HTQ's Thoughts - 7/3; Vengeance, ECW and Kobashi
Vengeance PPV
I’ve seen clips of the PPV which is all I care to see of it. The Foley/Flair angle looked well execute and as heated as anything WWE have done in a while that didn’t involve John Cena. Flair bled like crazy, which, to be blunt, is about the only thing he can do and not look like the 57-year-old that he is. RVD’s WWE Title match against Edge, apart from being criminally placed in the middle of the card, looked pretty good, and from Jim Ross’s comments after the pin, it seems like Van Dam’s win was booked purely to surprise people because it was felt the original plan was too well known. I ignored the DX vs. Spirit Squad main event, because I have less than zero interest in anything DX-related. It also didn’t help that DX have humiliated and embarrassed the Squad, and Vince McMahon, for three weeks in a row, so quite why they expect people to pay for what they’ve already seen for free I don’t know. The highlight for me was Fake Kane pinning Real Kane clean in the middle of the ring. Why? Well, it’s because of…
Fake Kane storyline gets dropped
Less than 24-hours after Fake Kane beat Real Kane, clean, the entire character and storyline was dropped, due to the complete apathy the Vengeance crowd had for their match the night before. I can’t remember if this has happened before, where a wrestler was put over a big name clean and then promptly got dropped and the whole angle scrapped. What makes it funny is that the deal got dropped because the crowd didn’t care about it. The crowd has crapped on a lot of angles and storylines before but the usual Vince McMahon MO is to push back even harder and force the angle or storyline down peoples throats. My guess on why things happened differently this time is that Vince wasn’t happy with the first angle to begin with, and probably from the get go he was looking for some reason to end it. With the crowd at Vengeance sitting on their hands for the Fake Kane vs. Real Kane match, that gave Vince the out he was looking for, and the whole mess, which was meant to stretch until Wrestlemania, was dropped.
’ECW’
This week, it was revealed that Vince McMahon is going to turn ECW into a complete WWE-style third brand and anything even remotely resembling the original ECW is going to slowly dropped. It seems Vince was upset with how the current ECW is faring and has decided against doing something different with it and instead ECW is going to be more of the same. While it’s not a surprise that Vince is turning ECW into the WWE ‘C’ show, it is a little baffling that this is happening; 4-hours a week of WWE-style programming isn’t exactly setting the world on fire as it is, so quite why another hour of the exact same product is expected to fare any differently, I don’t know. The best thing to have done with ECW, which meant it had zero chance of being done, is to have made it into a ROH/TNA-style product, with the emphasis on the wrestling, with angles and storylines as the garnish to the main course of in-ring action. From a business standpoint, it makes more sense to offer two different styles of product, because then you can draw in the Sports Entertain fans with Raw and Smackdown and you can bring in the wrestling fans with ECW. That way, you’re getting more pieces of an already small pie and you can make more money. With ECW being made into another WWE-style brand, it’s going to attract the same viewers who would have been attracted by Raw or Smackdown, and there’s only so many of those viewers around right now. Instead of gaining new viewers, WWE may either split the viewers they have into three groups, or simply burn them out altogether to where they stop tuning it completely.
Kenta Kobashi has cancer
My thoughts are with Kobashi right now. Kobashi has long been one of my all-time favorite wrestlers and I’m really hoping he pulls through. My first thought on finding out about his condition was what happened with Shinya Hashimoto, who was another favorite of mine. We can only hope that Kobashi’s story has a happier ending.
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