I'm getting back into Wrestling lately which is something I liked as a kid that I never really kept up with as time marched on. A lot of Industry Insiders and Wrestling Speculators are on the edges of their seats of late ruminating about a development in the Wrestling world... namely they are openly pondering whether the AEW (All Elite Wrestling) is going to make a splash.
They have a lot of good wrestlers, they have good methods of presenting their art to audiences, and apparently have some deep pocket funds to build a budget around. You can't really say this about any Wrestling promotion in recent memory who's not the behemoth industy-leading promotion we all know of.
Everyone is watching AEW, waiting to see if it's just another flash-in-the-pan or if it is on to something....
A Rhodes Legacy of Immense Proportions
I didn't know it was gaining the steam it was until only very recently. If I saw people talking it about on trends on social media ...I just thought it was another independent wrestling thing like the half dozen other ones out there. Then I saw something that blew me away .... big time.
Before I talk about this match, I want it to be known that I'm not a very big fan of extremely pointlessly violent wrestling. I don't understand why an entertainer needs to incur ludicrous amounts of personal human damage and suffering just to make a crowd go "Wowie!" for like 3 seconds. I really don't.
Historically it is the wrestlers who can't make fans go "Oh Wow!" in any other way who turn to needlessly hurting or bleeding all over themselves. A good example would be Captain Lou Albano who I think is a very entertaining man (both as Super Mario and as a Manager) but if you watch old clips of the Captain wrestling in the seventies ... you very quickly realize he was not really a terrific stuntman by any definition. So what did he do? He cut big huge holes in his face and bled all over the ring to make the crowd go "Wow!" which worked too but not in the same way a Bruno Sammartino could do it (by making you root for him to win) or an Andre the Giant could (by being a Human Wonder) or a Tiger Mask could (by being an acrobatic stuntman) ... bleeding all over yourself is a pretty gruesome and exaggerated substitute when you think about it.
Hurting yourself excessively is not interesting to me either. I like guys like Mankind but I think it was guys like him that took hurting yourself to get applause by a crowd a bit too far. You really don't need to jam all your teeth into your nose just to make a crowd happy for a few minutes. You really don't have to go that far, guys. I feel extremely uneasy clapping or cheering people on who are doing this to themselves.
That being said, despite the excessive blood involved, I still will say with 100% honesty that Cody Rhodes vs. Dustin Rhodes at "Double or Nothing" was probably the most emotional match I've ever seen in Wrestling.
They had a few vignettes leading up to it, clips put on their youtube site, of the rift that had arisen between these two... and then the rift culminated in violence at Double or Nothing....
Yes, the blood is pretty uhhhh.... bloody here. But this blood, it's telling you a story. It's the combined blood, sweat, and tears of two once-seperate but now-once-again-whole Brothers, both sons of the American Dream Dusty Rhodes ... their blood and sweat and tears of the once common bond of their Ancestor Dusty ... flowing .... and then Cody tells Dustin that he can't retire yet ... that he can't rest yet ... and with the spirit of the Dream in the AIR ... the common bond of Brotherhood is renewed! Ooooooooh.... it's too much. It's just too much for old me. I need a second, I just need a second to recoup after watching this again.
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Hard times. Hard times. There's always gonna be hard times. I know both of these men have seen Hard Times ... but with enough Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Trust ... they will always dig out of that hole, they will always swim back to the surface and learn to breathe again. There's still going to be Hard Times down the road for not only them but for all of us ... but I know in my heart that we will always find a way ... we will find a way to dig out, n' climb up, n' with nothing more than a deep love and trust in our hearts we can all walk past these Hard Times after Hard Times after HARD TIMES after HARD TIMES!
Now that they are a tag team, a united force, and with the triangulation of The Dream peering down from above ... can this triangulative force... this Tri-Force of a tag team possibly be bested in the squared circle? I'm not sure it can be.
Their next opponents are the Young Bucks, a brash youthful duo who are not to be taken lightly... who's high flyin' acrobatics, dynamic team work, cool outfits, and wicked tag finishers make for one of the most electric combinations in Sport.
Even if the Young Bucks wear the coolest of suits to the ring (which have included Street Fighter regalia and Elvis inspired regalia of late), even if their acrobatic tag maneuvers are both aesthetically awe-inspiring and equally physically devastating ... can they overcome a Tri-Forced Unity of Brotherhood and Ancestry bonded by the blood of previous struggles? I don't know...
.... I guess we'll have to wait for Fight for the Fallen to find out.
Kenny Omega
After being admiringly blown-actually-away by that match above... I started to look into the other athletes on the AEW roster and one that really really stands out is Kenny Omega.
I'm sure this name is severely familiar to wrestling afficiandos and the like ... but I haven't been following the wrestling world for over a good decade and he's not even on in America he's famous from Japan Proresu circles. There's a lot of good things in the Wrestling World in the last decade that are totally foreign and unbeknownst to me, it would seem.
Watching Kenny Omega matches from Japan over the last few weeks, I have to say that this guy is the complete package in Wrestling terms. He's a great stuntman, he has the look for the Wrestling World (that look that makes all the ladies go crazy!), he can be Good or Bad depending on what the situation calls for, he is incredible and synchronized with his cohort in tag team competition, and best of all ... he can do all this without really taking it super seriously ... which is a very unique ability that is usually only reserved to total stalwarts (such as Adam West).
I think along the way a lot of the actors in Wrestling start to forget that there is an inherent silliness to the art of Pro Wrestling and start to take it way too seriously. I think the most fascinating thing to me about Kenny is even though he is really a Complete Package in Wrestling proficiency all-across-the-board he is able to completely just break character and remind the audience that this is entertainment and you don't have to be taking it life-and-deathingly serious.
There's some very silly Kenny Omega matches in Japan. Very silly ones. There's one where he fights a puppet...
Personal Aside
I want to briefly interupt this section and relay to you a personal anecdote that is not related in large to the current section.
I used to make youtube videos with my friends in the day, zombie stuff, and we'd just go to a field and fool around. You start to notice when you make low budget entertainment that you need to be pretty inventive at times. If you're gonna make a short film on $0 dollars of budget ... you start to think of what you can get out of anything around you. You start squeezin' juice from turnips, bruddah.
One of the ideas I had for me and my friends to make fun but incredibly cheap youtube web-a-sodes was an idea called "Fruit Wrestling."
In my exceptional idea, the FWC (Fruit Wrestling Challenge), all we needed was some old matresses, a field, and some fruit from the grocery store. It's not hard to procure wares of this nature, you know? Now get this ... the FRUIT (actual fruits) are the Good Guys and us human actors would play the Bad Guys. We'd make some vignettes with Johnny Banana (an actual inanimate banana) where the banana would be all surrounded by ladies and being all cool ... and then we could film a short promo where one of the human actors would threaten to smash n' peel Johnny B. in the center of the ring! For the match you could have tied the banana to a string and like whipped it around and then it was incumbent upon the human actor to "Sell"* for the banana and LOSE to it.
This idea never came around to fruition, so to speak, but I think, as stupid as it sounds, it would have been funny.
(Note: "Sell" in wrestling means making an opponent's maneuver seem wicked and damaging when they preform it on you.)
Back to Kenny Omega
I was watching a Kenny Omega match in Japan the other day where he "Sold" for a puppet and it's basically what my idea of fruit wrestling was supposed to look like.
Man, Kenny can make a puppet look good in the ring, which is a skill, a skill that should actually be a prerequisite to be a Pro Wrestler. You should learn in wrestling training how to lose to a puppet.... you really should.
Those guys in those wrestling schools, who teach wrestling, should ask their flock of rookies the first day of class, "Yo, when you were a kid and wrestled your pillows in the basement ... were you ever able to LOSE to the pillow or did you just beat it up all the time?"... and any rookie who tells you that they were able to lose to the pillow should be shortlisted as having above-average Wrestling IQ.
You know who I would have LOVED to see wrestle a puppet? Mr. Perfect (Rest in Peace, My Perfect Friend)... Curt Hennig is maybe the best "Seller" of moves I ever saw. Ric Flair and Rick Rude (specifically selling the Atomic Drop in Rude's case) come to mind as well .... but man Mr. Perfect could sell those moves, man.
If you punched Mr. Perfect he was liable to do triple figure-skatin' lutzes all over the place, flop over the top turn buckle, looked dazed and disoriented for the briefest of moments, and then do it all over again. Mr. Perfect vs. A Puppet (or a banana even) could have been a "five star" match as they always say these days. I truly believe Mr. Perfect could have earned five stars losing to a puppet, 100%.
On the contrary, wrestlers who can't "Sell" are missing a valuable skill and have a huge flaw in their act. There's room on a roster for a few "impervious to pain" people ... you have a tag team like Road Warriors, a nut case like Ultimate Warrior, and a literal dead person a la Undertaker ... and that's enough impervious to pain people on a roster at any given time ... like three or four. I get it that if you punch Hawk, Animal, the literally titled ULTIMATE Warrior, and a Dead Person that they won't feel it... but once everyone starts being this character wrestling gets boring pretty fast.
The other thing in Wrestling I don't get in terms of "No Selling" is regional-specific No-Selling ... where people are like ... "Oh I won't lose a wrestling performance in Albuquerque." I see online there is a VAST tonnage of "Screwjob" videos and intense-takes and "shoots" on it ... I, to this day, have no idea why "the Screwjob" thing is a big deal. I don't.
Can you imagine a traveling theater group is going around North America doing "Hamlet" and the guy playing Hamlet's Father's Ghost one day wakes up and says ... "Hey, we're in Tucson! I don't want to die in Tucson! I have uncles here!" ... and he breaks script and doesn't die ... and then none of the other actors know what the heck to do because the play makes no sense now. The other actors are thinking ... "well now what do we do for all those ghost scenes?" ... and the guy's all "I don't care, all I know is I will not die in Tucson! I'll die and be a ghost again next week in Denver!"
Losing is surprisingly one of the biggest skills to accept and learn in wrestling. It's a performance, it's the emotion, the story, the acrobatic wicked moves, the colorful managers at ring side that make it what it is ... not if you win or lose... really. It's very different from say football or baseball where winning is everything. The storytelling in wrestling is more important than who actually wins or loses.
Kenny Omega can do it all ... and on top of all his talent he is still able to let a puppet beat him up. Someone get this man some kind of award. I was reading this guy plays Earthbound (History's greatest-most video game) once a year. That's cool. A lot of his moves are video gamed themed too. I dunno, man, this guy gets it. He really does. He gets it.
Kenny Omega is cooooooool. He's a very valuable asset on a Wrestlin' Wroster.
Conclusion
I'm weighing in with the opinion that the AEW is onto something and a lot of old fans are gonna get behind it and new fans too.
I don't think it is a gonna flash up for a few months and fizzle out. I think due to some of the financial security of the investors, the interesting personalities on the roster, and the brief glimpses of what it is going to be... that it is probably gonna have some lasting potential. When they start airing their TV show on old-school broadcasting I think it will tame down and add more reality-show elements but will still be good.
One thing I wanted to mention but forgot to is that the Updated 2019 version of Dusty Rhodes and Sweet Sapphire is about I'd say 10 million more times sexier than the 80s version. Brandi Rhodes and Cody Rhodes are going to produce some incredibly good-looking offspring if they mate, my word, and by gawd, are they ever. They're a real life couple, right? I don't think they are like a kayfabe-couple ... I think they are a real-life couple.
I also think the competition is going to be a GOOD thing for the wrestling industry. I think we'll see some interesting developments in the wrestling world in general due to the initial hype of AEW.
I still want to make Fruit Wrestling Challenge which despite how dumb it sounds on paper it is actually very smart and good. How it plays out in my head is pretty cool. The things the human heels do to poor poor "Precise" Paul Pumpkin is virtually in the realm of the atrocious ... seeds and guts EVERYWHERE ... wait a pumpkin isn't even a fruit ... nevermind.
This article was pretty short ... I might do two this month.
