- Taped from Washington, DC.
- Your hosts are Jim Ross & Jerry Lawler.
JBL, Ted Dibiase, Cody Rhodes & Kane v. John Cena, Cryme Tyme & Batista.
Kane hammers Batista down to start, but Dave comes back with a corner clothesline and boots him down for two. He gets caught in the heel corner and Cody Rhodes comes in and slugs away, but Batista powers him into the face corner, where JTG beats on him. Shad alley-oops JTG into Cody (that move needs a cool name in the worst way) and a press slam gets two. Snake Eyes follows, but a weak cheapshot from JBL slows him down and Shad is YOUR thug-in-peril. And thus we take a break. Back with JBL tossing him for some punishment on the floor from Kane, which gives JBL two. Dibiase comes in with a suplex and clothesline for two (complete with canned "oooohs" from the crowd and overdubbed NBC shilling from JR that sounds like it was bolted on with a rivet gun). Into the corner for more dull heel offense. Cody pounds away in the corner and follows with a weak dropkick to cut off the tag, and it's over to JBL for some elbows that get two. Over to Kane for a seated dropkick that gets two, and he goes to a bodyscissors of all things. C'mon, this is prime time! This crap is supposed to hook viewers? Dibiase tries a suplex, but Shad reverses it and it's hot tag Cena. Backdrop suplex for JBL and the five knuckle shuffle follows, but Kane breaks up the F-U. Batista dumps Kane and hits Dibiase with a spinebuster, which allows JTG to go up and get launched onto Dibiase. He's not legal, so the ref won't count, but when JBL hits him with the Clothesline from New York, he will count that and the heels win at 12:13. What happened to more realism in the reffing? Dull match that got hot for about 10 seconds at the end but was all kicking and punching before that. And really, if you're a new fan tuning in and watching Dibiase & Rhodes, you'd think they were a couple of jobbers instead of the World tag champs and the hot new act of the promotion that the WWE is pushing them as. **
Jeff Foxworthy wants us to know that autism is reversible and he'll be watching later when Jenny McCarthy talks about it. I thought they were trying to convince advertisers that rednecks WEREN'T watching their shows?
Carmen Electra also dislikes autism. Really bringing out the A-list celebrities here, aren't they?
The Great Khali v. Jimmy Wang Yang
Yang doesn't even get an entrance, not that there was any doubt about the finish anyway. Khali clotheslines him and tosses him around, then swats Yang out of the air and finishes with the tree slam and pins him with one foot at 1:24. Lemme just say, had they taken the time to book Big Show this strong in 1999 he might have ended up as a major star instead of the minor one he is now. Khali, however, is a lost cause, no matter how much crowd noise they pipe in. DUD
Ben Stiller reads his sincere greetings off a cue card. Autism, it sucks, man. Anyone else waiting for him to endorse the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too?
And now, it's Jenny McCarthy. Who really gives a crap about Jenny McCarthy in 2008 anyway? Anyway, autism is bad, we get it. I'd rather not be preached to in a one-hour wrestling show, especially when they go from something where we're supposed to see the "good side" of the WWE and then they cut right to...
Edge's trashy (but awesome!) wedding soap opera with Vickie and the wedding planner, which immediately makes them look completely low-class and silly again. Lemme say, HD close-ups of Vickie = EPIC FAIL. Edge needs Lita back in his life as a stabilizing force again. Lita v. Vickie in a battle of trailer trash would be so amazing that they'd have to go super-duper HD to contain it.
Edge v. Jeff Hardy
Hardy takes him down to start and they exchange baseball slide attempts, which allows Jeff to hit a pescado. Edge rests on the railing and Jeff tries to follow with a somersault off the stairs, but he splats into the barricade with a nasty bump and we take a break. Back with Edge working the leg, and he counters away from the mule kick and takes Hardy down again. Edge wraps the leg around the post, but Hardy comes back with a clothesline and puts Edge in the Tree of Woe. Baseball slide misses, but Jeff recovers and mule kicks him for two instead. Twist of Fate is reversed into the Impaler by Edge, and that gets a very close two. Edge tries the spear, but Jeff moves and hits the Whisper in the Wind for two. Jeff hits him with a front suplex and goes up for the swanton, but Edge rolls away and Jeff can't limp over and continue the advantage. Edge tries another spear, but misses again and lands on the floor. With the ref counting Edge, MVP pops out of the crowd and hits Jeff with the high kick out of nowhere, making him even goofier, and that darn spear finally finishes at 13:26. Good stuff, with Jeff selling the knee consistently and Edge looking like a star as usual. ***
The Pulse
Pretty pointless show from my end of things, as they had a timeslot on NBC and just kind of did a half-hearted Summerslam build because they knew no one would be watching anyway. But that autism, it's the real heel! Matthew Michaels also offers his take here: http://pulsewrestling.com/2008/08/02/5-thoughts-on-saturday-night%E2%80%99s-main-event-08022008/
And don't forget to check out www.stablewars.com for your chance to outguess me, and the rest of the interweb, as you try to predict the results of Summerslam and possibly win a copy of my new book this month and every month!
Tags: Rants
I’m surprised WWE hasn’t made a peep about Khali’s involvement with Get Smart.
Vince mentioned it on Raw….right before he plugged The Rock DVD.
Remember kids, it’s only charity if a lot of people see you doing it.
Whoops, that was meant to be a reply to the show review.
Jenny McCarthy had a kid with autism, her charity seems more like an attempt to resurrect her career than a real charity – if humping Jim Carrey didn’t do it, nothing will.
NBC must be really hard-up for cheap programming.
Funny enough, that’s why they keep coming to the WWE. Even if these shows draw abysmal ratings, NBC pays next to nothing for them.
On a side note, I have a question for Scott…
Why hasn’t the WWE reached out to premium channels like HBO or Showtime to have WWE broadcast on there? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Thankfully, if they did do an HBO special we won’t get any strange Oz-like angles.
Then again, HBO has Rome. And god knows McMahon loves incest angles.
Batista dumps Kane and hits Dibiase with a spinebuster, which allows JTG to go up and get launched onto Dibiase. He’s not legal, so the ref won’t count, but when JBL hits him with the Clothesline from New York, he will count that and the heels win at 12:13.
Im not sure if im correct, but wasn’t JBL the legal man on the team and not Dibiase? which was why JTG couldn’t pin but JBL could pin JTG.
Sounds right, although the way the announcers were explaining it in between plugs for NBC shows they made it sound like the ref was upset with JTG for not being legal. The other way would make more sense.
I was going to say the same thing…if their own announcers don’t pay enough attention to help explain the ref making a ruling which is almost never seen, how the heck do they expect the fans to be able to follow it??? And correct me if I’m wrong, but they put all the commentary in for taped shows like this in post-production, don’t they? So if JR actually cared enough to want to be better than say, Mike Adamle at the job he’s been doing for over 20 years, he could have asked someone (one of the wrestlers, the referee, an agent or booker???) what the ref was trying to get across there, so that he could explain it to the fans. But then again, I guess if they wanted someone to call matches, we might have Joey Styles on our tv screens somewhere, but all they want is someone to “tell a story”, whatever the fuck that means.
“but all they want is someone to “tell a story”, whatever the fuck that means.”
Awesome. I know, as if we want to hear stories all fucking day. CALL THE DAMN MATCH! I don’t need super-hardcore play-by-play, but for fuck’s sake the commentary is just not cutting it this DECADE. I know I’d be naive to wish for the days of the 80s announcing but hot damn can something change?
“Tell a story.” Here’s a story: JR and The King are horrible now.
I’ve heard that Vince just doesn’t want every single move called since, well, the show is on TV, not the radio. We can see that someone just did a bodyslam, so why do we have to be told? Why not use the commentators to put over things that viewers wouldn’t know just by watching the match.
I like Joey Styles, but in the original ECW, he did have a habit saying “Clothesline, another clothesline, a third clothesline, DDT, etc.”, and he sounded like he was reading Jericho’s list of 1,004 moves at random.
But the whole point of an announcer is to tell you whats on the screen. Al Michaels tells you what happens when you’re watching a football game.
Peyton Manning drops back, throws complete to Marvin Harrison for 12 yards. Sure, you saw that happen, but Al Michaels tells you that as well.
They tell the stories & bullshit during down times, time outs. Same as announce teams for every sport.
JR can call every damn move for I care. Save the stupid banter/stories for down time (ie, rest holds)…..
One more reason I’m glad I don’t watch football, then.
I really don’t want to hear JR, Cole, or whoever call an entire match like this:
“Cena with the clothesline, Batista back up, another clothesline by Cena, Batista slowly gets back to his feet, Cena goes for the FU, Batista escapes, kicks Cena in the gut, goes for the Batista Bomb…..”
I can see that’s what happened. You don’t have to tell me. The announcers should try to bring up things that aren’t obvious. If someone is using their left hand to punch when he/she usually uses the right hand but can’t due to an injury (real or fake), mention it to the viewers rather just saying “So-so with a punch, there’s another, and another…..”
I know what you’re saying, but there is a fine line there. One of my pet peeves with bad TV sports announcers is when you’ll see a replay and they’ll verbally take you through every insignificant part of the replay step by step. It’s not necessary, and it’s something the best announcers don’t do. It’s a visual medium; there’s a time to let the images speak for themselves and a time to call the action and analyze it.
That said, I agree that the announcers leave a lot to be desired. Lawler was a perfectly good heel announcer when he first came to the company, but now he’s just another washed-up good guy. Heel announcers can be one of the best parts of the show, as Heenan and Ventura proved long ago, but now they don’t exist anymore.
I have no idea how Michael Cole has managed to stick around this long. He is horrible. Count how many times he says the word “hell” the next time you watch him. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but once you notice his constant use of the word, it will annoy you. Every two minutes he just casually drops in a “what the hell was that?” Not that I am offeneded by the word or anything. It just comes off sounding childish and unprofessional when he does it so frequently. Then when something major happens that actually does warrant a strong reaction, and he says, “What the hell was that?” it has no impact because he’s already said “what the hell was that” twelve times in the past hour in casual conversation. Michael Cole sucks.
“And correct me if I’m wrong, but they put all the commentary in for taped shows like this in post-production, don’t they?”
It used to be that way but now the inserts are just things like the NBC plugs and the talk of what took place of the previous night’s Smackdown since it happened after SNME was taped. Outside of that, the commentary is done at the arena.
I remember the appeal of the old SNME episodes… You could actually see guys like Hogan , Savage, Andre and Warrior wrestle for free…
Now, These SNME’s… You can actually watch JOHN CENA WRESTLE!!!
It didn’t even seem like they wanted their regular viewers to now this SNME was happening. I don’t remember one mention from a wrestler or announcer in the 5 hours of RAW, ECW, and Smackdown that I watched this week. The only thing they hyped was the Jenny McCarthy/autism thing, with the constant celeb interview clips over the last couple weeks, but I would think a heck of a lot of people may have been zoning out, channel surfing, or fast forwarding during those bits and may have not even known what they were about. I was kind of hoping Y2J would come out and interrupt McCarthy and show the clip of her accompanying HBK to the ring at WM XI. He could have said she somehow transmitted the autism to her son because of all the drugs Michaels was on back then and something rubbed off on her. I guess some might have found that in poor taste though. Plus, Jericho “retired” his jokester persona last week so I guess that would have been out of character for him now.
But that Jericho thing sure would have been awesome…
I agree with the WWE not really letting us know that this SNME was even happening. I only caught RAW this week, but kept up with everything via the Internet and I totally forgot that SNME was on last night. I caught the last half hour of it from Jenny McCarthy coming out to the end of the show once I remembered that it was on.
I think several of the replies to my first comment above sort of missed the point. I did end with the line about how the announcers supposed to “tell a story”, as opposed to calling the match, but my point wasn’t that they should be calling every single move. The comment was in response to Scott misunderstanding what the referee was trying to get across when JTG was trying to pin someone who wasn’t the legal man. It was kind of a crucial part of the match, being immediately followed by the finish, and it is sort of sad that the best play-by-play man in the business wasn’t able to make it clear to the fans what was going on, since as Scott said, he was too busy doing NBC plugs.
See I also agree that the announcers don’t need to call every single move, because it is TV, not radio. Absolutely 100% with you there.
BUT…
I honestly, truly don’t think that JR, the King, Cole, whoever, really… I don’t think that they even do a good job of “telling stories” the way people like Gorilla, Vince, and even JR himself used to.
I also really don’t like the fact that there are no more heel commentators. I’m not asking for another blatant heel like Bobby Heenan, but maybe more of a realist with a heel slant like Jesse Ventura?
Maybe I just need to get with the times.
Okay, I somewhat agree with that. I, too, would like to see another Ventura-style color man who disagrees with the play-by-play guy and has a slight bias for heels but is mostly fair.
Again, my original point was that I agree with the idea of commentators
“telling stories” and don’t agree with them merely telling me what happened 2 seconds ago when I saw it with my own eyes.