside references. That’s bullshit, of course. Anyone can pick up what he’s talking about and figure out what they don’t get. Still, the smarks get some extra flavor from Punk’s remarks as it speaks for the most of them. The response reminds me of a lot of Grant Morrison’s recent DC Comics work, only even more straightforward. Just because you haven’t read decades of Jack Kirby work doesn’t mean you can’t read through Final Crisis.
That got me thinking. David Uzumeri has been annotating Grant Morrison’s comics for the past few years. Maybe I could annotate CM Punk’s speech and give the casual fans something to go with an already fantastic rant. Let’s give it a shot.
I remember when I first saw a link to this video years back, someone remarked that he had never felt like a wrestler believed in his own storyline as being real as Savage right here. I have to agree. The guy is just SO INTO what he’s saying that it’s nothing less than phenomenal.
“Macho Man” Randy Savage (Randy Poffo) is one of those guys who defined my childhood. When I first started watching wrestling, he was in his Macho King phase, accompanied by Queen Sherri. The story going on was that the champion, the Ultimate Warrior, didn’t consider him worthy of a title shot. Savage got his revenge by interfering in the Ultimate Warrior’s title defense against Sergeant Slaughter at the 1991 Royal Rumble (my first PPV) and costing Warrior the belt. This led to a feud that hit its end point at Wrestlemania 7 where the loser had to quit wrestling.
Savage lost but still found his way back via a fantastic feud with Jake “The Snake” Roberts months down the line. While his match with Warrior was the beginning of him stepping down from his prime, he remained entertaining for his remaining years in the company. He mostly did commentary, but had a unique spot as the top tier legend who hung back and allowed the others to do their thing, stepping back into the ring every once and a while, usually because he felt he had no choice. His feud with Crush was the story that had me the most enthralled during the lead-up to Wrestlemania X. Shortly after, he went to WCW and I saw very little of him for the rest of his in-ring career.
I did end up watching his work from before I started following wrestling and appreciated his MADNESS even more. The guy was one of the most unique and colorful among a pantheon of unique and colorful individuals. Despite being overshadowed by Hogan and Warrior, Savage was easily my favorite of the three. He felt like he was in their league, but didn’t rely on their “win button” gimmicks. He was a better worker and came off as an actual competitor rather than an invincible superhero.
What the three had in common was their penchant for insane ramblings. It’s something that’s sadly missing from the business these days, outside of R-Truth’s recent heel turn. Savage, though, was the tops. The guy had this deranged intensity that had you hanging on every word. The man had ten million ways of telling you that he was going to beat you in a wrestling match and they were all amazing.
He had his own identity that’s so distinctive that he doesn’t fit into its own archetype. Hogan tends to be synonymous with wrestling, but Randy Savage is only synonymous with Randy Savage. He’s so specific that to ape his style in any way sticks out like a sore thumb.
I could go on, but it’s late and I’m beginning to ramble. The psychedelic, beef jerky-peddling cowboy was entertaining as hell and I’ve always respected how he was one of the few 80’s wrestlers to hold onto his money responsibly and give himself the ability to earn a wonderful life in retirement, as long as it lasted. It’s a punch to the gut that he intended to make some kind of media comeback, having recently resurfaced in a video announcement of his new Mattel action figures and again for the recent WWE All-Stars video game. According to him, 2011 would be the year of the Macho Man.
Whether he was a face, a heel, a king, a groom, a champion, a spokesman, a commentator, an ill-fated rapper, a superhero talkshow host’s grandfather or a cartoon parody of the Champion of the Universe, Savage never failed to make me smile. He was larger than life and there will never, ever be another man like him. R.I.P.
(coincidentally, this is what the inside of my brain looks like)
As a kid, I never read much of the choose-your-own-adventures books. I did read an old Superman one once, which was really good and in retrospect is intriguing for including so many ways that Superman can get taken out in one book. It’s just that those books tended to be just a little too depressing. You don’t just receive bad luck in a lot of those books… you enact nightmare material that I was too young to endure. Where I currently work, I had flipped through several of them and even now I find the stuff questionable. I saw one book where a decision led to the main character getting hit with a car so hard that they needed to check the dental records to see who he was. Jesus…
Then I saw this book: Race to the Rumble: Pick Your Path #1 by Tracey West. It’s a WWE choose-your-own-adventure book and it’s Royal Rumble-based. I kind of had to pick it up and read through it out of principle.
Rey Mysterio actually has very little to do with this book. Same with Edge who appears on the back cover.
The book is nearly 100 pages and exists as being both fun and lacking. Lacking in the sense that there’s no real path divergence in the stories. Instead of branching off into different scenarios, we’re only given two storylines. Each decision, with one exception, gives you one choice that will continue the story or end it in one page. That’ll at least make this write-up easier on me. What is there is at least good stuff. West has a decent grasp on the WWE and really does come up with some good booking ideas for a gimmicky book like this. There are times when I’ve read what’s happened and thought, “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”
So let’s get into the story. It all begins with you, a nameless and indistinct indy wrestler winning a match against Blockhead in a high school gym. A talent scout from the WWE comes to you and offers you a tryout. You remember news that WWE’s announced a tournament of sorts that’s allowing newly-recruited guys to earn a spot in the Royal Rumble. This sounds awesome and gives you the drive needed to beat another nameless hopeful in your tryout match in front of Vince McMahon himself. Vince thinks your ringwork is impressive, but wants to hear you cut a promo on the spot.
This is where we get our first choice. You can either play a good guy or bad guy. For now, let’s go face and cover the rest later. You give a generic, “What this means to me,” speech and Vince kind of shrugs at it. You’re a good athlete, but you have a month to prove yourself and grow a personality. Off you go to your first match where you’re opening a show against Drew McIntyre. Backstage, Drew takes offense to the idea that you were signed by Vince himself, since he’s Vince’s Chosen One. You get absolutely destroyed in your debut match and the fans call you a loser.
Here’s where we get the one and only side-plot of the choose-your-own story. Chris Jericho meets you backstage and comes up with a gimmick idea that comes off as lame, but he’s a veteran, so maybe you should listen to him. The gimmick is Kid Caveman, where you’d wear a loincloth and carry a big dinosaur bone as a club. Should you listen to his advice? Let’s see what happens with that…
WWE’s NXT experiment has been going on for a bit over a year and despite its ups and downs, it still draws me in with its uniqueness. For those late to the party, the show is about 6-8 wrestling “Rookies” who are trying to earn their way onto the main roster by being paired with their “Pros”. A group of established wrestlers mentor these new guys and it’s turned into a fake reality show where these guys are voted off based on internet popularity and the consensus of the Pros. It’s a mess of a show, but one that I watch regularly. When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s usually so bad it’s good.
Currently, it’s in its fifth season. The first season, which aired on SyFy, ended with Wade Barrett winning decisively. He would go on to lead the Nexus in a storyline that was plenty awesome until they wrote themselves into a corner and “fired” John Cena despite his continued appearances on the show. The winner of the second season was Kaval, an indy wrestling darling whose victory was short-lived. WWE has a boneheaded tendency to shove popular acts down the card to see how they react. If they take their burial in stride? They’ll be pushed stronger later. If you’re like Kaval and you complain about it on Twitter? You’re gone. The third season was an all-female roster and was renowned for being a gigantic train wreck. By this time, it stopped airing on TV and became broadcast on the internet only (SyFy started airing Smackdown as their lone WWE show instead). The winner was Kaitlyn, who has gone on to do nothing since she really isn’t prepared to be on TV yet in the first place. For the fourth season, the winner was Johnny Curtis, who has gone on to do absolutely nothing, boggling the mind of anyone following the show.
Sometimes it isn’t the winners who matter. I want to talk about the losers. One of the more interesting parts of the show is when they have to vote off a Rookie. The way it will usually go is that all the remaining Rookies will line up outside the ring and the host Matt Striker will direct their attention to a roulette-like graphic that stops on the one the fans and Pros decided was the least impressive. That doomed wrestler will then look all bummed and will be given the opportunity to give a farewell promo. With a couple exceptions, there’s value to find in all of these. Sometimes they’ll give a promo so good that you might wonder, “Why didn’t this guy act this awesome before he got voted off?” Sometimes they’ll mumble through some embarrassing tirade that makes you shake your head in disbelief. Sometimes fights will break out. Sometimes the Pros will mess with them. Either way, it’s always a highlight.
So here’s the top 25 goodbyes in NXT history. How can there be 25 when there were 24 losers? I’ll get to that in time. Keep in mind, these aren’t listed from worst to best. No, that would be another list entirely. These are in order from how entertained I was by them.
25) NAOMI Season 3 Date: November 30, 2010 (Week 13) Rank: 2nd Pro: Kelly Kelly
Naomi reacted to the news that Kaitlyn is the next breakout star by shrugging, calling it bittersweet and spending five seconds talking about how everyone worked hard. Yep, that’s it.
Not only are the women lacking in the last name department, but most of them lack the personality as shown in this list. Let’s get the other two out of the way.
It’s no surprise to me that Chaos Comics would release a set of WWF comics back in the late 90’s and early 00’s. That era was like a golden age for professional wrestling and WWF was really running with the ball in order to become the #1 game in town. It was a cultural phenomenon at a level that we may never see again. Unlike the days of Hulk Hogan wearing the red and yellow, it wasn’t just one man’s popularity holding up the company. Even the midcard guys would get wild responses from the crowd for doing nothing more than walking out and saying the same thing verbatim again and again followed by performing a horrible match (I’m looking at you, Road Dogg and Godfather). WWF had a ton of personality to play with, so as bad as any wrestling comic tends to turn out, playing with the properties during the Attitude Era made sense.
The Undertaker is the only one to get his own ongoing series, which I’ve already covered in a two–parter. Other than him, we got one-shots for Mankind, the Rock, two one-shots for Chyna and a four-issue miniseries for Stone Cold Steve Austin. At least with Undertaker, it doesn’t make you bat an eye as much because he’s an undead demon cowboy with an ill-defined backstory. How do you do a comic about Chyna, let alone two?
I’ll start with the Rock’s one-shot, as I might as well bookend this with the two top guys and the Bookend is another name for the Rock Bottom anyway. See? All ties together. Like all of these non-Undertaker stories, it’s written by Steven Grant. On art for this one, we have Fabiano Neves. For the non-wrestling fans out there, I guess I should say some stuff about who the Rock is… or was. What I’m saying is—
Okay, okay! Even that guy on the left looks like he knows I walked into that one.
