411’s Wrestlicious Take Down Report 03.10.10

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to 411mania’s second Wrestlicious report. I’m Ryan Byers, and we have to begin this column with a bit of a programming note. As some of you may have noticed, this column is appearing on the website on Thursday as opposed to late Monday night when last week’s column ran. This is due to a change in the times at which Wrestlicious is being made available to the public. The show is airing on Canada’s BiteTV and the U.S.’s MavTV, with the BiteTV airing being Monday at 11 PM, the MavTV airing being at 11 PM on Wednesday. Additionally, the shows are being archived on Bite’s website, http://www.bite.ca, though now they are not being posted until Thursday morning whereas previously they were posted at the same time that the show aired on BiteTV.

My only access to the show is actually the http://www.bite.ca webcasts, so these recaps will now run on Thursday. I offered the opportunity to recap the earlier MavTV or BiteTV television broadcasts to other members of our 411wrestling staff, but, surprisingly, nobody wanted to watch the show. I can’t imagine why.

Anyway, on to the “wrestling.”

Jimmy Hart opens this week’s program in front of a generic backdrop, doing a monologue about how he’s supposed to be meeting the “host of Wrestlicious” here today. Don’t ask me why they didn’t have their host in place for the debut episode. Said host eventually walks on to camera, and it’s Leyla Milani, who is referred to as a “Hollywood starlett” by the chyron that appears when she walks on screen. Milani, as three or four of you probably remember, as the runner up in the WWE’s 2005 installment of the Diva Search, where she lost to Ashley Massaro. I don’t know about you, but, if my wrestling career started with a loss to Ashley Massaro, I would’ve never come back to the business. I have no clue what else Milani has done in order to earn the “starlett” title that is thrust upon her here. Anyway, Hart continues to drool over Milani for a little while, eventually getting comfortable enough to put his arm around her . . . though his advance is ultimately rebuked.

We head to the studio, where ring announcer Johnny C. tells us that the “Wrestlicious trainer” Bootcamp Bailey has asked for a moment of our time. Bailey is a model with no prior wrestling experience. Having watched some of the other models that the company has hired to wrestle last week, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bailey, who has no experience herself, was their legitimate wrestling trainer.

As Bailey enters, they play a snippet of her rap from the Wrestlicious promo video that you’ve all seen by now, which is hilarious because it makes it obvious that a professional voice actor was hired to do the raps instead of having the actual Wrestlicious performers do them. You see, Bailey’s voice on the mic is COMPLETELY different than the one that she has when she’s rapping. The live studio audience, most likely on cue, gives her a fairly large heel reaction. Bailey says the lines “Attention!” and “I’m looking for a few good women!” about twenty-seven times each before finally getting to the point. She asks if anybody in the crowd wants to become one of her trainees, and two plants immediately volunteer. Bailey apparently wants a third, so she points at a woman standing ringside and wearing a headset who Johnny tells us is Tracy the floor manager. For reasons that escape me, Tracy is powerless to refuse Bailey’s demands that she enter the squared circle. Bailey calls the ladies maggots and marches them out of the ring. Again, Tracy doesn’t want to do it, but for some reason she just can’t stop. Well, hopefully this leads somewhere.

Announced for later in this show is ice princess Autumn Frost against webmistress Paige Webb. Webb should be immediately recognizable to most professional wrestling fans these days. You see, the Wrestlicious episodes that are currently airing on television were taped over a year ago. As a result, they were able to sign an independent wrestler by the name of Serena Deeb to a contract before she was picked up by a little company you may have heard of called World Wrestling Entertainment. Deeb, who has since lost both her last name and her hair, is currently on CM Punk’s arm as Serena of the Straight Edge Society.

Milani throws us to a “Wrestlicious Rewind” of last week’s six woman tag team main event. This seemed like pure filler, as the match didn’t set up any angles, nor is it discussed on commentary why this match was so important that we needed to see its highlights again.

As was noted last week, the company will soon be doing a twenty woman battle royale to determine the two wrestlers who will face one another for the right to become the first Wrestlicious Champion. Three more participants for the battle royale are announced: Felony, who we saw last week was indy wrestler Rain; “The Southern Belle,” which is interesting because the woman pictured is NOT Amber O’ Neal, the woman who played Savannah the Southern Belle on last week’s show; and, finally, the Naughty Girl, who is reigning SHIMMER Tag Team Champion Portia Perez made to look like a Catholic schoolgirl.

Now it’s time for a “Country Quickie” with Tyler Texas and her Cousin Cassie. They do a routine called “You Just Might be a Downhome Wrestler,” an obvious knockoff of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might be a Redneck If.” You know, the routine that was popular FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. Anyway, you might be a downhome wrestler if your furniture is made of old turnbuckles or if a comb has more teeth than your opponents. Groundbreaking stuff, here.

The show’s next foray in to comedy is “Are You Smarter Than a Male Wrestler,” a game show spoof hosted by Jimmy Hart with the contestants being Wreslicious’ Glory, who is better known on the indy scene as Christie Ricci. Her opponent, making his Wrestlicious debut, is one half of my current favorite act in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling . . . NASTY BOY BRIAN KNOBBS~! The question for the competitors is in the category of American history: “What happened in 1776?” Hart asks. Knobbs guesses that it is the world’s first beer drinking contest, but Glory corrects him and tells us that it was the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Really? That’s the only thing that happened? Pretty uneventful year.

A brief recap of the Bootcamp Bailey angle from earlier in the show leads in to a skit titled “The Young and the Wrestlers.” Bailey’s three trainees arrive at an unidentified house and run around in it, “oohing” and “ahhing” at beds and hot tubs in an obvious takeoff of television programs like The Real World. Eventually Bailey walks into the shot and yells at them for having fun. That’s the end of it.

Today’s Takedown Spotlight is Lacey Von Erich. Lacey stands on the beach in a bikini for thirty seconds. I wish that there was a more exciting way to recap this, but it’s literally one step above watching a test pattern.

Mafiosa Toni the Top and Autumn Frost are on the steps of the home of Wrestlicious owner JV Rich. Toni tells Autumn to relax and that she’ll “do great.” Rich answers the door and Ms. The Top tells him that Autumn Frost would be perfect for him and that she “belongs on his arm.” Rich’s response is that Frost actually belongs on a leash. Unfunny joke aside, exactly WHAT was Toni the Top trying to do there? Maybe I’m crazy, but it looked like she was attempting to pimp out Autumn to Rich, with Autumn being a fully willing participant and actually getting angry when her prospective john refused her turn of trick.

Before she has an opportunity to wrestle in the evening’s main event, Paige Webb gets a segment in which she answers fans’ e-mails, similar to the old GLOW segment in which wrestler Tiffany would do her own Q&A session. She gets to react in mock disgust as a male fan supposedly e-mails in a picture of his pierced junk. During the entire segment, the e-mail address “[email protected]” is pasted on the screen, so presumably the idea was to get real viewers to e-mail in . . . though I don’t see that happening since every episode of Wrestlicious set to air has already been taped and since, if they actually do get to tape new episodes, it will be without Ms. Webb. (Though I wouldn’t put it past them to hire a new wrestler, give her the exact same name and gimmick, and never acknowledge the change, similar to Darren on Bewitched.)

You can vote for the name of the battle royale that will determine the first Wrestlicious champion http://www.wrestlicious.com.

Match Numero Uno: Paige Webb vs. Autumn Frost

We’ve already gone through Paige’s true identity in this column, and, those of you who read last week’s write-up know that Autumn Frost is in reality “Girl Dynamite” Jennifer Blake, an Ontario based indy wrestler who has come through the States for SHIMMER and who has also gotten to appear the big leagues of lucha libre when Mexican company AAA was making a push to bring through American women. Her entire Wrestlicious gimmick appears to be that it snows when she walks down to the ring and that she is from Alaska. Hopefully she studied up by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s epic performance of a similar character in the classic film Batman and Robin.

The sexual innuendo on commentary goes to a new level in this match, as the announcer tells us that Pagie is turning his “floppy disc” into a “hard drive” and describes Autumn ambushing her opponent at the bell as “giving it to her from behind.” Webb gets rammed into the turnbuckle and has her face run across the top rope, though Paige responds with a full nelson. Frost tries to escape with a wheelbarrow type hold, but Paige manages to clamp the full nelson back on. Eventually the ice princess does get a rope break and slaps on a full nelson of her own, but Paige does succeed in doing the wheelbarrow counter that Frost failed at earlier. She turns that into an armbar but Frost breaks by raking the eyes. Paige is undeterred, though, coming back with a monkey flip and some punches that cause Autumn to bail and take a breather on the outside. When Frost returns to the ring, Webb charges at her, though the Alaskan is ready for it and gives her a drop toehold that sends her throat-first into the bottom rope. That gives Autumn Frost the advantage for quite some time with generic offense like forearms, boots, and back rakes. Deeb’s comeback starts slow with a sunset flip for two, but Frost is able to retake the advantage by applying a chinlock. Paige fires up as you would expect a babyface to do in that position and armdrags her opponent off of her, then doing the exact same thing two more times when Girl Dynamite attempts to reapply the hold. Frost rolls to the floor again, but this time Webb is more aggressive and follows her out with a baseball slide dropkick. Autumn returns to the ring and is hit with a top rope cross body block, though it only gets two for Paige. Frost leaves the ring again and avoids the baseball slide this time, hitting a forearm and rolling her opponent back in between the ropes. Once there, Paige reverses an Irish whip into the buckle and looks for her second monkey flip, only to have Frost block it and get a rollup with her feet on the ropes to score the tainted three count.

Winner: Autumn Frost

And our final segment is a preview of next week’s show, specifically a tag team match that will pit White Magic and Draculetta (Lacey and Daffney) against Amber Lively and Lacey Von Erich (two of TNA’s three Beautiful People).

Final Thoughts

Last week, my impression of Wrestlicious was that it was essentially a direct copy of GLOW and its spinoff companies, except for the fact that Wrestlicious has decided to sign more legitimate wrestlers than its predecessors, resulting in better in-ring action than we would see in those other promotions. This week was essentially the exact same thing, as the twenty-five minute show consisted of tons of lame skits capped off by a match worked by two talented independent wrestlers who got a decent amount of time and didn’t really have any limitations put on them by their over-the-top Wrestlicious gimmicks. The skits are completely skipp-able, as, at least this week, they weren’t even bad enough to tread upon “so bad that it’s good” territory. The match, however, I found rather interesting. It was a very solid little bout, and it was an interesting one for me to watch because, aside from a few isolated AAA clips, I have never seen Jennifer Blake work as a heel. I would imagine that it might hold similar interest for WWE fans who have not yet seen Serena wrestle and would like to get a preview of what she will be able to do when she goes up against that company’s Divas. The only thing that I considered to be a true negative this week on Wrestlicious was some of the comments on commentary, which, though they were silly last week, started to become outright demeaning and sexist this week. It was only a line here and a line there, but, if it increases much more, I might not be able to take it, especially if it continues to be coupled by themes like the implied prostitution of the Toni-Frost-Rich segment from early in the show.