Sunday!
Okay, the Wikipedia Page has ELEVEN(!) matches set up for WrestleMania.
That’s kind of not perfectly accurate, though. Three of the matches are part of the pre-show. Kalisto vs. Ryback for the US belt, a Ten-Woman Divas Match (sigh), and the Dudleyz vs. the Usos. Of those three, I find myself wishing that they’d put Kalisto vs. Ryback on the main card and move, oh, the 20 man Battle Royale down to warm up the audience.
I suppose I understand why they did what they did… but the storyline for Kalisto and Ryback actually, you know, *EXISTS*.
Anyway, we’ve got eight matches to look forward to (in pretty much the order I’m looking forward to them):
The aforementioned Battle Royale.
The New Day (Big E, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods) vs. The League of Nations (Sheamus, Alberto Del Rio, Rusev and King Barrett).
Charlotte (with Ric Flair) vs. Becky Lynch vs. Sasha Banks.
AJ Styles vs. Chris Jericho.
Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn vs. Dolph Ziggler vs. Zack Ryder vs. Sin Cara vs. The Miz vs. Stardust in a ladder match for the IC belt.
Shane McMahon vs. The Undertaker.
And:
Dean Ambrose vs. Brock Lesnar (with Paul Heyman).
Wait, Roman Reigns has a match too. Against HHH or somebody. That one will probably close out the show, now that I think about it.
Of those, let’s make predictions.
They’re going to try to push two or three storylines with the Battle Royale but they won’t really stick the landing with any of them. We’ll see tension between tag team partners, tension between stables, and tension between Goldust and R-Truth. I have no idea who will win. “Someone who has not yet been announced” is my best guess but I can’t imagine they’d have “winning a match at WrestleMania” be the start of a storyline. They’ll just throw this match out there and then forget about it 3 minutes after it’s over.
New Day is wonderful comic relief and can cut promos like nobody’s business. The League of Nations are bullies who get booed out of the building. Aren’t they both heel stables? Have I been taking crazy pills? The League of Nations wins because they cheat and they’re evil. This will set up a nonsensical rematch at Payback.
Charlotte is lightning in a bottle. She has Ric Flair explaining to her “here’s how you get the audience to *HATE* you… if it’s 1987.” The women’s division is also turning into “remember what matches looked like in 1987? Let’s do that…” and turning the weekly women’s match from “get up for a snack” material to “holy cow, I can’t believe that this is a good match” material. Pity it’s a triple threat match. Charlotte with the win.
AJ Styles, welcome to the WWE. As part of your initiation, we’re going to shackle you with a storyline that nobody likes. The upside is that you get to beat Chris Jericho at WrestleMania.
The ladder match will have chills, thrills, and spills. We’re going to see a lot of dangerous spots, a lot of no-selling, a lot of 4 of these guys disappearing for a minute at a time and cycling through them with KO winning his belt at KOMania.
The Undertaker will kill Shane McMahon. It’s great to see Shane again (which surprises no one more than me) and I can’t believe that they’ve done this good a job hyping up this match and I really, really would have rather seen Undertaker vs. Sting… but what can you do? Poor Shane.
This Brock vs. Dean thing has me honestly scratching my head. Are they going to set up a Rock/Paper/Scissors where Brock beat Undertaker at WrestleMania and now it’s Brock’s turn to start putting over new talent? It’s a great idea!!! I just don’t know that Dean Ambrose would be my first choice for the guy who gets a win over Brock. Who is my first choice, you ask? I don’t know the answer to that either. It wouldn’t be Dean, though. That said, I think he just might pull it out. I can’t believe I’m picking Ambrose here.
And that’s it. It looks like a solid show.
Oh, yeah, Reigns. Reigns will probably win. He’ll do that “cock the forearm before the Superman Punch thing” and it’ll suck. But, maybe, they’ll turn him heel for real… and let the audience boo him out of the building and officially give him the work version of the shoot storyline that they lampshaded with Seth Rollins.
All in all, this is my own personal Superbowl and, if you’re a ‘rasslin’ fan, I hope you put your hopes and picks down below.
If you’re not, well… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
Reading: two Russell Hoban books, Riddley Walker (for me) and The Mouse and His Child with The Boy. So far I love RW and am not far enough into Mouse to say. Recently finished Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records and it was good, nostalgia-inducing, and a little depressing at the end.Report
Ridley Walker is awesome, good fun. If I may make a suggestion, I would follow it up with Pavane .Report
I couldn’t agree more. Pavane is amazing.Report
What is it about Australia that makes them so obsessed with post-apocalyptic worlds? Is it the fact that the bulk of their lonely island’s land mass is a post-apocalyptic world? Or is it the spiders and snakes?
I’m going with spiders and snakes.
Took a trip to the big used bookstore in the neighborhood yesterday, and in addition to some boring stuff for me, we picked up one kids book and one more serious sciencey (though stl with pictures) book on volcanoes, because the teenager’s little brother is obsessed with them. At this rate, I’m just gonna have to devote an entire shelf to vulcanology. On a related note, I know a lot about volcanoes now. And his ability to name famous ones, including pronouncing the name of the one in Iceland that no American can pronounce (this despite a language delay that still causes him to get frustrated occasionally trying to pronounce ordinary English words), is impressive.Report
? Hoban was American-born, and lived in England; RW is set in England. It was a big influence on Mad Max though (as well as, IMO, The Road and one section of Cloud Atlas).Report
Ah, I looked it up and thought it said Australia. Maybe it was just set there? Or maybe I need more coffee.Report
No, as I said it’s set in England. The first para of the wiki says it won an Aussie award, maybe that’s where you are getting it (and, as I said, the Mad Max universe borrowed some stuff from it).Report
That must be it. Clearly the answer is more coffee.Report
“I enjoyed Mad Max very much.”
“Moi aussi.”Report
I’m sorry, I don’t speak Australiash.Report
@glyph Riddley Walker has long tempted me. How does it read, given the language? I’ve seen it compared to A Clockwork Orange, which I had to read twice, once to learn the language, then again for comprehension.Report
I’m still getting used to it. Sometimes it helps to read it out loud, since the point is that it’s sort of a “devolved” dialect; but then of course I look like someone who can’t read without moving their lips. But despite (or maybe because of) that, some of the concepts hit really hard – the worldview or cosmology of the characters is very interesting/complex, and I think a little profound.Report
Back to reading Alamut, which is a mindful of book. Not difficult (it was only translated into english in the early 2000’s), just presenting a world that is almost impossible to imagine, and while it was originally writen in response to Mussollins black shirts, it was translated in response to 9/11, as it specifically is about the original assassins of the Old Man On the Mountain. Very good.
Also reading some Alistair MacLean, Where Eagles Dare for something lite to back up the other book. Great fun.Report
Where Eagles Dare is indeed great fun. It was also my favorite of all the McLean movies, even more than Navarone.Report
I just picked up Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which is 20 years old, but I only became aware of because there’s a sequel of sorts in GRRM’s anthology Rogues (which I got because it contains one of his Westeros short stories.) Anyway, it’s great fun; I find myself reading slowly so that it lasts.
My daughter took me to see this last night. Again, an old one I’d never heard of (he’s been doing Groucho for 30 years). A lot of fun — he alternates stories and bits from the movies with going into the audience and doing You Bet Your Life-style insults.Report
Neverwhere always makes me think: Where does the original version of the opposite-but-bonded twin assassins archetype originate? The first instance I can think of is Mr Windt and Mr. Kidd from Diamonds are forever, but are there others before them?Report
That’s a great question. It’s become a trope, all right, and it goes beyond opposite: specifically, one is scary because he’s dumb and violent, the other because he’s smart and sadistic.. (Real-life example: Uday and Qusay Hussein,)Report
Watched the OJ Simpson FX series this week when I was sick for a couple of days. It was suprisingly good. Some wink wink nod nod stuff to the audience (esp w the Kardashians) but also interesting stuff to say about racism – and even more interesting stuff to say about sexism, as the racial subtext is of course what made the story famous in the 1st place.Report
Planning to revive the Mindless Diversions Listening Parties, in a new and improved form (better/simpler/stabler interface). I may use this thread to ask a couple of you guys (and gals!) to pop over to it, so we can get things set up the way we like. Another nice thing is, we can leave it “always on”, and pop in and out as we like (so we aren’t limited to my schedule), and I don’t think there’s any user limit (not that we ever hit the limit anyway). Stay tuned.Report
Awesome news!Report
@slade-the-leveller – you around this AM?Report
In addition to reading children’s books and discursive guides to Paris, I have now mixed things up a bit by… reading a book about a children’s illustrator. Yeah, I’m really in a mode here :D.
Watching – finished the best of Mr. Rogers, now watching Game of Thrones season 5.Report
finished the best of Mr. Rogers, now watching Game of Thrones season 5
No risk of cognitive whiplash there 🙂Report
“Can you say “flayed alive? Sure you can.”Report
One upside of containing multitudes, I guess :P.Report
I am reading Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shaffer and the history of the British Gentry that Lee mentioned on some thread this week.Report
Halfway through Wrestlemania, and so far Jay has not hit with a single one of his predictions. Just presently, there has been a lot of yelling, “I UNDERSTAND NOTHING!!!!” at the screen.Report
How is that even possible? I have a friend who loves this stuff, and he always claimed it was the only sport that couldn’t be fixed, since everyone knew the outcome ahead of time.Report
Starting with the women’s match, my predictions started being right.
But Zach Ryder? That came out of nowhere. Once we all closed our mouths, we cheered and cheered loudly.
Chris Jericho won as a message to AJ that he’d best not get a big head. (One of our group thought that their match was match of the night.)
Oh, I guess my prediction for League of Nations was technically correct, but I should have guessed that the finish would involve burying modern talent for the sake of getting a cheap pop for late 90’s talent.
I was the only one in our group who enjoyed the Brock Lesnar match. While I enjoyed that Brock won, I kind of wonder who they’re finally going to have beat him. I hope it’s not Reigns. I hope it’s not Reigns. I hope it’s not Reigns.
Charlotte was awesome. That match was awesome. That match was my pick for match of the night.
Undertaker/Shane had no right to be as good as it was, my main complaint with it was that we had already seen that match a couple matches prior when Dean Ambrose played the Shane role and Brock Lesnar played the Undertaker role in a no-holds barred match that told the exact same story. Another guy in the group said that that match was his pick for match of the night.
The Battle Royale match told no interesting stories apart from Shaq/Show. It could have told them… but it didn’t.
The Rock killed Rowan. A funny story, when my friend’s son was around 4ish, I had to cancel Monday night wrestling one evening and my friend and his son were watching it together. The son asked “is Jaybird coming over?” and my buddy said “Nah, he couldn’t make it tonight.” Rowan came out and the son said “Oh, Jaybird couldn’t make it because he’s wrestling tonight.” Since then, we’ve referred to Rowan as Jaybird.
Poor, poor Jaybird. We jobbed out yet another current talent for a 90’s guy.
Reigns got booed out of the building. They had to turn the mics down and then turn them *OFF*. That poor, poor man winning the main event at WrestleMania and then… everyone hating him.
I booed him too, of course. But I pitied him as I booed him.
Anyway, we had three different matches qualify as “match of the night” for three different people and everybody had a point. I’d say that out of all of the matches, five were pretty good, three (New Day, Battle Royale, Rock) accomplished what they had hoped to accomplish, and only the Reigns match failed to hit its mark (and that wasn’t even Roman’s fault, really).
All in all: a quality show. Not the best one ever, but everybody went home happy.Report
I thought this Wrestlemania was kind of strange, though some things made more sense the next night. Overall, I felt a lot of the feuds lacked a payoff to make it worthwhile.
Undertaker/Shane? Sure, Shane cannot beat Undertaker at Wrestlemania, but surely they would not hype up the regime change just to have him lose. There will be some sort of shenanigans and Shane still ends up in control. Nope, Shane dies for our sins, but The Authority remain in control.
Ambrose/Lesnar? Of course Ambrose is not going to beat Brock, but he should at least be able do some damage to the Beast with the weapons available. Surely he will keep coming back until Brock nearly kills him. Wrong! Ambrose looks ineffectual. Brock wins. No real point to the match.
HHH/Reigns? Reigns has been getting booed and HHH has been getting cheered for weeks. Surely there is some surprise here. Reigns heel turn. Unexpected interference. Something other than Reigns beats HHH clean without a twise. Wrong! Reigns gets the title and gets booed out of the building. Nothing interesting happens.
There were some bright spots. I was happy to see the Diva’s title retired, and the new belt looks nice. I was happy to see Baron Corbin win the Battle Royale. It has been good to follow his development over the past year or so in NXT (he used to really suck). I hated that they got me to cheer for the jerk. I was glad to see Ryder have his Wrestlemania moment (though my fears were confirmed last night on RAW).
Overall, I had a good time, and I enjoyed the show, but some of the booking left me scratching my head.Report
…but some of the booking left me scratching my head.
I gave up on the WWE a couple of years ago after coming to the conclusion that none of the booking made any sense any more.Report
Imagine it being 1985. Hulk Hogan wins a match against Nikolai Volkov.
Then Superstar Billy Graham, Pedro Morales, and Bruno Sammartino come out and beat up Hulk.
On one level, yeah, it’s good to see the Superstar, Pedro Morales and Bruno Sammartino.
On another… what?Report
I UNDERSTOOD NOTHING!!!Report
We had an absolutely gorgeous day here in Chicago, so after church, and a bit of messing around, my wife and I went for a stroll through a local sculpture park.
Currently reading Avenue of Mysteries, John Irving’s latest. It’s a bit of a slog. Also reading Complicated Game, a collection of interviews with Andy Partridge of XTC about his song writing process.
Currently watching Season 4 of House of Cards and of Arrested Development. HoC is as engrossing as ever, and the Netflix ADs are, at least in my opinion, just as good as the Fox episodes. The Bluths could give the Underwoods a run for their money in the despicable character contest.
Also, awaiting with bated breath for the announcement of the Leaguefest dates.Report