INSIDE THE RING NEWSLETTER
Edition 35
by Trevor Hunnicutt and Eddie T.
I apologize, but due to an illness, I couldn’t fully contribute this week. Trevor took good care of analysing this week’s WWE shows though! Here are his thoughts…
MONDAY NIGHT RAW
6
There was nothing at all to the 2/14 RAW, and far too many bad things, but it was entertaining and advanced most of the simmering angles being set up for WrestleMania. The first killer was the lineup: Hassan vs. Jericho was DOA, Shelton Benjamin vs. Gene Snitsky was guaranteed failure; Kane vs. Simon Dean; and Edge vs. Batisita in a match that everyone who thought Batista was the most improved wrestler of the year last year, which is a joke, should probably take a look at when judging Batista’s in-ring potential rather than his push. I expect quarter-to-quater ratings to be bad. The one highlight of the show was a match between Christian and Randy Orton that highlighted the improvements that both of them have made in the last year and with specific regard to Christian, his improvement has been duly noted by few. (Eddie has been saying it for awhile and the rest of the world is starting to catch up.) It also featured a suprisingly nuanced continuation of the concussion storyline. The segment with Candace Mitchell, which assumed that people got anymore than a laugh out of the godaddy.com commercial at the Superbowl (and I didn’t even recognize her then), was masturbatory and pathetic. Even more pathetic is Jerry Lawler’s continuing insinuation that all African Americans are criminals. Last time I checked, all four of the people that conspired to rob (and kill him if necessary) were white, and one of them was his former girlfriend. At the end of the night, the Batista angle was well in tact, but there are a few problems that need to be quickly noted and fixed. If everyone watching the TV knows that the JBL angle is at the very least a distraction from the Batista vs. Triple H feud, than Batista must know as well. Now, we know he can’t wrestle, so WWE has to prove to use that he’s smart and in past week’s they’ve been doing that effectively, this week it seemed as though they thought that would interfere with this great creative JBL confrontation tease. Bottom line, a badly planned show. How is it that Ultimate Fighter was ten times better than any WWE angle in recent memory?
WWE SMACKDOWN
2.5
Vince McMahon, the quintessential wrestling promoter of all time, is credited with coming up with the terrm sports entertainment. Some twenty-plus years later, on one of his promotion’s main weekly shows, neither aspect is consistently evident. SmackDown is painful to watch, poorly written, an utter waste of time, and in perhaps the highest insult, most of the talent is put into a position where they simply cannot succeed athletically. WWE, as a whole, is the embodiment of a badly-managed company that in the end, is moderately successful, and the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. But SmackDown is indicative of worse: its badly managed and poorly executed to an unreasonable degree. Without paying attention to the PPV failures of the recent past (and not to mention those tons of horrible WCW PPVs one after the other), the brand, in one week, organized another PPV that’s destined to fail. I don’t really need to go through the specifics of this show, it was flat as usual, and the company made one stupid booking decision through another, Booker T carried John Cena to a good match, there were tons of bad matches, and then Batista came in and made SmackDown look and feel like the flat show it is. Overall, a show commensurate with this Sunday’s upcoming PPV. This is wholly unsustainable.
Expect some No Way Out Analysis in this week’s issue!
Eddie — Levski11 at aol.com
Trevor — THunnicutt at aol.com
