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2017 LUCHA UNDERGROUND DISCUSSION


Phantom Lord

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So I binged all the episodes I hadn't watched last night (like 4) and now am all caught up. I love Sexy Star, but wow those backstage bits with her are so bad. I know LU has a shoestring budget, but they can't afford a real spider?

My favorite match in the Battle of the Bulls had to be Mariposa vs Killshot vs. Dante vs. Jeremiah. That match was great. When Mariposa busted out the Butterfly Effect on the chair she should have won it right there. I'm surprised that Jeremiah won it, but I guess his character has big things planned as seen by him apparently used to play at the temple when he was a kid with Katrina. 

Cage vs. Texano was such a great damn match. I really wasn't expecting Cage to win after all of that, but it should be fun to see him become this super being now that he has The Infinity Gauntlet.

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Also, call me a pessimist but I don't think this hiatus is good at all.  I don't have any info or anything that leads me to believe anyone saw it coming, for one.


They have like what, four or five months of shit in the can?  And trust me, without seeing the story stuff, it's the best part of the season.  Like there are some crazy blowaway matches that top any crazy blowaway matches you've seen so far this season.

It seems like the talent didn't fucking know because they're all scrambling to fill dates they had left open.

 

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I feel like the tapings delays led to this "mid season finale", but getting both at the same time is not great. I was concerned that night when it was announced that night and people calmed me down a bit. I think they know when they're coming back, all the episodes will air, and this is possibly just a way to split up a long break between Season 3 to Season 4 into two smaller breaks. 

Still - that announcement was Wednesday. It was a holiday week, but it's now Tuesday, and there's not been a single word more said about a mid season finale. Not a token press release explaining what the deal is, not some big hype towards the last two episodes of this mid-season, just that singular 20 second ad outside of the normal context of the show. (It wasn't part of the episode, so I wonder if they included it in the iTunes episode, or if those people on a season pass will just be baffled when the episodes stop appearing in a couple weeks.) El Rey is not great at communicating these things and the lack of a rollout for the idea just seems to confirm it was a sudden change of course. It's rarely a good thing to be suddenly taken off air.

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You also gotta figure that every other show that has this happen not only sees it coming, but uses the off time to shoot the episodes that are coming up after the hiatus, which are already shot in this case.

Still though, this smells like  "Network fuckery" and not "LLC fuckery" to me, because I feel like when the LLC decides to fuck everyone over, THAT's when the show is gonna get killed off.

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No unplanned hiatus has ever worked out well for a wrestling promotion.

I know, certain people will reply LU isn't a wrestling promotion, it's a TV show. I'm not gonna bite and argue that nonsense.

We'll see what happens but clearly not a good start to 2017 & gotta be a lot of frustrated talent right now.

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I thought for El Rey they were getting decent ratings.  I know it was far from blowaway numbers but it seemed like they had a good relationship.  I wonder if they saw the ratings one day and decided it wasn't worth it.  Now if they were waiting for an announcement on tapings then they could have said that to LU so they were at least on the same page.

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While I only see the darkest of timelines, like Days of Future Past type shit, I do have to say that one of my very podcast cohosts had an unplanned hiatus on the show he's working on now (because of Dancing with the Stars stealing the show's host) and everything is fine.

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I was under the impression that there were a lot more weeks already in the can. Is that not the case? If the mid-season finale is indeed the last of what's taped then an unplanned hiatus might be ominous but if there's still a ton of episodes in the can it doesn't make sense to spend all that money taping and then not airing them.

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No, that is the case.  There's another 20 episodes taped and in-ring they're better than the ones that aired so far this season.

But they're waiting to air them.  This means they're trying to spread what is already done out over time, when there was realistically already a shitload of time left to set up future tapings, so it isn't for that.  I don't think this is a LU decision.  This is an El Rey decision that is fucking over the LU talent who are scrambling to get dates/bookings now and can't go work somewhere with TV until the episodes air.  

Like someone who was probably already on the way out is getting REALLY fucked over by this now, I bet.  Probably really fucks over Sexy Star too but who cares

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4 hours ago, Tromatagon said:

No, that is the case.  There's another 20 episodes taped and in-ring they're better than the ones that aired so far this season.

But they're waiting to air them.  This means they're trying to spread what is already done out over time, when there was realistically already a shitload of time left to set up future tapings, so it isn't for that.  I don't think this is a LU decision.  This is an El Rey decision that is fucking over the LU talent who are scrambling to get dates/bookings now and can't go work somewhere with TV until the episodes air.  

Like someone who was probably already on the way out is getting REALLY fucked over by this now, I bet.  Probably really fucks over Sexy Star too but who cares

Not liking that folks are getting fucked over (I have friends of friends that work on the production side of the show so my interest in LU succeeding and thriving goes beyond my just selfishly wanting it to as a wrestling fan), but liking that you responded with this info. Thanks.

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Legit my only comment on tonight's lackluster, at times very dull show, is Katrina's true love is the cop who has the other half of the amulet.

Oh, and also that one line where they cut to Sexy Star in the backstage segment and she had ONE WORD to say "pero" and still made it come off as the worst acting ever. Get the fuck off my TV.

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It looks like El Rey is just going to air really good episodes from the previous 2.5 seasons, so this is definitely more about stretching out the (really long!) season than taking them the show away entirely. It's weird and not well planned out - you could tell when they were muting out mentions of the Mack/Mundo title match happening in two weeks on this week's episode - but it's better than them disappearing in some void for a while.

The late shift in plans just fits the pattern of the show itself not being handled well and no strong commitment to a long term plan. EVW was very much pushing a concept of Season 3 airing, Season 4 taping, and then finally actually touring. If Season 4 isn't taping until "October", where October is sufficiently far away that they have plenty of time to push it back again, then does the mythical touring not happen until 2018? Does it get moved up to happen this summer to give these guys something to do in the 14 month break between taping? No one on the outside knows and I'm not sure the people on the inside do either. A savvier group would paired the medicine of the hiatus/taping delay with some sugar good news, and either they didn't think to do it, or there's not a lot of good news to be had.

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I wonder how much of the poor planning is the split between the El Rey people and the people in Mexico who are handling talent. From the interviews with EVW I've seen, it sounds like he and the El Rey crew are less than thrilled with the Mexican side of the power structure, as he pretty much blamed them for not having better merchandising among other things IIRC.

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I think it's all El Rey Network's doing.  It doesn't make sense for it to be that when half the season is already shot and they aren't airing it.  They can shoot out of order anyway if they can't get some of the talent up from Mexico on certain dates.

Also, it's one thing to do a Slim Jim commercial, but doing a Slim Jim commercial with two dudes that clearly resemble two of your biggest fans that have been supporting the show from the beginning with their podcast it gets a little weird

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My impression is the hiatus is an El Rey call.

The thing that makes it confusing to follow is when EVW was referring to people above him, you'd assume "AAA!" since it was presented at the start as an AAA thing. But it's not really an AAA owned thing. AAA owns part, but so does MGM and El Rey and many other people/businesses/investors. That's why there's a few different logos after the show ends, and two pages of people listed as executive producers. There doesn't seem to be one person or business who's got the loudest voice in all matters, and it seems like it's a lot of different groups handling different parts of the business. This is not all negative, all those different people bring different resources to the table (they wouldn't have the look of the series without El Rey, they wouldn't be on in France and Germany and Malaysia without MGM) but it also means different parent companies put different emphasis on getting things done. And, when things aren't working, it means there's a lot of powerful people with ideas on how to fix it, and a maybe not everyone involved agreeing in what to do. When EVW is talking about people getting things done, he could mean the whole conglomerate, or any part of it. 

(If you talk to AAA, they say they own a lot of LU. If you to listen to Konnan or others, they say AAA now owns very little of it. Both could have been true at different points - the owners had to put more money into this to keep it going, maybe AAA didn't put in as much, and so their ownership was reduced. AAA is probably part of the problems in it's usual AAA ways, but this is a different situation than the usual AAA problems.)

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They're at least not taping until April, and might not be for the rest of the year.  If you look at the available dates for the talent on the show it gives that much away.  When Matanza himself is saying "I guess I will start taking bookings for April and the rest of 2017" something's up

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Cobb very clearly wants out of his deal since he has options so I wouldn't count on his word as indictive of the overall roster feelings but if they are indeed not taping all this year you can bet a lot of guys are going to want out. I suspect if you aren't Mexican you have a shot, if you are Mexican you're fucked as usual. The two most interesting cases may wind up Cobb & Angelico.

As for tonight's episode... well... it was TNA. If you slap the TNA logo on the show and do the exact same thing with a guy doing a Stone Cold ripoff gimmick, two different prop spots, a lame angle where a guy has a glove with special powers AND TAKES IT OFF BEFORE THE MATCH, an in-ring promo that dragged on and on and on and focused on a fan the average viewer has no clue about, a comedy act causing a screwy finish in the opener & ending with a poorly acted campy skit... TNA would be absolutely destroyed. But it's Lucha Underground so we're supposed to give it a pass. I don't. I hated the show start to finish.

But good news everyone: They found time to give Sexy Star her shine & more time to act on a show she didn't even have a match. Cool.

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