That Was Then, Is This Too? 03.09.10: Wrestlicious Retrospective

Welcome to yet another installment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. As usual, we have comments:

Batista eliminated Michaels at the Royal Rumble. Not Orton.

Posted By: Guest#2847 (Guest) on March 02, 2010 at 12:20 PM

Ah, my bad. I was working from memory here, and should have double checked.

Michaels will this year. Then the Undertaker will retire. Without the streak, his character is DONE! I truly believe wrestlemania is Taker’s last match. It adds more heat that they have SHAWN put his career on the line. That’s why I believe Taker had this last World title reign and why they’re having this rematch. Shawn is someone Taker truly respects backstage so he is the only one fitting to give him to that last great match. Remember at Wrestlemania 19 no one knew that was Austin’s last match. I personally like things better this way. Shawn ends the streak and Taker’s career. My opinion and I’m stickin to it

Posted By: wwefan (Guest) on March 02, 2010 at 04:51 PM

HBK won’t be remembered for his World title reigns (the last two were extremely short anyway). He won’t be remembered for consistently putting on great matches ever since he reached the main event.

He’ll be remembered for this: ending the streak. HBK wins and cements his status as a legend.

Posted By: The Shat is Cookin (Guest) on March 03, 2010 at 09:10 AM

Well, if one thing would permanently cement Shawn’s status as the one and only Mister WrestleMania, it would be ending Undertaker’s streak. However, I don’t know if I can agree with the statement that Undertaker is nothing without his WrestleMania streak. After all, the streak didn’t really matter until WrestleMania X-Seven, and even without being unbeaten at WrestleMania the Undertaker is still one of the most unique and entertaining personalities to ever set foot in a WWE ring.

It will be a controversial draw. Undertaker keeps his streak, Michaels keeps his career going

Posted By: Poindexter (Guest) on March 02, 2010 at 09:58 PM

If there’s one thing I would put money on, it’s that this match will not end in a draw. WWE is smart enough to put proper finishes on their big matches, and give the fans a payoff at the right time.

HBK won’t be remembered for his World title reigns (the last two were extremely short anyway). He won’t be remembered for consistently putting on great matches ever since he reached the main event.

He’ll be remembered for this: ending the streak. HBK wins and cements his status as a legend.

Posted By: The Shat is Cookin (Guest) on March 03, 2010 at 09:10 AM

Well, if one thing would permanently cement Shawn’s status as the one and only Mister WrestleMania, it would be ending Undertaker’s streak.

I honestly don’t know who will win this one now and that’s what makes it more exicting than any match that has been on at Wrestlemania in fuking years. This deserves the main event spot in my opinion. Also don’t ever remember hearing of Undertaker’s respect for Shawn if anything I always thought Taker didn’t like Shawn as by all accounts he was an asshole.

Posted By: MoMoney1985 (Guest) on March 03, 2010 at 11:32 AM

Exactly. When push comes to shove, WWE can still book a match that will make people want to pay money. By adding the stipulation of Shawn’s career being on the line, they’ve managed to create a situation where this match, despite appearing on WrestleMania just last year, is interesting all over again.

That leads us to Banner 2.0!

At the end of 2009, I took out two weeks to review the articles I had written in that year, taking a look back at the predictions I had made and seeing to what extent I was right. One problem I ran into was that Wrestlicious, which I wrote an article about roughly five months ago, still hadn’t aired. At that point, it had been over half a year since the first teaser had appeared on Youtube, and the show was, by all reports, ready to go on the air, needing only a timeslot. The first episode finally aired on Monday, March first, and 411mania’s own Ryan Byers had the honor of reviewing it, the result of which can be read here. Since we’ve finally gotten a chance to watch the first episode, I’ve decided to abandon my usual format this week to take an extended look at Wrestlicious. The show’s Canadian outlet, Bite TV, was kind enough to air the first episode online, and it can be watched here. I strongly suggest you all watch it, as no review could probably do the insanity justice.

The tone is immediately set in the very first segment, as Jimmy Hart complaining about washing dishes and cleaning the pool of Jay Vargas. One of the girls volunteers but gets stopped by a rent-a-cop, something which wouldn’t actually make sense until later in the show. We cut away to the show’s intro, which is essentially a montage of the various character raps that have been floating around Youtube for over a year. After the opening we’re treated to half a dozen ‘referees’ in hotpants dancing in the ring. The show is apparently sponsored by the Horny Goat Brewing Company. Classy, especially since their motto is “tap that”. From there we go straight to just what this show needs: more comedy. Some producer walks into a locker room, which appears to be occupied by Marley Sebastian (Daizee Haze), Maui, Bootcamp Billy and one of Jimmy’s Angels. The girls leave disgusted, and Kandi Kisses bumps into producer guy. She lets him listen to her new single.

Producer guy: I think you’ll sell millions.
Kandi: Millions of CDs?
Producer guy: No, millions of ear plugs!

A punch to the gut from Kandi puts the producer and the whole segment out of their misery. Candi and her dancers head to the ring to lip-synch what appears to be an old Three Count song. This wouldn’t surprise me, as Jimmy Hart was pretty much completely responsible for that whole gimmick up to the point where Tank Abbott was added. Eventually Kandi’s dancers give up and drag her out of the ring. Something that’s incredibly obvious at this point is that Lizzy Valentine, who wrestles under the Kandi Kisses gimmick, looks nothing like the model that plays her in the sketches.

From there we were treated to a segment called the TakeDown Spotlight, which is apparently supposed to introduce us to new wrestlers. Tonight: “Stone Cold Stunning” Ice Princess Autumn Frost (Jeniffer Blake). All the producers wanted us to know about her is that she apparently looks good in a bikini, frolicking on the beach. I can’t say I disagree. Still, it’s interesting to see Jennifer Blake in Wrestlicious if only because she’s a pretty talented worker that has made a handful of good showings in SHIMMER.

After over eight minutes (on a 22 minute show), we finally had our first match, in which Tony the Top, who mostly wrestles on the west coast. squashed Maui the Island Princess. Unlike Kandi Kisses, Maui does look exactly like the model that plays her in the skits. This means that she’s virtually untrained, which became perfectly obvious the moment she tried to run the ropes. Tony hit Maui with a modified Michinokou Driver for the win in under a minute. Judging from the match, Maui had recieved about two hours of wrestling training in her whole life, which made the bump she took incredibly scary.

From there we went to more sketches. The first one was just incredibly lame, revolving around Cousin Cassey, a doctor and a bad pun based on the word “glasses”. The segment with Bandita however, which involved her joking about rats in her cantina before dancing off while singing La Curaracha, was on a whole new level. Like Maui, the whole thing is just racially insensitive enough to get the show some attention, but not bad enough to alienate a whole demographic. All in all, it seems that they’re definitely keeping the spirit of GLOW alive in these segments.

From there we went to the ring for our main event: a six woman tag match pitting the babyfaces of Tyler Texas, Cousin Cassey and Charlotte the Southern Belle against the heels of Felony, Bandita and Maria Toro. As with Maui earlier, Bandita and Cassey are just models, and therefor suck. They wrestled an incredibly awkward opening sequence, including sloppy lockups, botched hip tosses and almost comically oversold clotheslines. Eventually both women made the tag, and from that point on the match was better by far than anything ever put on in GLOW.

This should be no surprise. After all, Tyler Texas is none other than SHIMMER regular Lorelei Lee, and Felony is played by Rain, who, besides being part of the Minnesota/International Home Wrecking Crew, has also had some exposure on national TV in a brief stint as Ms. Peyton Banks in TNA. The final two women were also SHIMMER workers. Maria Toro is being portrayed by Mercedes Martinez, who is one of the top names in SHIMMER, and Charlotte the Southern Belle is yet another worker who mainly made a name for herself in SHIMMER.

And this is where the Wrestlicious show truly deviates from the standards set by GLOW for the very first time. While the models are still all over the show, it seems that someone has had the bright idea to have the actual work being done by women that can wrestle. The women appearing in Wrestlicious include Daffney (as Draculetta), Lacey von Erich (as herself), Christie Ricci (as Gloria), Daizee Haze (as Marley Sebastian), Lacey (as White Magic) and Ashley Lane (TNA’s Madison Rayne, as Amber Lively). They’ve even hired referee Bryce Remsburg, who appears on pretty much every promotion working out of the east coast, and who, as evidenced by his appearances on CHIKARA’s Podcast-A-Go-Go’s, is comfortable in a speaking role, something that could be quite important in the Wrestlicious format.

Which brings us to the positives of this show. If the main event is any kind of indication, it seems that whoever is in charge of booking this show actually seems to be using the talented wrestlers to carry the in-ring part of the Wrestlicious product, rather than leaving that to the models. If they can keep this up over the next few weeks, I might actually check the show out every week just to watch the wrestling.

As much as we may mock the absolutely horrid comedy and the abyssmal in-ring work from the models, I still have to admit that the first Wrestlicious episode did show a lot of positives. For one thing, they seem to be very clear on who their demographic is, which is more than can be said for most wrestling shows out there. The crowd is incredibly into the action, cheering the faces and booing the heels. Most importantly however, the show is providing a platform for several talented independent women to show their skills to a whole new audience and possibly catch the attention of the big two. Looks are still incredibly important, and women like Amber O’Neal and Lorelei Lee have exactly the look that WWE wants in their divas, and Wrestlicious might be just the spotlight they need to boost their careers in that direction.

Of course there are plenty of negatives too. The comedy is so horrendously bad that I can’t help but wonder if it’s all some sort of elaborate joke. Even worse than the comedy is the commentary team, which seems to treat the whole product as some sort of joke. Of course comedy is a major part of the Wrestlicious product, but judging from the way the commentary team is talking about it, they seem to think the whole wrestling industry is a joke. Finally there’s the problem of the gimmicks, many of which would have been considered cheesy 25 years ago.

In the end however, Wrestlicious isn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. The comedy and gimmicks are horrid, but that was pretty much to be expected. The gimmicks and sketches seem to have been lifted straight from GLOW and WOW. However, the show is worthwhile simply because it’s giving a lot of talented young women a chance to shine. Of course there are still plenty of talentless models running around, but at the same time it seems that whoever is actually booking this whole mess understands that it’s the women with actual wrestling experience that need to do the actual work. The formula seems to be “Come for the eyecandy, stay for the action”, and that could work out surprisingly well in the long run.