Caliban

So did Josh Matthews do a line before the show?

Holy crap, that may have been the best Stretcher match I've seen. Really good stuff here! Must be building to a TLC match between the two. Can't say I was interested in a Jeff/Matt feud, even the Mania match I felt was underwhelming. But damn, I'm into it now. They could feud all year as long as they keep producing matches like this, and I've gotta say, Matt's pretty damn over as a heel now. And yeah, one of Cena's best ever promos, I know it was with Edge who tends to draw the best out of him, and the hot, pro-Cena crowd probably helped, but tonight's Smackdown was a great example of how Cena should be presented.

I think it was supposed to be more creepy than gay. Another shot at poor old Jeff, who lost his (gay) dog in that blaze that apparently every casual WWE fan knows about(?)

Yeah, good episode of Smackdown. I marked out at the very end, because I wasn't expecting it at all... the bit that the spoilers missed out I mean... Someone needs to cap the last minute or so with the Benny Hill music. Some more good promo work by the Hardys on this show as well. @ TSM Fantasy: The music playing after the 8-man tag was the ACDC Mania theme song, does sound similar to Kennedy's though.

Funniest moments of the night: The guy yelling out "Good job Orton!" at the end. Excellent work. Edge and Vickie's mashup photo - I could have sworn it was Kizarny.

I agree that the build to Mania has been pretty lame this year, but IIRC it was lame before WM22 as well, and that ended up being a pretty good show. I think 25 will go the same way. Besides, when watching back old Wrestlemanias nobody remembers the build anyway... I even fast forward the little video packages they have.

Yeah, lets get sombre: now Wrestlemania X7 is the most recent 'Mania to contain a match with only deceased competitors. Test vs Eddie Guerrero.

Every PPV last year has at least one good to great match on it, bar Survivor Series. WWE had a great 2008 on PPV. The Jericho vs Michaels feud last year yielded some great matches. Check out the Michaels vs Hogan feud built around Summerslam 2005 as well. Some of the promo work is probably better than the eventual wrestling though. The Edge vs John Cena feud from 2006 must be seen as well. Check out their TLC match from Toronto at Unforgiven 2006. Great heat. I think Vengeance 2005 has been mentioned before in this thread, but that was a good PPV. HBK/Angle II and the superior HHH/Batista Hell in a Cell match. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, the 2006 Royal Rumble event is ok if you stop watching before the main event. It's Angle/Henry, for some reason. Yeesh. Other than that, Rumble matches have been excellent in that time period.

Carlito/Primo vs Miz/Morrizon vs Bourne/Mysterio vs DiBiase/Rhodes for the "undisputed" tag titles at Wrestlemania, book it... it'll be great. Kozlov has another expression! Behold the "I just beat Taker" smirk! Matt Hardy's heel promos are pretty good, but they could be even better. More emphasis on the "me" and the "sick". If you saw the show you'll know what I mean... With Edge, Orton and Jericho in top form, he's got some pretty good inspiration.

After the show was done, like everyone else I started to spectulate on the two World Title matches at Mania. How about Edge vs Cena vs Orton on the Raw side? Fresh matchup, all three have history with each other, the three biggest stars in the company under the age of 40. That leaves HHH vs Undertaker on the Smackdown side, which is plausible given how their EC match ended. I would HATE to see HHH vs Orton.

Why set yourself up for dissapointment? Austin isn't going to wrestle again, period.

I've only watched about the first 30 minutes of the show, and that was on Dailymotion, but did Undertaker really get no entrance, as in the jobberific "waiting in the ring for his opponent as we come back from commercial" treatment? Whoa. And Matt Hardy's promos still suck.

The pyro angle actually looked pretty cool. It was a lot better than last week's "police footage". And so far there's been some pretty original stuff in this Jeff stalker angle, which is good to see. I just hope the payoff is as good as expected... i.e. Christian's return

Re: Hardy's title win... Since NOBODY really believed he was going to win the title having held off so long, the "money is in the chase" rule didn't apply. Now that he's actually won the thing, have Edge screw him out of the title at the Rumble. Fans will then be clamouring for him to win it back... Jeff can chase the title up to Wrestlemania, and maybe draw some big bucks. That's how I would do it, anyway.

The show's not been bad at all apart from Santino/Honky. And we've still got Jericho/Batista and likely HHH/Hardy. Though I'm sure there will be a lousy Koslov run-in in the HHH match.