|
|
 Well, look what’s back. I’m going to shoot through the ads real quick so we can get rolling. Our own MMN made that too damn funny banner from the pictures of the Gathering up exclusively at the forum for now. There’s new Zenk and Ginger at THE RING POST (currently experiencing server problems… fixed soon), the eagerly-anticipated “Gathering” post with Madrox and me is coming very soon, and I just completed a review of Psychopathic Record’s upcoming “Hatchet History” up soon at ABNORMAL STATUS. Now it’s time for some recapping. WWE VELOCITY 7/27/02 OPENING GRAPHICS: Plenty of Triple H, no Brock Lesnar. Oops. OK, I cracked on Al Snow a lot, but MARK LLOYD REPLACING HIM? I haven’t seen a trade-down like this since every single shit show that ever replaced something good FOX cancelled. Billy and Chuck make their way down. Cole says their haircut looks like Mark’s. This may very well be the longest hour of my life. Probably taking on Mark Henry and Albert. Well, OK… Hurricane’s music is playing. Who the fuck is his partner? Christian? Kid Kash? OOOH, it’s Shannon Moore. They are TOTALLY missing the boat by not joking that “Three Count” sings their opponents’ entrance music. The commentary is so beyond awful it defies description. The TECHNICAL term for what the problem is would be that it’s being called by two “straight” men… but we know better, don’t we? They discuss the tag team scene, including the new champs. Meanwhile, Shannon reminds us he’s one hell of a talented kid. Mark Lloyd: “They did beat Hollywood Hogan and Edge, a great tag team championship when they were in their run”. Look buddy, I don’t care how they speak on the Isle of Fagmo or wherever you’re from, but here words should run together in ways that make something resembling sense, got it? Hurricane in and doing all kinds of flippity-floppity kicking things. Shannon back in and does a really cool running form of the blockbuster. God DAMN he’s tiny. Shannon’s tossed outside and Chuck goes after him. Even though Billy’s in the ring Cole explains that this is what the former champs are best at: double-teaming(?). Billy must hear this and goes out to do some damage as well. I THINK Lloyd and Cole mean this as a compliment, but you tell me: “No matter who he teams with, Billy seems to make his partner look that much better.” Hurricane finally gets the hot tag and has things in hand when Shannon gets caught in mid air and wiped out on the guard rail. Helms gets his choke slam but then gets superkicked while the ref is distracted and it’s all over. Someone hold’s up a sign that says “The Rock Says Hoosier Daddy”. LIAR! Coming up later Noble defends against Kidman. Commercials VENGEANCE RECAP: Steph slaps Bischoff. In case you haven’t been paying attention (or reading FIST FARKING) Uncle E. added a million viewers to RAW last week. Just when this business can’t get any nuttier. The announcers sell the big talent-raid gimmick and we take a look back at Brock’s jump on Monday and his Smackdown debut. He DVD’s Mark Henry and has words with Kurt Angle. Kurt then talks to someone named Eric on the phone, Steph assumes it’s Bischoff, and it turns out to be Eric Angle. This means someone else is being raided for RAW, as Eric leaves with a “mystery steal” we’re not privy to. I gotta tell you, I really like this so far. Commercials. XXX is going to fucking rock so hard. Tajiri vs. Mike Awesome. Smart move having him return against a jap, since them (and Tazz) are what gave him the illusion of being a monster for so long. Plus, it means he’s not in there against Albert. Tajiri starts with a leg takedown attempt and gets tossed, so he starts going after the legs. The announcers talk about Rey’s debut on Smackdown, comparing him favorably with the “great” Mils Mascaras. Fuck him! Everyone knows there’s only one true masked legend, and that’s “SANTOS”. Why? Because the Mystery Science Theater guys did one of his movies, of course. Tajiri goes for a tarantula but Awesome powers out of it. Mike goes for a big splash and takes a mouthful of Tajiri feet for his effort. OW! That’ll teach you to drop Shaggy 2 Dope off a bus, you fuck. Back to speculating about the talent raid. Since Cena and Rey were in the ring at the time they are the only people it can’t be. No surprise there, something tells me Rey isn’t exactly chomping at the bit to be back under Eric’s thumb. Tajiri finally gets the tarantula on but gets shoulderblocked as he tries to capitalize. Powerslam for a near fall. He goes for a crucifix but the cruiserweight slinks out and gives one of those temple kicks for the finish. Good match, Awesome is a bit of a tool but good to see him back anyway. Commercials Rico is backstage with Funaki when Hardcore Holly calls him a smelly faggot and challenges him. Rico accepts and Funaki gives him “thumbs up”. He should start saying “indeed” again. Highlights of the cage match from SmackDown. Edge got pretty damn bloody in this one. Jericho keeps trying to escape and Edge continuously stops him. Finally Edge climbs to the top and wins the match, but he’s met by the Anti-Americans who drag him back in and start destroying him (YEAH!! KILL THAT AMERICAN EDGE!! *rolls eyes*). Cena comes in at first but isn’t much help. Then Rey Mysterio comes in and delivers the awesome cage dive I’m sure everyone’s seen or heard about by now and cleans house. Cruiserweight Title match next. Commercials JVC TOWER OF POWER RECAP: Highlights of Rey’s debut Thursday. Kidman is out first, followed by the white trash. Cole tells us that winning the Crusierweight belt was the ticket to the good life for Noble and he’s going to do anything to keep it. So because he’s not champ, Billy Kidman is eating cans of Vienna Sausages a year past their expiration date? Noble delivers some power and stretch moves to wear down his opponent. Kidman sort of recovers and the two exchange blows and near falls. Billy does a COOL DVD into a backbreaker then gets powerslammed but Nidia distracts the ref. Noble bumps into her and gets rolled up. The ref VERY CLEARLY COUNTS THREE then says it was a two count. What a dipshit. Nidia then trips up Kidman and holds his leg so Jamie can get his pin. Next, Rico vs. Hardcore. There’s a main event in any high school gym in the country… well, maybe semi-main. Commercials Holly is in the ring, and Rico brings out his boys and they hassle Hardcore until the ref sends them to the back. Mark and Michael argue over which one of them is the play-by-play guy. Certainly, it’s not an easy call… since the “color” guy is supposed to be the funny one and Al Gore would be the charismatic one if they were a trio. Without Chuck and Billy Rico is scared shitless, and with good reason. Within moments he’s being slammed, kicked, and chopped to hell and back. Cole mocks Lloyd for laughing at one of his own jokes earlier. Well SOMEONE had to. Rico gets some offense in, including kicking him “field goal” style. He then makes the mistake of going up top, and after missing the moonsault Hardcore comes back and gives one of the ten “best dropkicks in the business”. A “gas mask” gets a near fall, and when Rico tries to deliver his spin kick he gets caught in the Alabama Jam. It’s all over after that except for the Billy and Chuck run-in and Big Valboski save. We’re Mark Henry and Albert free, so the show is a winner in my book. NEXT!! WWE CONFIDENTIAL 7/27/02 Today we look in-depth at the background of Randy Orton. Yessir, I picked a BANNER week to come back to this gimmick. Gene fades in. He first talks about the impact Bischoff has made since coming in. I’m now all for his hiring, therefore Gene moves back up to the top of “why did you hire this worthless bum?” list. Later tonight we’ll look back at one of the incidents that hastened WCW’s fall from grace. That narrows it down to about a million. Like everything else, the segment begins with some Rock ass-kissing. Blah blah blah, third generation. Blah blah blah Rocky Johnson molests little girls. Blah blah blah he fears Sickboy. Well, he may have been the first three generation star but now there’s another, far less exciting one. We begin with Randy sitting with his dad and granddad, saying they’re the reason he’s here. YA THINK? Hey! Bob’s arm finally healed. He yaps about growing up in the locker rooms and his mom encouraging to do other things and his dad encouraging him to “never go into a room alone with that Patterson guy”. Then he joined the marines instead and wound up going AWOL. Bob is interviewed saying he got what he had coming to him since he didn’t listen to his old man. I bet that was a real happy household. So he does 38 days in the brig and gets kicked out and goes to try out for wrestling. In two weeks he’s in Stamford being tested by Dr. Tom. He admits that there were guys wrestling for 10 years in OVH who hadn’t gotten the push he did with a month of total training there and they pretty much hated him for it (“hey, what’s this smell in my gym ba… AAAWW MAN!!”) Tom says he’s got a natural feel for the ring and D-Von says there’s no hostility in the WWE for his quick rise since Rock is also a third generation superstar and moving him out of the mid-cards turned out to not be a horrible idea. Randy says he looks up to the Rock as someone he wants to be as big as, and D-Von points out that both of them have to work especially hard so they’re not in the shadows of their fathers. What the fuck does D-Von have to do with this? His father’s not a wrestler, he’s a traveling salesman with a powerful libido and the wiles to inseminate every piece of trash chick in Dudleyville. Val Venis and Mark Henry put him over, and his grandfather says he’s a cross between “George Clooney and Lou Thesz”. Unlike him, who looks a cross between the corpses of George Burns and Lou Costello. Randy, along with everyone else, says that what’s best about him is that he knows he’s got lots to learn in the business. Oh, and one day he wants to be champion. That was a truly groundbreaking piece, and by “groundbreaking” I mean “I want to dig a hole and bury myself in it after sitting through that boring shit.” Coming up next, RVD learning to fly. Clip of his principal showing the roof he jumped off of one day and made her poop herself. Commercial. Oh yeah, there’s a house show here in about two hours. Pffft. They lost my patronage for life the night they didn’t serve beer AND Austin no-showed. Gene talks about the kids in school that would do sick shit for attention, mentioning Mick Foley eating worms and Carl Henry putting a frog in his mouth until it peed (I’m pretty sure he means “Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry”, who sang “Aint got a Home”; the bumper music for whenever Rush Limbaugh has news about the homeless… hehehe). Well, there’s also the kids who would do the dangerous stuff, and it should come as no surprise that Rob Van Dam was just that sort of hellion. His mom starts out, telling that he was the defender of the neighborhood. If a dog bit someone, he’d go down and kick the dog’s ass (ha, cool! Dogs suck). His dad says he wore glasses so he’d get in fights but he pretty much always won. We see clips of him on diving boards and boats as a child. He explains the diving board was pretty much where he was all summer every summer, and that’s where he learned his acrobatics. His parents say he was academically gifted at first, but about 3rd grade “something happened” and he began to focus his mind elsewhere (good GOD, he started toking in THIRD GRADE??) His teachers talk about all his cutting up, and the hell he gave them. One teacher talks about the bumps and bruises he gave her doing moves he “didn’t think would connect”. Then they show the school roof he jumped off of. It’s like 12-14 off the ground. He says “half the school was there watching, then all of a sudden the other half was there chanting “one more time” so I did it… I got suspended for that.” HAHAHAHA!! A clip of a teenaged RVD coming into the ring and kissing Ted Dibiase’s foot. That’s classic. His mom tells about him trying out for the wrestling team at school, but quitting when they wanted him to lose weight (no cure for the munchies, yo) so he quit and started taking kickboxing. He says by the time he was 14 he knew what he was going to do. His PE teacher says “we all laughed at him, now we’re still here in Battle Creek and he’s eating a little better than we are”. He got trained by The Sheik (lots of Sabu stories probably cut out of there) and started wrestling down south (my roommate worked against him REAL early in their careers). Sure enough, they show a picture of RVD with Fonzie, his whole team history is going to be completely omitted. He says he likes to leave people with the idea that if a normal goofy kid like him can become something anyone can. What a kowinky dink… it’s 4:20. Be right back. UP NEXT: The day The DX Army drove to Nitro and fired a cannon. Commercials So now Eric is in WWE, but we all remember a time when he was running WCW and buying talent calling out the WWF and basically being the smarmy cock that is clicking to a degree years later. Ha! They start off with Bischoff laughing about “the competition” in a Nitro ring, then go straight to Triple H talking about how ahead of its time the angle was “because companies didn’t acknowledge the other’s existence on TV in those days”. Way to prove him wrong before he ever makes the statement. Meanwhile, Billy Gunn is just fucking giddy through the entire segment remembering a time when people actually cheered for anything he did. X Pac is totally gone (in more ways than one apparently… ZING!), but mumbles something about no one saw it coming and they were just winging it. Then they cut to Eric, who recollects “I was pissed. I was very pissed.” Outside, Triple H asks the crowd “does Eric Bischoff suck?” Nash is pretty funny sounding like he was marking out as big as anyone seeing them there. Hunter gets a girl to say “WCW Sucks” and then reminisces about people how paid money to see the competition dissing them and chanting “D-X”. This is followed by the greatness of the marquee sign saying “free tickets” and fans telling the army they’d never pay to see this crap. Hunter asks a fan why he wouldn’t pay and he says “cause WCW SUCKS!” They go STRAIGHT from that to Eric saying “DAMN! They figured it out.” HAHAHAHA!! X Pac calls out Hall and Nash and Hunter claims they’re “political prisoners” of the war. Yeah, all that alcohol they tortured Scott with… inhuman, it was. Nash admits there was no plan to retaliate because “at that point no one there could make a cup of coffee, much less plan a covert counter-strike”. He later says that everyone in WCW was trying to find monitors to watch DX antics every week (that’s a shoot, too). They’re pretty much playing this up like this was the defining moment of things turning in favor of the WWF in the great “Monday Night War”. I guess since you don’t pay Foley or Austin anymore, no reason to suggest THE TRUTH or anything. X Pac then delivers the LINE OF THE NIGHT: “I don’t know if I’m ever going to have a period in my career to match that”. You can bet the farm on that one, bud. Segment ends with WCW closing their garage doors before the jeep can get down there, and they drive away saying “back to real wrestling”. Meeeeeemooories. Oh GOD, more Ortons next. They had two fucking weeks to run this garbage in my absence. Commercials Gene says Randy Orton has a long way to go if he wants to escape the huge shadows of his dad and grandfather. In that case, I suggest taking Gene with him. Shine a hundred watt flashbulb off his pate and let it do to any shadow in the room what the disco ball did to vampires in “Dusk Til Dawn”. Bob O Sr. and Jr. talk about the past and lots of clips are shown. This is SO not going to translate to recap, so let’s move on. They do spend a fair amount of time on Cowboy’s broken arm. Coming up next: The geekiness that is Al Snow’s life. SWEET JESUS PLEASE LET IT END!! Commercials Gene reminds us of all the places that cameras are in Tough Enough, then turns things around and says now we’re going to see one of the trainers at leisure. When I said I wanted Snow back during Velocity this is NOT what I meant. Snow starts out by showing us the “formal” rooms that no one ever goes into, making “funny” comments about neighborhood petitions to keep him clothed in the front yard. He bypasses all the pictures of his real family to show off one of him with the kids from Tough Enough 1. He shows off his collection of canes, including one that has a sword in it and another that has Ivory design running all the way down it (HA! Fuck you PETA! DIE DUMBO YOU BIG-EARED BITCH!!) Then they go to his part of the house. He’s done what anyone good man that ever gets a monster paycheck should do and has all the Simpsons action figures. Then there’s of old 50’s shit and an autographed picture from “A Christmas Story” (of either Peter Billingsly or Bob Clark, I’d assume). Lot’s of comic book stuff, and Pierre the deer head. From there we see his office, and all of his wrestling memorabilia, including a real “Head”. Then we see his daughter, and she’s WAY hot. His son is a lard ass. Then he shows off his motorcycle and classic Thunderbird. Not what you’d call “gripping”, but way less grating than the Orton stuff. Trish and Ice Cream when we come back. That has potential. Commercials Gene talks about his favorite things in summer, of course leading to bikinis (wonder if him and Lawler have to fight for the few “dirty old man-friendly” rats out there). Another thing is the sound of the ice cream truck… especially when Trish Stratus is driving it… especially when that vanilla cone runs down the corner of her mouth and down her neck as she takes another big lick of… um… be right back. *lights cigarette* The point of the commercial is they’re in Middle America and everything is normal, and suddenly the ice cream truck comes and every man on the block stops mowing the lawn or helping carry in groceries and chases after the truck, which of course is being driven by Trish. Lots of cleavage and goofy dickweeds ogling her. Speaking of which, Mean Gene has to make a “double dip” comment on the way out. Next week: Booker T’s “other passion” (strong arm robbery?) Til then WE ARE DONE!! Barbwire Mike Still in Peoria in my mind |