Quite a bit has happened since I last wrote about NXT. We had the season finale, which came across as rather strange and anticlimactic at first, only to be retroactively interesting based on recent events. Wade Barrett is the favorite to win the entire night with virtually everyone agreeing that he’s the most well-rounded of the finalists. When the NXT losers are interviewed in the crowd, even Darren Young – the one who had something resembling a feud with Barrett – sings his praises. As if hinting you with a swerve and swerving that swerve, there is no twist and Barrett is voted over both Justin Gabriel and David Otunga.

Then six days pass. On last Monday’s Raw, Barrett gives a seemingly generic, yet somewhat enigmatic interview about how the winds of changing and how something big is about to go down. The main event is John Cena vs. CM Punk as voted by the fans (which came off as the best choice, though you just know the company was hoping Cena would fight Mysterio or Swagger). Barrett arrives for what appears to be your usual spot where the heel messes with the champ as a way to informally challenge him and psyche him out. Then we see this…

…and all bets are off. What follows is the coolest 15 minutes of WWE action in years. Please don’t fuck it up, wrestling writer guys. Please don’t fuck it up.

With the fan discussion that’s followed, there’s been a lot of fun things to come out of the NXT/John Cena beatdown. There are a bevy of nWo parodies, like this one done by Renaissance Spam. Also came the Tubedubber mash-ups with this one by Gonz being my favorite. Give it a minute or so to get going, but the Otunga/ref punch syncs perfectly.

My favorite fan response has come from a guy by the name of Jerusalem. He’s a guy I know from Something Awful’s forum, in this case more specifically the Wrestlehut 2K sub-forum. The guy is witty, a class act all the way and always goes the extra distance by making animated gifs based on just about every wrestling show that doesn’t have the stink of Vince Russo’s never-ending failure.

With the NXT Invasion segment, Jerusalem made a bunch of gifs, but added a little extra. I very much dug his text-based mash-up and thought I’d share it with the rest of you. Enjoy.

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For today’s Tales of Wrestlemania profile, let’s go with Andre the Giant.

Wrestlemania 1: Andre battles and defeats Big John Studd with Andre’s very career on the line. In Studd’s corner is Bobby “The Brain” Heenan.

Wrestlemania 2: Andre continues to show his dominance by winning the big battle royal. Later, in the main event, Heenan’s acquisition King Kong Bundy fails to defeat Hogan for the title.

Wrestlemania 3: Andre and Heenan have joined forces to get the title off Hogan. Andre loses the match. Once again, Heenan has failed.

Wrestlemania 4: Andre has a rematch with Hogan, though this time represented by Ted Dibiase. Andre succeeds in taking Hogan out of the tournament, but when he tries to take out Savage, Hogan appears to strike him down. Also at this show, Jake Roberts has a match with Rick Rude that starts a feud between Jake and the Heenan Family.

Wrestlemania 5: Andre is back with Heenan and is going after Jake Roberts. Big John Studd is the referee. Andre is disqualified and chased off by Jake, giving Studd some face closure in their rivalry.

Wrestlemania 6: Andre and Haku are the tag champs. They lose the belts to Demolition and Heenan has had enough. Ever since turning heel, Andre has yet to get a victory at Wrestlemania. Heenan slaps Andre and sets him off.

Wrestlemania 7: Andre is too broken down to wrestle, but he does show up to help Big Boss Man fight the Heenan Family. After helping clear the area of Mr. Perfect, Haku and the Barbarian, Andre gives some words of encouragement to Boss Man and effectively passes the torch before moving on.

Has kind of an Anakin Skywalker ring to it.

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I’m sure some of you may have seen the site Tube Dubber. It takes two YouTube videos and merges them, showing one vid’s visuals and the other’s audio. As it turns out, there are a mountain of wrestling entrance videos, otherwise known as Titantrons, on YouTube. These being the looped highlight reel videos that play on the big screen whenever someone walks to the ring. Not only are seemingly all of them on YouTube, but some fans decided to make these videos for those wrestlers from earlier eras.

At the Something Awful wrestling sub-forum Wrestlehut, a bunch of us started playing around with Tube Dubber and seeing what we could do to improve on these wrestling Titantrons. Here are some of my better ones.

The Hurricane
Doink the Clown
Vladimir Kozlov
The Ultimate Warrior
Jeff Hardy (my favorite one)
CM Punk
Adam Bomb
Brutus Beefcake
John Morrison (listen, the guy slows down time. I had to do this one)
JBL… if he was a face.
Rated RKO
The Miz
Mike Knox
The New World Order

Later on, I decided to take some CHIKARA and indy highlight videos and tack on a new soundtrack.

The Osirian Portal
The Super Smash Brothers
Chuck Taylor
Mike Quackenbush

This is way too fun. Try it!