Dolfan Watches Every Wrestlemania On Lockdown

[Eivion]

20 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

The problem is, even in WWE, known for its house style and similar match layouts, there's still a lot more room to freestyle as a singles guy. And he's not good at anything other than doing all his shit.

So what are Seth's best singles matches in WWE, and are any them designed so he doesn't get all of his shit in? I recall liking the Reigns & Styles matches all, but both guys still worked those matches out so Seth could get all of his shit, just in a sensible way.

[Brian Fowler]

My legit favorite Rollins singles match was with The Miz a couple years ago. Rollibs had to slow down so much that an actual story got told.

[Dolfan in NYC]

Pitbull does a song or two while they set up what's next... 

So, the difference of a motivated Randy Orton and a completely disinterested one is day and fucking night, respectively.  Well, the sun has gone down, and the moon has come up, and long ago, somebody left with the cup...  which unfortunately contained all of Randy's interest. 

Bray Wyatt welcomed Randy Orton into the family. Randy Orton, a snake, betrays Bray Wyatt (turning face) and burns down Bray's house as, I guess, punishment for befriending him?  Look, I don't know.  It's been three years and I really wanted to forget this whole thing happened.  (*It's still happening*)  

Oh, Randy Orton won Royal Rumble '17 and Bray has somehow lucked his way into being WWE Champion at Elimination Chamber.  So this match is for the title.  

It's actually funny to see the SEVERE edit they put into Bray's entrance.  He's at the top of the ramp and I literally think to myself... Oh god if HHH's entrance took forever, Bray slow walking is going to take 10 fucking hours.  But they cut away for a few seconds, and BOOM he's at the bottom.  Poor Bray.  

And oh boy, speaking of slow walkers, Randall is out now.  He does have a quite cool element where the ramp has a snake on it that is following him down to the ring.  I must have been loopy at this point, because when he's about halfway down, he starts screaming for the crowd, and the snake looks like it's screaming "MOVE" to him, and he keeps going.  The animation is  SNES level choppy, so it was clearly done in-house by some unpaid intern... but, points for effort. 

Bray doesn't have a pouty, "I'm jobbing" face on per se, but he doesn't look thrilled right now.  Randy might as well literally be looking at his wrist for an imaginary watch.  

Ooh boy does this match suck.  Wyatt has basically no sustained offense and Randy is all but refusing to tell any kind of story here.  I mean, maybe you can get away with saying Orton's learned all of Bray's tricks and has answers for everything?  

HMM... MAGGOTS ON THE MAT. 

The announcers are acting like they've just seen the most terrifying thing ever. Randy's like, whatever.  

Like the amount that Randy is clearly phoning this in is amazing.  You can literally see him not caring about selling or playing to the crowd or...

WORMS ON THE MAT.

Again, the idiot announcers are aghast.  The crowd is restless because this match is very not good.  Orton is like, Did I leave the oven on?  

Randy and Bray exchange finishers and Bray is shouting out something about being A GOD.  I'm guessing Gozer the Gozerian just asked him a question?   

ROACHES...  

I think Tom Philips has fainted and JBL has changed religions.  The crowd actively laughs.  Randy's so fucking done with this shit, Bray picks him up and promptly gets RKO'ed.  Orton clearly makes a "can you believe this shit" face at someone in the audience, I'm guessing his wife.  He covers and gets his 13th world championship, but notably, his first title won at a WrestleMania.  

THIS by the way, is when the Bray character should have been retired.  He was made to look like a complete and total idiot out there.  I don't even blame Randy for phoning it in, because the whole thing was incredibly stupid.  A few years later, the Firefly Funhouse match would be stupid, but also really great because it essentially turns into the skid of of the insanity of Bray Wyatt.  As it was, though, we just have him doing some very "creepy" things, projecting some "creepy" images, and putting on a "crappy" match.  

Man, at least it was relatively short. 

Unlike this ride, which felt like it took years off my life. 

End of Day 108. 

[Brian Fowler]

I'm not sure if the two guys were just disinterested and that made the match suck, or they saw the plan for the bugs on the mat bullshit and decided it wasn't worth trying. But Bray never got past first gear, and Randy might've been in reverse.

[Dolfan in NYC]

DAY 109

I'd like to circle back to Mania 20 with you all, as I was sitting in my upper deck seat enjoying one of the largest fuck you any crowd had ever given to Vince at a Mania to date.  As I said earlier, though at the time Brock was a heel and Goldberg was a face, until I heard Brock was leaving too, I fully expected the MSG faithful to tell Goldberg to cram it with walnuts.  

Of course, that's not what happened.  

What we have now though, is Goldberg having taken the Universal Championship off a well-liked heel champ the month before and then I believe never actually defending it until now.  And Brock Lesnar, who'd been beaten in 90 seconds a few months prior, seeking revenge and the title.   Oh yeah, the crowd is firmly on Brock's side of this little tiff. 

Goldberg's chants are usually sweetened by piping in, but they are blatantly being piped in during his entrance now.  You can tell because no one in the crowd shots is doing the chant, you see a bunch of thumbs down, and like 3/4 of the stadium are booing him when his music ends.  

So, the thought that struck me as I was watching was this is one of those matches where you're in a video game and you've turned on the cheat codes and you're just spamming super combos.  It's not going to be a technical masterpiece, but it will be to quote Thomas Hobbes: 'nasty, brutish, and short.'  

Indeed, Goldberg no sold some suplexes and got a spear and jackhammer. Then Brock added the god mode cheat and started throwing Goldberg around the ring as the crowd counted the suplexes for fun. 

And once again, the most over person in this match -- Tye Dillenger.  

Brock looked like he was legitimately having fun being a heel with a crowd that was completely behind him.  So, yeah, after 10(!) suplexes, Brock picks up Goldberg's lifeless corpse and F5's him back into retirement.  This is Brock's 6th championship... this one is notable in that would last over 500 days. 

But yeah, the match was exactly what it needed to be, 'nasty, brutish, and short', and most importantly a lot of fun.  And frankly, so much better on the re-watch, I'm going to include it here.  

 

[Dolfan in NYC]

This is a fantastic video where Jimmy Uso & Naomi switch entrances where he ends up complaining that he's glad he doesn't have to do that every night.  And there's really something to be said about the women having to work 10 times as hard just to get noticed on the same level as the guys.  

Well, we're at the Smackdown Women's Title 6-Pack Challenge, the first defense of that title on the main show. The participants are Alexa Bliss, Naomi, Becky Lynch, Carmella, Mickie James, and Natalya.   Fun fact, with the exception of Mickie James, none of the other 5 participants had been on the main show of Mania in a non-gimmick (i.e. one fall to a finish) match before this.  Poor Nattie. 

Naomi actually gets a very nice hometown pop, despite I'm sure 75% of the crowd not being from Orlando.  Alexa Bliss is rolling in as champ and has decided she's going to be a bitch to everyone.  Oh and Carmella is seconded by James Ellsworth in what was a feel good story at the time, before he was outed as allegedly, a humongous piece of shit. 

The crowd is antsy at this point, because the show has been running for 6+ hours at this point. But these six ladies actually perform terrifically.  The action is fast-paced, hard-hitting, and the spots are coherent, and in a couple of cases pretty cool. 

End came as Naomi did the Butt Butt to Alexa, dove out of the ring to get everyone down, and returned to the ring.  She ducks an attack and makes Alexa tap to what the announcers are calling Alexa's finisher, but I do not recall Bliss having a submission finisher.  Maybe they're still seeing the roaches on the mat?  

I remember the majority of people reviewing this hated this because a) the show was running too long, b) everyone was grousing about "a PaRt TiMeR wOn ThE tItLe!!!", and c) it's on right before the main event (oh and I'll have stuff to say about that...)   But the reality is, this was a VERY fun little bit of chaotic action.  All 6 ladies were on their games and the result was a nice little surprise. 

And yeah, once again, the ladies are given 5 minutes to try to impress a bunch of idiots who need them to work 10 times as hard to even consider them as equal.  Frankly, looking at the other matches, this was one of the top 3 on the show.  So fuck those guys.  

[John from Cincinnati]

On 1/2/2021 at 1:29 PM, Brian Fowler said:

My legit favorite Rollins singles match was with The Miz a couple years ago. Rollibs had to slow down so much that an actual story got told.

It helps that Rollins was so hot coming out of the hour in the gauntlet match. That crowd was there for him every step of the way. 

Crazy that both WWE and Seth managed to burn that down. 

Edited January 6, 2021 by Andy in Kansas

[Dolfan in NYC]

It was supposed to be simple.  It was supposed to be easy.  Roman Reigns was supposed to beat The Undertaker and that would be it for the career of the Undertaker. But then again, life has its own plans. 

Undertaker has had several very bad WrestleMania matches in a row. However, since he's only wrestling at Mania by this point, the fact that they've been bad is looming larger and larger. So, someone finally made the decision to pull the plug and have Taker "go out on his shield" (Pun!).  So, let's find the 'best wrestler on the roster' and give him the final victory. 

Roman Reigns fits the bill perfectly, except for one small thing... He's not getting the right reaction from the crowd.  And having the golden boy end the Undertaker's career is going to make him... less popular.   But whatever, we're here, let's go.

My memory of this was it was a uniformly poor match.  That doesn't *quite* bear out though.  

Taker gets his big epic entrance after Roman is booed out of the stadium on his entrance.  The match itself starts out fine. It's pretty standard "Big WWE Main Event" fare. If anything it's just formulaic and just gets a bit monotonous.  But then Roman tries to Tombstone the Undertaker....

Yeah, here's where it went off the rails.  Really badly.  Both guys are clearly panicking because they've clearly built some kind of sequence around the Tombstone spot and neither of them really know what to do with a botch as bad as Taker does.  For his part, Roman is clearly listening to Taker call whatever spot is next, but Taker is just gassed or something.  Nothing beyond that point works.  

The crowd who's been doing the standard "boo Roman", "yay Taker", goes pretty quiet. Like everyone knows something is wrong... and that Taker is losing.  So it's just a march to the inevitable.  A long.... slow....  march. 

They try to go for the defiant "you're gonna have to put me down" spot, but even THAT doesn't work.  Mainly because one of Roman's big problems at this point is his finishing sequence is *always* Superman Punch, Spear.   But here it's SUPER corny that he literally has to "cock up" the Superman Punch every time he does it.  Then he fucks up the spear spot, twice, apparently.  

Eventually, and I mean... eventually....  a spear is enough to hang a 2nd L on Undertaker, for 23-2.   The Lesnar match is WORLDS better by comparison, and if this was supposed to crown Reigns, boy did they fail at that miserably.  The Lesnar loss also fucks up Roman's spot here because that first one is the big one... this one just looks like he was shooting Old Yeller, with zero emotion. 

Taker lays his equipment in the ring and disappears into the ramp, and we're finally fucking done.  

--

This Mania is a good example of why an editor matters.  The three long matches are all actively bad or massively disappointing. The short matches though are all where it's at.  Now you can't exactly make a WrestleMania in the 2010's and not have an epic match or two, but having an epic match doesn't mean it has to go on for that long.  It has to be emotional, hard hitting, dramatic, and above all else, it has to matter.   

And you can't project roaches onto the floor.  

I will say though I enjoyed this a lot more this time around... it's because I broke this up into segments.  At more than 6:30 (5 of which are on the Network), this was a flaming pile of death.  

Christ.  Let's go back to New Orleans already.  

End of Day 109. 

[DJ Hero Morganti]

I like the story they were trying to tell with Roman Taker... the execution though oooffffffaaaa.

[EVA]

Yeah, Taker had been in decline up to this point, but this was the first time where it really seemed like he was in danger of seriously hurting himself or someone else if he kept on.

So, of course, he kept on.

[NikoBaltimore]

I honestly can't wait for Dolfan's review of the next show as boy do I have things to say about that one.

[Brian Fowler]

The story telling in Taker/Reigns was excellent. The physical wreck that was Mark Callaway just wasn't up to executing the moves.

[Log]

This was the last Mania I watched live. I used to watch with some friends and we were literally dozing off by the last match. After this one, we waited until the weekend after and cherry-picked stuff we wanted to see. 
 

As long as they keep up the current overly-long format, I don’t ever see myself watching one live again. 

[Ramo2653]

The only thing I remember about this WM is the Hardys surprise which caught me off guard and inviting some friends over and I made a pizza but I bought breakfast sausage on accident so it was weird but still good.

[Brian Fowler]

Last year's two night show was such a relief for length. Not that I went over to watch with the friend I always watch with, but two ~4 hour shows is so much better then one 6 hour show.

[Eivion]

2 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

Last year's two night show was such a relief for length. Not that I went over to watch with the friend I always watch with, but two ~4 hour shows is so much better then one 6 hour show.

This really needs to be a format they keep for Wrestlemania.

[Dolfan in NYC]

DAY 110

WrestleMania XXXIV (or Learning To Live With Disappointment)

So it's 2018.  

So... um, let me give you a little inside baseball. When 2018 started, my partner and I flew to Austin to visit some friends.  We rented a car for the weekend but I was so big at that point, I was having trouble getting in and out.  I weighed 470 lbs.  

After that weekend, he and I went on Nutrisystem, and in the time since then, I've lost almost 220 lbs. (He's lost about half that much, but frankly he had less to lose.)  Doing so allowed me to do many more activities like long  10+ mile walks around the city, hiking in the White Mountains, and just contributed overall to my quality of life.  As I said when I started this whole thing, NYC went into a lockdown and I bought an exercise bike that's helped keep me sane until the lockdown slowly lifted.  I'm keeping it up a little less frequently than before, because I can actually go outside again, but it's still helping keep me going.   

And frankly, if I hadn't lost that weight before, I would have been well over the weight limit of this bike and who knows what would have happened.   

2018 was a big year for me.

Alright, enough mush, let's start with the Intercontinental Championship.  

The Miz has just become a father for the first time and is riding a bit of a high career-wise.  He's running with the Miz-tourage (Bo Dallas and whatever Joe Hennig is calling himself in 2018) and is rolling into WrestleMania as the Intercontinental Champion, his 8th and (so far) final reign.   Fun fact!  One more and he ties Chris Jericho for most ever.  

Seth Rollins has spent the last year burning it down. Which means... *checks notes* he was a tag team wrestler who's partners kept getting career-threatening injuries.  Hmm.  Maybe don't push everyone in Crossfit so hard there?  

And Finn Balor...  well, after his injury comeback, Vince apparently discovered the whole "Demon" side of him.  The thing about it though was he wanted the Demon for everything. Including an absolutely idiotic feud with Bray Wyatt that was going to lead to The Demon facing Sister Abagail. (Thankfully, Bray got some horrible disease and the whole feud was called off.)  But he's in the upper mid-card and is among the best workers on the planet so...  in he goes.  

This is actually Finn Balor's WrestleMania debut and he's surrounded by a bunch of people from New Orleans wearing his new rainbow t-shirt. (Yeah, whatever idiot said he wasn't 'over' is owed a drink by Balor, because this shirt made a fuck-ton of sales.)  And I don't know what it was, but damned if this entrance didn't actually get me.  Welling up while riding a bike is a weird sensation.   

The match is pretty fun.  It went about 16-18 minutes, the first half of which was pretty much non-stop because they just kept trading dance partners between each other.  They've clearly got Miz's spots very laid out for him because they're clearly giving cues and he's dutifully following along.   

But for what it's worth, it's very good because everything is laid out intricately and things are building and making sense, and they're sticking to the script.  Like I'm sure there's a mind-blowing ROH 70+ minute war between Tyler Black and Prince Devitt out there, but the Miz anchoring them just works perfectly here.  

Finish is the re-introduction of the curbstomp which he hits on Balor then on Miz by Rollins, for his first IC title.  This completes his career grand slam a mere 5 years into his WWE career, so good for him.  Both Balor and Miz came out looking like a million bucks here, so nothing to hang their head in shame for. 

Well worth the re-visit. 

"Where's Poochie?" count is 1.  (more on that later)

[Dolfan in NYC]

At NXT Takeover: Brooklyn a young lady known to the world as Kana was sitting in attendance.  Within months she became known as Asuka and set the NXT women's division on fire. Her absolute dominance was characterized best by her undefeated record in her entire NXT run, including surrendering the NXT Women's Championship rather than losing it.  No one was ready for her there, and when she got called up to the main roster, no one there was ready for her either.   She crushed competition and won the first Women's Royal Rumble in January.  

Then she chose to challenge Charlotte Flair.  

Charlotte, for her part, was becoming the dominant figure on the main roster. I mean, I guess that's one of my main problems with her -- is she's vanilla ice cream. It's really good and an absolutely solid option all-around, but it frankly becomes a little boring if you have it every single day. (I'll say, I am very interested to see what happens with her now that she's been injured/away for months.)  So yeah, she's about 5 months into her reign as Smackdown Women's Champion and going in, I seem to remember the sentiment being:  No way she ends Asuka's streak right away.  That would be dumb.  

...

Charlotte is flanked by (masked) Tino Sabatelli, Riddick Moss, and Dan Matha.  I actually looked it up because I thought the tallest one was Dijakovic (or Rebar or T-bar or whatever the fuck Vince named him to make fun of antifa).  They did play Also Sprach Zarathustra for her, and I wonder why she didn't just use that for her music tonight.  

Asuka gets the debut of the giant CGI elements that plague WWE television to this day. I can already tell you, two years later, they look dated and rough.  Sometimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel -- music and pyro are usually more than enough. 

Poochie Count is up to 2. 

The match was solid, but I dunno... uninspiring?  It's solid, everything is done well, and I don't have any real reason to criticize anything they did.  But I just was not into it.  I guess I just knew what was coming this time.  

And yes, in one of the more infamous moments of WrestleMania's recent history, Charlotte had been trying to get Asuka into the Figure 4, gives her a humongous spear, and then locks in the Figure 4.  Asuka had been working her arm in preparation for the Asuka Lock, so Charlotte has to change the bridging technique for the Figure 8 to one hand instead of two.  Her facial expressions are very good and on the replay you see she braces her arm just before... 

Yep, Asuka taps.  

The crowd is in utter disbelief.  You can see several "What the fuck"'s in the ringside crowd's shot. Flair has ended Asuka's undefeated streak at over 900 days.  

And then in an absolutely infuriating spot, Asuka asks for the mic and puts over Charlotte again.  "Charlotte was ready for Asuka."  In what was clearly supposed to get a standing ovation or something, but gets at most polite applause and a smattering of boos.  

So, yeah, again, I just could not get into it.  It was technically sound, and well done, but knowing this is when Asuka became "just another girl"... that sucked. 

Poochie is bemused at ringside.  (#3)

End of Day 110. 

[odessasteps]

Wasnt this also right after Asuka won the mixed match deal? Or was that later? 

Edited January 9, 2021 by odessasteps

[tbarrie]

9 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Wasnt this also right after Asuka won the mixed match deal? Or was that later? 

The Mixed Match Challenge was before Wrestlemania. They made it clear mid-way through that Asuka's team losing would mean the end of her streak, which led to some fun bits but kind of telegraphed who was winning.

[Eivion]

I still maintain Asuka's streak was too limiting by this point, and most of people annoyed at it ending were annoyed purely that it was Charlotte who ended it. In reality the regular WWE audiences were not especially excited for it, and Asuka didn't really come up with any sort of strong character. The first Asuka/Charlotte match is quite good, and I think some sell it short because of the result. I will always feel Charlotte ending the streak was fine. It was the piss poor non-follow up that annoyed me. That should have been when Asuka turned heel and beat the shit out of Charlotte. Its a shame we never not got zombie clown face paint Asuka.

Edited January 10, 2021 by Eivion

[Brian Fowler]

I totally agree that ending Asuka's streak solely for the purpose of ending it was dumb as fuck, but, dude, that match ruled. They tore the house down.

[MoeCristyV.1.6]

And cutting it short by Poochie running backstage ruined it even more.

[NikoBaltimore]

Ah, New Orleans.  By rights I shouldn't have considered going when factoring in the cost of everything from hotel, airfare, and all the wonderful yet expensive food that we've had.  But I went anyway with some friends and had one helluva time.  Only thing is I took one plane which got there earlier than the one they took.  So with time to kill I made my way through Bourbon Street and figured I'll try some local brews but not go too crazy.  Nothing heavy percentage-wise, eating food and taking my sweet time.  Well it turns out one thing I didn't factor in was the medication I was taking at the time which turns out can make me drunk a lot quicker.  So by the time my friends get there without intending to I got trashed on Bourbon Street.  Which is pretty standard when going there but I figured I would wait for them get there before attempting that first.  Whoops.  But New Orleans is quite the lovely place and I hope to go back with my wife one day.

On 1/9/2021 at 12:40 AM, Dolfan in NYC said:

This is actually Finn Balor's WrestleMania debut and he's surrounded by a bunch of people from New Orleans wearing his new rainbow t-shirt. (Yeah, whatever idiot said he wasn't 'over' is owed a drink by Balor, because this shirt made a fuck-ton of sales.)  And I don't know what it was, but damned if this entrance didn't actually get me.  Welling up while riding a bike is a weird sensation.   

With us being in nosebleeds I could barely see Finn.  And I didn't see the people with him considering I wasn't looking at the screen that had him on there.  But what I did see was the one video wall that had his graphic and it changed at points to the pride colors.  I thought at first I was seeing things but when it happened again I took a picture and sent it to my wife and friends.  Turns out that this was all Finn's idea that Stephanie helped get off the ground which led to partnership with GLAAD.  So needless to say even though he's going back to the Prince deal I'll always be fan of Finn for doing that.  And yeah I got the figure and shirt that represented that entrance.

Oh, right, Asuka vs. Charlotte.  Good match but the ending was bullshit.  I like Charlotte but at the time it just felt like the completely wrong person to break the streak.  And I didn't realize how much they cut from the post-match for Cena until watching it back.  For as long as the show went they could have given it at least another minute.

Edited January 11, 2021 by NikoBaltimore

[Zimbra]

OK I've been trying to put it together from context clues and failing: Who's the Poochie on this show?