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So, I was there. And I... liked it? It wasn't as good as the first Atlanta Dynamite. That show had the feel and audience buzz of a big time rock show. That crowd was almost feral in it's appreciation of the alternative to WWE. It was also downtown. This was at Gas South, about thirty minutes north of the city proper. It wasn't the same vibe. That arena hosts minor league hockey and some other things, but it isn't the Home of the Hawks. (SPOILERS) The Dark matches were all really fun. I won't spoil too much, but QT Marshall, Jungle Boy and the Varsity Blondes got the biggest reactions for that set of matches. I thought .Ogogo returning is cool, but having him return on Dark reeks of "Kross debuting on Main Event" level of weird. I think Tony Khan is overestimating the level of audience goodwill he is currently being afforded. More on that later (End Spoilers). Punk and Bryan being in the first hour was insanely cool to me. Lee Moriarty is a guy who's real popular in Atlanta, and it was fun to see him in a big spot. Big things in the future for that dude. I saw Alan Angels at a Georgia indy a few years ago, before Dark Order was a thing, and so it was amazing to see him in a big match on Dynamite. I think TK has to start being a little more discerning with his tv matches. Punk and Danielson wrestling is cool, but one of those probably needs to have a bigger name opponent. Adam Page got a huge reaction. I know some people on twitter think he's responsible for AEW's ratings downturn, but he's popular as hell live. Love that dude. Seeing Sting live in 2021 was surreal. The match wasn't fabulous, but it didn't need to be. I will have "Ruby Soho" the song stuck in my head forever. It was super cool to see her live, and she is a STAR. Statlander is a personal favorite, for reasons, and she got a good reaction, but in person Ruby was the star. She seems like a lovely person, and it makes me happy to see her. The Young Bucks running from a beating will never not fill me with joy. When they're allowing themselves to be booked properly, rather than as unstoppable terminators, it's not nearly as annoying. Adam Cole, for reasons that still escape me, is a big time act. He's 5'7 with a head like an Easter Island statue and a body made out of pipe cleaners, but he connects with the audience somehow. Ricky Starks got a really good reaction. The main event was kind of a mess live. The reaction to Cody was very split, but he got some solid pops. I don't understand the choices being made with regard to Andrade and Malakai Black. They gotta get both those guys away from Cody. The booking made little sense to me. You have these two big stars that got away from nXt, and their first order of business is an endless slog with a guy who isn't allowed to wrestle for a title? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Andrade rules. I'd love to see him destroy wimpies on Dark and Dynamite for a couple months and then take the TNT Title from Sammy. He presents as such a big deal. I thought Cody getting that win was pretty counterproductive, but the match was good and Cody will die for our enjoyment in Georgia. I'll say that about him. He is his father's son. I'll wait until Friday to talk about Rampage.

Please prepare your fainting couch before you read this...

Sting is just traumatized from what happened last time he showed up without a tan.

This brings up a point that is damned interesting, to me at least: Going by my experience, fandom in Japan, and pro wrestling fandom in particular, seems to be very very very different indeed from what it is in North America. I'm not any kind of educated expert in Japanese culture, but I've been living here almost 13 years, I have Japanese family, close Japanese friends, Japanese drinking buddies and training partners... I've taught literally dozens and dozens and dozens of high-level conversation students. Before Corona I spent a significant amount of my free time hanging out with pro wrestlers and crazy pro wrestling fans. Everyone who knows me knows I was involved in, and love, pro wrestling. I have had literally hundreds and hundreds of conversations about pro wrestling, and if those conversations involved any kind of judging (and particularly any kind of negativity or shit-talking) then I was talking to another "gaijin" wrestling fan. With Japanese fans, we talk about what we like. if they don't like something, they prefer not to get into it. Which fits in with my general impression of Japanese social life. As far as I can tell, the lion's share of Japanese fandom is about appreciation rather than about judging, ranking, bad-mouthing... A couple of times, I have sat with a Japanese wrestling fan who was proficient in English, or with a student who is really into wrestling, and had them translate wrestling discussion on, like 2chan or something. It's a festival of agreement and positivity. Small sample size, but: Shockingly different from what you might find even here on DVDVR, where people tend to be pretty civil and open-minded but we also enjoy lots of disagreement and trash-talk and complaining about how we don't like stuff. TL/DR: In my experience, Japanese wrestling fans are marks for their favourite wrestling and favourite wrestlers, rather than being marks for their own hipsterish opinions about pro wrestling! You seem to score a lot more social points here by being enthusiastic about a thing rather than by being "sophisticated" or "refined" with regard to how you appreciate it. So, Japanese fans are more into "appreciating" than "judging." Not saying it's better (or worse). It is definitely different.

Oh yeah, that Decapitation was fucking awesome. FTR is so good. No Harwood Brainbuster but the Tiger Driver was pretty choice. So Sammy Guevara is the best wrestler in AEW? Tony Nese looked fucking great. Guevara's selling made that match and I LOVED the half crab with the knee digging into the bad ribs TWICE. I am SO STOKED for Pac vs Malakai Black. So much wrestling. YAY! AEW!

Sammy rules. Nese looked damn good. BUTT MEAT~!!! Dax's tiger driver was a thing of beauty.

Now people are (rightfully) singling out the "Macho Man" section of this tweet, but I think the first part is funnier and even more damning of WWE Creative. "Let's shoot some promos in a graveyard to kill off the music part of this gimmick, you know the part that got you more over than anything else, got you an actual charting EP, took you from being a bit player in NXT to an actual upper-card wrestler on the main shows." "Am I going to be some sort of supernatural character, hence the graveyard?" "No...but we'll figure it out from there. Or not..." Seriously, how do you "script" vignettes in a graveyard without having any sort of endgame to them? Utterly fascinating.

I don't think that we're making a big enough deal about this. Dynamite has supplanted Raw and Smackdown as the most watched wrestling show in Canada.

I really liked Andrade’s street fight outfit tonight. Most guys go for the jeans and T-shirt look but he looked like a Mob boss when they roll up their sleeves and loosen their tie ready to get their own hands dirty.

But it looked awesome.

6:19pm on the east coast and no thread? Did Cody run everybody off? THIS IS RAMPAGE BABY THIS THE SHOW YOU ALL BEEN WAITING ON Jade Cargill “in action” (vs Janai Kai). It does my head in to see Kai on national TV the same way it did to see Lord Crewe on Dark. Last time I saw either was on the Covid PPW tapings in an empty bar. Good for her, she’s awesome! Sammy Guevara vs Tony Nese. Should be good but I don’t love Sammy Sammy Sammy as a babyface. Penta y PAC vs FTR. PAC looks like an angry pirate now! Should be GREAT!

PAC is going full Sander after this

You know what would be real good? FTR vs PAC/Fenix.

True, Impact had Allie stabbed/murdered by Su Yung to write her off when she left for AEW.

They can’t figure out what to do with Elias? Bray’s gone, this shit writes itself.

My prediction is he finally gets a new gimmick, gets promos played saying “coming soon to Raw” for a couple of months. Debuts. Gets purged the night after.

Have fun, read those replies...

How about Arn wakes up in a world overrun by car jackers, but he’s out of ammunition?

I think the GOAT discussion is hard because wrestling is one of the few artforms where everybody kind of does what they do the way they do it. Rey Mysterio and Mick Foley are both all time greats, but for completely and totally different reasons. They aren't even trying to do the same things. They could be in the same match and they put together something great in collaboration, but no one is going to mistake Foley's style with Mysterio's style. So how do you really decide which is better? Liger and Mysterio is a great conversation because they are the kings of their specific weight division, but they are still completely different. If Liger was 20 lbs. heavier he wouldn't have to change anything to be a credible heavyweight. Honestly if he was 200 lbs. heavier his moveset wouldn't even change much. He probably wouldn't have come up with the shooting star press, but he could still Liger bomb and fisherman buster people into oblivion. There really was no limitations to his style. He's pretty much the proverbial 5-tool player, except he was a Jr Heavyweight, so his opportunities were limited. Mysterio could probably adapt, but his entire style is based on the fact that he was 150 lbs. If he was 200 lbs. he would have developed a completely different style. The thing about Mysterio that makes me rank his work so high is that it's a ridiculous level of difficulty. He had to figure out how to do everything with everybody in a way that kept himself and his opponent credible. He can't credibly power bomb anybody on any roster that he's been a part of. He can't trade strikes, he can't throw suplexes, and he is always one big move away from losing. He knows that, and has built an all time great career out of exploiting his limitations. He's kind of a 1 or 2 tool player, who made all his weaknesses into strengths ask the way to the hall of fame.

Doing a Burgess Meredith death angle with Arn would be tasteless and probably wouldn't work in a wrestling context, but you do you.

It's not like we didn't go through a years long exercise with GWE a few years ago, with another one happening in a few years. And you're right, a lot of the discussion wasn't about specific wrestlers but about the criteria and what should be valued most. With my list, the top guys were generally very multifaceted and I liked to see them in a number of different roles because it was about gaining assurance and understanding. To me, there was a cap for people who I couldn't be sure of in certain ways. Here's the post I used to push for Bockwinkel, for instance:

What a moment this was. Kenta Kobashi beating cancer and returning to the ring. Made me cry.

This is an interesting take. I liked the whole show, but as I said: I didn't feel like I needed to see a flaming table spot. It isn't "a Cody thing" for me, in this case, and it certainly wasn't any kind of issue with the technical execution of the spot (though I can see elements of both of those elsewhere in this thread). For me personally, and I'd assume it's true for others, I just don't like seeing pro wrestlers take wildly unnecessary risks for relatively limited pay-offs. It's the same issue I had with the finish to Blood & Guts, and Exploding Ring. Even if the camera angle on Jericho 's cage bump had been perfect, I think I would have enjoyed the match a lot more if it had ended inside the cell. Even if the explosion had been spectacular, I think Mox and Kenny could have put on a great match without it. You know what I mean? I don't think that this is a case of "the younger audience" not liking what you like, considering that I am 56 years old. I just don't like that level of risk taking. I'm worried that someone is really going to get hurt, badly, some day in an AEW match. Also: I've seen Foley take a bump off the cell. I've seen Onita work in an exploding ring. Any attempt to replicate that... is going to look like "an attempt to replicate that." Any attempt to top it is doomed to fail because when you are competing with sacred memories you cannot win. So, I just don't feel like the pay-off can justify the risk. I have no equivalent comparison for flaming tables... What would the apt comparison be, here? My other issue with the spot was a "why now" issue. No pun intended, but Cody vs Andrade did not feel heated enough to justify that spot. Why wouldn't you save something that insane for a blow off to a major blood feud on a PPV? You have answered that question, though. It wasn't a "why now" but rather a "why here"? I hadn't considered the location/Cody's hometown/this is where he did his cage moonsault... So that part of it makes more sense to me now. Thanks! Still, while I love almost everything about AEW, I sure wish they'd go to the Attitude Era Big Stunts well less often. That is a "me thing" though. It's cool that you, and others, mark out for that stuff. AEW gives me loads of wrestling comedy, relatable characters, highly technical wrestling, Japanese guest stars, and on and on that I love but that aren't for everyone. So, I guess it would be churlish of me to complain too much about massive contrived stunt bumps that other people love but aren't my cup of tea.

Garvin was pushed as a killer on tv before he won the title. I mean, all you had to do was look at him Tony, just look at him. Dominating the other man. Tying him up in knots. Just look at him.

I say this as the son of a minister, but I don't think we should take morality advice from religious institutions. I say this as a black person, if you have a moral objection to dancing in any context, I'm just going to assume you're racist. Neither of this general rules has ever steered me wrong.

I'm going to need a never-ending loop of PAC saying "Rey Fenix"

My moment of the night was FTR busting out Demolition's decapitation elbow. Here comes the Dax and here comes the Casher.

We go live to Utah:

Sinister Minister is the best, hahaha.

Not enough taunts

And it was an easy gimmick to swing back and forth from heel to face. Short a face? Have Elias lead crowds in singalongs mocking the heels. Too many faces? Have Elias go back to singing songs in the ring or get interrupted mid-song by a face. It's easy shit that's never going to main event, but always gets the crowd into it one way or the another in the middle of the show when people are starting to sag. Taking away the music gimmick, without a suitable replacement gimmick, just leaves Elias one among many jacked-up, bearded guys with middling ring skills.

Don't you understand that Vince McMahon is a creative genius. He can't seem to come up with anything better than average unless an all time great wrestler is involved, but he's clearly a genius. Ask anybody.

I don't disagree, because you'd have to be insane to, but I just want to say this: I think Andre benefitted tremendously from 1) being able to traverse the territory system and 2) actually being booked like an attraction in said towns. If Andre rose from the dead and walked through the doors of Titan Tower tomorrow, how long until he's dressed like Baby New Year? My point being, an attraction like Andre couldn't happen today with the nature of weekly TV and two big companies, so I don't know if he's so much underrated as he was (rightfully) not over-exposed.

I second Bockwinkel being neat. I bring to the table: Andre the Giant. So good and now underrated.

I'm not a big podcast guy, but there is a suuuuper cathartic, very NSFW clip on YouTube of Conrad Thompson unloading on Bischoff about it that I think you'd enjoy

This made my laugh even though Sting vs. Hogan at Starrcade 1997 royally pisses me off to this day for how it went down. Fuck Hogan and fuck Eric Bischoff for that and that lame ass excuse.

Apparently when Brian Kelley got on the plane down to Baton Rough, somebody handed him an Ipod loaded with Jerry Clower routines and said "Lurrrrn tuh tahhhlllk lahhllk theeuuss". I can't wait for his first postgame press conference. Reporter: Coach Kelley, Max Johnson seemed to be struggling with his reads in the first half. What did tell him to get him settled down? Kelley: I told Maxy, I said 'just throw it in there amongst em. One of em has gots to catch it.' At this rate, by the end of next year he'll be shilling Magic Bait.

It was a blink and you miss it, two week angle. Arn exorcised Cody’s Hollywood demons by burning his pink tie one week and then having him take bumps with trainees the next. This makes it two times now we thought we’d get a Rocky 3 angle out of Cody, only to wrap it up quickly with nothing resembling an interesting story or payoff.

Never gets old.

Imagine if there's a pluderific Malakai Black vs. Cody match. Like on a big theme episode of Dynamite or something. Black does some dork/cool Folk Metal pose. Drinks unrefined pine sap brandy from a marmot skull chalice or something. The lights go out mid-match - for awhile, there's clearly a struggle going on for a bit. Before they go back on, a TABLE in the middle of the RING is set on FIRE. WHAT? DUDE! You HIDE THE DUMB SETUP and highlight the FUCKIN FIRE. Within the DARKNESS, all the crowd can see is a TABLE IGNITE. This generates what is known as a POP. Has this been done? Do this. Lights back on, Cody's on the top rope and Black has him set up for a superplex or something of the sort. If Cody wanted to be a babyface, he'd know the shine goes to the guy who TAKES the bump. So Cody fuckin' takes the bump. One of 'em wins, whatever. But we don't get to have a moment like that, because the first fire spot in AEW was something else entirely, something entirely Cody.

That's not ridiculous at all because as far as legit rookies go he's as close as you can get I guess. He looked impressive, and he also looked like he totally got it and was really having a great fucking time. He's past his time as a top heavyweight fighter in MMA, but if he'd gone into rasslin a decade ago he would have been a huge star. He was in MMA and def made more money doing that, but I'd love to see more of him in AEW I thought he was going to be at Triplemania but the internet is telling me no

Garvin didn't give a shit about anything then making money. It's why he went to WWF after the heel turn. He felt Dusty was cutting him off constantly. Garvin wasn't a belt mark.

Well, CSC, at least that explains your hiatus from XBox game play. You have been working like a slave to pay for that GIGANTIC ROCK~! Congratulations, bro! My interview for the promotion seemed to go really well. Now we play the waiting game. Patience is not my virtue.

I don't really think this is graphic enough that it needs to go in a spoiler, but just in case, for the squeamish. It's a tweet with a picture of Cody's back after the flaming table spot. One of the quote tweets of this is something like "He did this stupid spot for only 861,000 viewers?" and I'm absolutely killing myself laughing. Like, have you seen what some people will do for an audience of 30 plus however many people buy the DVD of the show afterwards?

Cody in the main two straight weeks of down ratings? My boy isn’t as smart to the biz as I thought. Hulk would have taken Thanksgiving eve off, at least. Meanwhile, Jericho has glommed on to another hot act (Eddie) and a trio of fresh faces. Shows you who’s really an old school brother brother and who’s just larping in his suit and tie Flair Starter Kit. But seriously, maybe fans don’t understand Cody’s meta Cena Wins LOL act and are mistaking it for a legit Cena Wins LOL run and don’t care for it. And that’s not the fans’ fault. If your “gimmick” is over everyone’s heads, that’s your fault. “I’m just playing jingo white meat babyface as parody” fails if nobody gets the joke.

I'm not either but I'll check that out. Cheers!