Kayfabe! – Guest Booker with Dutch Mantell

KAYFABE!
Guest Booker with Dutch Mantell

Like the previous installments of Guest Booker, this starts off with the standard one-on-one interview between Dutch and Sean Oliver. What separates this from other installments of Guest Booker, like Raven, Cornette, Sapolsky, and Dillon, is that the interview is the majority of the DVD. So, if you’re a big of this DVD series strictly for the fantasy booking and angles and such, then this might not be for you. It’s not as bad as Mike Graham’s GB, where it was 9/10 interview (and 10/10 bullshit) and the booking was just kind of tacked onto the end, I’d say the ratio is about 70/30 for interview to booking.

That’s not to say that this is a bad DVD, because Dutch does have a lot of interesting things to say. He starts off with his philosophy of booking versus writing and what made the old territory days so much better. It’s more or less the usual Jim Cornette rant, only with a lot less colorful language and adjectives. The gist is that booker let the wrestlers do their thing and gave them a little direction, while writers do the whole thing and thus, everyone seems the same. He tells a funny story about some dude going on facebook and saying that bookers shouldn’t give the fans what they *want* but what they need. A few people commented about how deep it was, and Dutch told him that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. He compares it to going to see your favorite band and them deciding that you don’t need to hear your favorite songs, but rather songs from kid shows like Sesame Street.

Sean asks him about favorite angles, and he talks about a time in Georgia when Ole Anderson begged Dusty Rhodes to team with him in the Omni against the Masked Assassins. Gene Anderson was the ref, and during the match Ole turned on him, and the Andersons and Assassins beat Dusty to a pulp (WCW actually did the same thing in ‘94 with Dustin and Arn along with the Stud Stable). Dutch also laments about his extended time in Puerto Rico and how the fans thought it was real. When asked to compare PR to Mid South, Dutch says that Mid South was crazy, but PR was dangerous. Dutch talks about all the money he made back when PR was a hot territory and horrible hotel he stayed at “If they put some money into the place then it’d have been a dump.”

After Dutch’s background, he talks a bit about how he got to TNA and what it was like while he was there. He was booking in PR and was bringing in Jeff Jarrett for big shows, Jarrett pitched the idea to him of starting a company and Dutch told him he was nuts. A while later Jeff asked him to help out and Dutch agreed, because TNA was on Wednesday nights and IWA was only running on Fri, Sat, and Sun. The booking committee meetings were more or less a joke. They’d start at about 9:00 and by 1:00 nothing would be accomplished. The idea was supposed to be that Jarrett was the overview guy, Dutch the wrestling guy, and Russo the writing guy, but they started overlapping one another. Sean tells him about a certain person telling him, on camera, that he was the one that booked all the angles that led to Fire Russo chants. Dutch’s response “Bullshit.” He specifically brings up the Sting/Abyss Last Rites match, which was 100% Russo. He points out that nobody had ever started a Fire Dutch chant while he was booking, but he also wasn’t telling everybody that he was the one booking, and taking credit for, everything.

Dutch gives his take on the whole Russo/Cornette history. He thinks Cornette blamed Russo for him getting booted from WWF creative in 1998. When Russo came back to TNA in 2006 Cornette quit on the spot and Jarrett talked him into staying, Dutch kept an eye on Cornette and Jarrett kept an eye on Russo, for about four months they stayed on opposite sides of the arena at all times, and then were able to be in the same room and talk civilly. When Dutch got released, he gave Cornette two weeks to keep his cool. Cornette got released in Fall 2009 and blamed Russo again. Dutch reads a passage from his book about the situation, detailing Cornette telling him that he wants to outlive Russo, just so he can piss on his grave.

Now it’s time to book! This illustrates one of Dutch’s booking philosophies: work backwards. Instead booking show to show and leading to the PPV, Dutch starts with what he wants for the PPV, and then works backwards so each show has something to build up to it. The main problem Dutch has is that the roster was so huge, there were almost sixty wrestlers on the roster. So his first order of business on 1/4 is to not trot out everyone at once. Even though he’s only booking the 1/4 Impact to the 1/17 PPV, he keeps things in mind for later. He wants to hold off on using Hall and Syxx-Pac for a few months. I found Dutch’s use of Hogan to be really smart (although it’d never happen in reality), Hogan comes in putting over TNA as the future of the business and saying he’s had his time and he’s done. Abyss, who Dutch would put back with Mitchell in November and have him start running roughshod leading up to 1/4, wants Hogan in the ring, but Hogan insists that he’s done in the ring. That goes on until Lockdown, or maybe even Slammiversary, when Hogan finally agrees to fight Abyss. He uses legends like Hogan, Flair, and Foley to help get over younger guys like Styles and Matt Morgan and concentrates on pushing fresher faces in TNA like Hamada, Mr. Anderson and Desmond Wolfe. When asked about Bubba the Love Sponge, Dutch sarcastically says that he’ll just put him on a throne to watch the matches with the camera constantly on him, and then have Awesome Kong knock him out.

The 411: Your mileage varies depending on how much you just want to see Dutch's booking. I personally found this to be quite interesting, Dutch had a lot of good things to say, and is actually pretty funny at times.
Final Score:  8.5   [ Very Good ]