411’s Half-Pint Brawlers Report 06.02.10

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For those of you who are not familiar with this program, Half-Pint Brawlers is a new reality show airing at 11 PM EST on Spike TV featuring the exploits of a group of 4’2″ wrestlers traveling the country and putting on shows wherever they are able.

The show opens with various media clips covering midget wrestling . . . and it’s made very clear that the men involved consider themselves to be “midgets” and not “little people” or whatever the PC term du jour may happen to be. Various members of the HPB troupe are also shown performing various low-risk stunts, and then we go to an opening video package.

Afterwards, we are introduced to HPB promoter and wrestler Puppet. Some of you may remember him from the early days of TNA and its predecessor, the World Wrestling All-Stars series of pay per views. Puppet is in Chicago, and he’s getting ready to take his crew on the road. He wakes up wrestler Beautiful Bobby by dumping a glass of urine on his head and then does a brief montage introducing all of the various wrestlers and average-height announcer Spyder, who long-time indy wrestling fans may remember as “Spyder” Nate Webb from IWA Mid-South, CZW, ROH, and MTV’s ill-fated Wrestling Society X. As far as the short fellows are concerned, We’ve got Bobby (“the ladies man”), Kato (“the veteran”), Mad Mexx (“the immigration sensation”), and Turtle (“the rookie”). In a somewhat disturbing scene, there’s an initiation for Turtle which involves the wrestlers shaving his head . . . and then every other part of his body. Yes, every part. Yes, on camera.

The Brawlers are loaded up into a full-sized van and headed to their first two shows of the year. At a rest stop, they make poor Turtle run around in his underwear screaming “I’m a midget.” Clips of people reacting to . . . something . . . are show, but the editing is so poor it looks like the onlookers were added in post-production instead of actually watching the incident.

We’re back from commercial and on the road in Kansas City, Missouri. The troupe discusses Turtle’s motivations behind becoming a wrestler and torture the miserable bastard more by putting a shock collar on him. Beautiful Bobby in the back seat has a remote, and Turtle gets a low voltage shot to his neck every time a button is pushed. Surely the pay on this show is not that good.

The guys eventually show up at their venue for the evening, and they’ve got a problem in that their wrestling ring won’t fit in the bar at which they’re fighting. As a result, they spend some time “choreographing” (and they use that word) the spots that they’re going to without a ring in the bar.

Now it’s show time, and Puppet says that he wanted to do something that would get people talking about Half-Pint Brawlers again. His idea? He’s going to let the audience members bid on the right to shoot a staple gun into his scrotum. I WISH I was making this up. Anyway, a tatt’ed up twenty-something girl pays ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY DOLLARS to do this, and, of course, it’s shown with a bare minimum of censoring. Note to all of our readers: If you ever have $170.00 and you consider spending it on something that even remotely resembles this, take your money and get as much professional psychiatric help as it will buy you.

Kato and Beautiful Bobby have the first match of the evening, which Puppet is worried about because Bobby has been off the circuit for two years. The match is presented as a highlight reel of big moves, including a trash can lid shot to the head and a rana on the concrete floor. Eventually Bobby gives Kato a splash off of a guardrail and through a card table to get the three count. Unfortunately, when he comes up, it looks like Kato is hurt. Bad. There’s a significant amount of blood splattered across the floor as we go to commercial.

An ad for TNA Impact airs during the break. As lousy as this Half-Pint Brawlers show is, I’d rather watch it than anything involving Hulk Hogan in 2010.

When we return, Puppet calls what he’s seen the worst injury in HPB history and Bobby is crying in the backstage area. We then go to the hospital, where a MASSIVE wound is revealed in Kato’s head. Some wounds are long, some are deep, and some are wide. This one manages to be about as extreme as possible in all three dimensions without exposing bone. In the hotel that evening, Kato tries to convince Puppet that he’s going to wrestle on the next show despite the massive, barely stitched up canyon in the back of his head.

The crew arrives at their next venue, and, yes, it’s another bar. Not surprisingly, there is a stripper’s pole in the bar, which Puppet gets naked and dances on, eventually rubbing his exposed buttocks on the pole. Oh, and he forces poor Turtle to lick the thing once he’s done. I’m already begging for an episode in which the rookie has a massive emotional breakdown and beats the hell out of all of these jackasses.

Now it’s show time in Wichita. Kato is still begging to wrestle, and Puppet eventually relents because Kato promises that he won’t take any “bumps” and he’ll just “work spots.” Insiders, ladies and gentlemen.

We go to the match between Kato and Bobby, which is at least in a wrestling ring tonight. Despite his earlier promise, Kato takes several bumps and a back body drop before Bobby pins him with a frog splash. Fortunately, Kato managed to not hurt himself further . . . so I guess we have a happy ending?

Overall

TNA Impact. Herb Abrams’ UWF. GLOW. Wrestlicious. In my five years writing for this website, I have gotten stuck reviewing some absolutely godawful professional wrestling. This might be a new low, however. The actual wrestling content was kept to the barest of minimums, so this isn’t the show for you to watch if that’s what you’re looking for. However, I don’t necessarily consider that to be a huge negative. After all, reality shows about wrestling which feature very little actual wrestling have managed to be fairly successful and damn entertaining in the past. (WWE Tough Enough immediatley springs to mind.) What makes the show so horrid is what they’ve decided to feature instead of wrestling. It’s a bunch of lowest common denominator bullshit that nobody with an IQ over fifty could actually consider entertaining. The wrestlers involved in the show do at points seem like legitimately cool guys who have a close bond with one another, but that’s not enough to overcome the fact that the ridiculous stunts that they’re doing for the cameras make them seem at other points like emotionally stunted jerks who stopped maturing somewhere in the eighth grade. Jackass was able to get away with that formula and make it somewhat entertaining twelve years ago, but that ship has long since sailed.

I do not see this show lasting long at all.