WWE WrestleMania 36, Sun Apr 5th & Mon April 6th, 9am AEST (via tape delay magic)

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Filthy Sanchez

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Having had time to digest it and get out of the house for a bit I've got some more thoughts to add on the show.

Charlotte and Ripley had the best match and it wasn't even close. I would've accepted the finish if the commentators sold it like a ref * up (btw the commentary over the two nights was abysmal)

Zayn vs Brian was a good match but I'm not sure it was Mania worthy.

It wasn't clear what the feud for the Owens Rollins match was about. Amazing Wrestlemania spot from Owens made it a pretty good match.

Everything else was horseshit. With especially shitty mentions to:

- Defending the tag titles between singles competitors with zero storyline explanation. Not enough s**t is being given to this.
- Just randomly putting a new challenger to face your world title, without any storyline explanation
- Having two coronation moments occur on this night. I don't think I'll ever be able to take Strowman or McIntyre seriously as champions, the circumstances they won the title will always usurp them.
- Presenting completely fake movies instead of matches. I want to watch wrestling, not fake action movies. You can enjoy this if you like, but it's not wrestling and it doesn't belong here. Nobody believed any of it for a second.

If at any point you say 'they did the best with what they could do' you're lying to yourself. The solution was to not put on any show. Literally doing nothing would have been an improvement on this.

I'm also concerned about the praise for the movie style matches. If that becomes as normalised as spotfest wrestling then I'm not even going to try to watch wrestling on a part-time basis.
 
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You think Braun and Goldberg are the two guys to get a long match out of? WWE trying to get 20 minutes out of Goldberg is what killed his original run in WWE, and Braun isn't much better. Lesnar could go longer but these days probably only with guys who can really work (Styles, Bryan, etc.). Essentially when you have old part timers carrying the belts, then you can't have them do the long, workrate epics. They've got to be hard-hitting and quick. You'd hope moving forward that they'd take these guys out of the title pictures so you can get those long main events through capable workers; however, you won't be getting wrestling classics from Braun either.

I don't disagree with these points, but surely by now there is a new formula that could work? It worked twice with two Brock/Goldberg matches and honestly hasn't gone close to working since.

Would it have been so difficult to give Brock/Drew 8 minutes instead of 4, and maybe have Brock F-5 Drew through the announce table? Brock comes back before the 10 count and F-5's him on the table remnants. Throws him back in the ring, plays with him and taunts him for a minute, goes for another F-5 but it's counted into a Claymore. Have them slowly both get up and have Drew the two claymores the way he did in the actual match to ultimately win it.
Drew copped a beating and still won clean. Brock only looks weak because of his own arrogance.
 

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I don't disagree with these points, but surely by now there is a new formula that could work? It worked twice with two Brock/Goldberg matches and honestly hasn't gone close to working since.

Would it have been so difficult to give Brock/Drew 8 minutes instead of 4, and maybe have Brock F-5 Drew through the announce table? Brock comes back before the 10 count and F-5's him on the table remnants. Throws him back in the ring, plays with him and taunts him for a minute, goes for another F-5 but it's counted into a Claymore. Have them slowly both get up and have Drew the two claymores the way he did in the actual match to ultimately win it.
Drew copped a beating and still won clean. Brock only looks weak because of his own arrogance.

I thought they might have done a spot where Brock goes for the F5 but Drew lands on his feet, then hits the Claymore. Maybe it's easier in theory than in execution, since Drew is quite lanky.
 

offtherails9

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Ok yeah the Cena Wyatt thing was awesome. Great stuff. Yeah whatever it wasn't wrestling but I don't care. Great great stuff. One of the more captivating, real and interesting things I've seen on WWE TV since I returned to watching and probably more on top of that. If you want a nitpick I wish Cena tried a bit more with the rapper gear rather than last years WM gear.

Edge/Orton - average. Far far too long. As someone else said they were just banging each other into doors lol. Boring.

Can't expect much else from Lesnar and McIntrye, was what it was.
 
Watching now

*en awesome boost for Rhea to get a win ov..
giphy.gif



Just got Asuka'd :mad:
 
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Not as good as night one, but overall that was far better than it had any right to be.

- Drew/Brock should have got 5-10 of the minutes allotted to Edge/Orton, but if Brock's back in prime IDGAF mode you can understand where they're coming from keeping it short.
- Rhea/Charlotte probably match of (both the) nights.
- Firefly Fun House not quite as good as the Boneyard, but still a lot of fun. Let Bray get back a bit of his heat they've sucked away through bad booking and meant we (thankfully) avoided the weird spectacle of no crowd Cena.
 

offtherails9

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Reddit post and yeah whatever most of them are idiots but I like this post

I've been watching WWF/E since 1996, and I say with complete sincerity that this was the most entertaining non-wrestling segment in at least the history of my viewership.
One of my biggest complaints about modern WWE is the way that it feels like a product actively discouraging dedicated fandom. Nothing leads to anything more than 3 months out, characters have no consistency, history has almost no bearing on the storytelling.
This match/segment/whatever was the complete inverse. Every step was a love letter to people who've spent years of their life invested in this bullshit. It was a kayfabe feud, it was a surrealist retrospective on the modern history of post-territory pro-wrestling, it was a 4th wall-breaking comedy bit to pop the smart fans. You could engage with it in a multitude of ways, and all of them were entertaining.
The most fun I've had watching WWE programming in many, many years.
 

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offtherails9

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I'm just so surprised that Vince actually went for that. Find that so interesting. I don't even mean the Vince character in the FFH. I just mean everything else. Meta as all hell.

It does open the book for a different Cena now, possibly a heel. Which would be nice.
 

Filthy Sanchez

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Reddit post and yeah whatever most of them are idiots but I like this post

The barometer for whether wrestling is good or not is whether somebody who’s never watched wrestling can see it, make sense of it, and understand why people would care about it.

Just catering to smart wrestling fans has killed the WWE fan base. I don’t see how you could engage with it in a multitude of ways. It was a few comical digs at WWE creative and the John Cena character.

Even going by that fans’ criteria, this won’t matter three months later, the characters had no consistency, the only thing you could say is that history had an impact on the storytelling.

This was objectively bad wrestling because you didn’t believe any of it was real.
 
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apparently when they release this on DVD/Blu-Ray, they're only releasing the DVD version in Australia (as was the case last year)

But in the UK, they're re-releasing WM 15, 17, 18 & 19 on DVD with original music.

Perfect! 18 is the only DVD missing from my collection which starts at 11 I think. Got 18 on VHS though :p UK Blu rays work here don't they?

17 was the first wrestling DVD I ever bought I reckon, I remember it being on special for like $10 and everyone at school was buying it!

People still buy wrestling DVD's??

As someone currently stuck without internet due to the Covid-19, I'm glad I have DVDs to watch! Watched Mania but reluctant to do too much streaming on just my phones hotspot.
 
Perfect! 18 is the only DVD missing from my collection which starts at 11 I think. Got 18 on VHS though :p UK Blu rays work here don't they?

17 was the first wrestling DVD I ever bought I reckon, I remember it being on special for like $10 and everyone at school was buying it!

different region (UK is 2, Aust is 4), but most DVD players are region free?

yes, I bought WM17 DVD for $10 too. :thumbsu:
 

nobbyiscool

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The firefly funhouse match was the best, most creative and most artistic thing they've ever done. I had no idea they had the courage, and I had no idea they had the know how to do it so well.

This was so deep and so intricate - Cena's history, the crowd boos, the willingness to accept the darkside in their match 6 years ago, the allusion to Hogan. There was so many layers to this that start with the pre-match video, through Bray's monologue, through to the end.

Ultimately I think Cena let him in, and he paid for it. I loved this so much.
 

Bomberboyokay

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The barometer for whether wrestling is good or not is whether somebody who’s never watched wrestling can see it, make sense of it, and understand why people would care about it.

Just catering to smart wrestling fans has killed the WWE fan base. I don’t see how you could engage with it in a multitude of ways. It was a few comical digs at WWE creative and the John Cena character.

Even going by that fans’ criteria, this won’t matter three months later, the characters had no consistency, the only thing you could say is that history had an impact on the storytelling.

This was objectively bad wrestling because you didn’t believe any of it was real.

Bearded fat guy nerd ownership culture is a consequence of WWE pushing everyone else away from 2008 onward.
 

offtherails9

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The barometer for whether wrestling is good or not is whether somebody who’s never watched wrestling can see it, make sense of it, and understand why people would care about it.

Just catering to smart wrestling fans has killed the WWE fan base. I don’t see how you could engage with it in a multitude of ways. It was a few comical digs at WWE creative and the John Cena character.

Even going by that fans’ criteria, this won’t matter three months later, the characters had no consistency, the only thing you could say is that history had an impact on the storytelling.

This was objectively bad wrestling because you didn’t believe any of it was real.
Who says that’s the barometer? And do you know anyone who doesn’t watch wrestling that saw it? What did they think.
Catering to the smart fans hasn’t killed the WWE base at all, catering to tell them what they want instead of listening to what they actually want is what killed the fan base.
It was the most creative and different thing we’ve ever seen in WWE, let alone on a wrestlemania show. Of course it wasn’t real, none of it is! But I was actually lost for 20 Minutes suspending my disbelief because it was interesting
 

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