LogFAQs > #950951812

Last night I wound up watching AEW All Out 2019 (or what AEW had of it on their YT channel -- it looks like the full show included a 21-woman battle royal (which I would have been interested in watching) and another tag match). Part of it was curiosity and part of it was the fact that I had just watched weekly shows so I wanted to see an example of AEW at its hypothetical best.

Well, the event had one really good match, but goddamn if that match wasn't amazing. I'm very obviously referring to Cody Rhodes vs Spawn Spears, with MJF and Tully Blanchard respectively. And while Spears was fucking awesome, it was really Tully Blanchard who made that match because you got a LOT of old-school heel shenanigans.

Cody was incredible, but I think a lot of that might be on Shawn Spears... who I didn't recognize as having been the WWE's Tye Dillinger (and then obviously the ringside Tully and MJF drove a lot of the action and kept me invested). Good fucking god the WWE under-utilized that guy back when I watched it. In fact, I can't think of any really huge complaints I had about the match (which even made the usual fight spilling out into the ground palatable after the package explaining the feud). However, I'll mention that in the middle of a fucking grudge match where Cody is finally getting revenge on this guy, he stops to high five a child. It was something of a nice gesture, but he completely broke character and took me out of the match for a minute.

The rest of the PPV was a mixed bag. Jungle Express vs SCU was interesting since I got to see Jungle Express's early gimmick, between the different entrance video (with the cup of water homage to Jurassic Park) and the fact that JR (and only JR) kept referring to Jungle Boy as "Jungle Jack." SCU still seems like a massive under-use of reasonable talent, although I guess somebody like Christopher Daniels wouldn't rise above a midcard position outside of TNA.

That Cracker Barrel match dragged on towards the end. The early going was neat. They worked in what seemed like another dig at Jim Cornette during the match, when Jelly Nutella pulled out a racket from under the ring and the announcers made a big deal about him not using (prior to that, Chris Daniels -- in the middle of what sounded like a heel entrance -- made a big about somebody talking about them not being able to fill an arena. I'm kinda guessing who they meant there). Darby and Jimmy Havoc were both cool. Jelly Nutella was a distraction. I laughed when one of the announcers call the match unforgettable. This one certainly won't stick out in my mind, even with the hilarious over-use of Cracker Barrel promotion within it.

Pac vs Omega was okay. There was a lot of stupidity in it (all of which was 100% on Omega), but if somebody likes Omega, I guess they're into stuff like that. I thought it just looked lousy. I will credit Omega for his ability to mug for the camera and otherwise demonstrate personality. I've always been less impressed by his wrestling, although -- outside of the silly stunt stuff -- he's not terrible (at least when he's not trying to do things he can't pull off). Pac was reasonably solid. I liked the ending.

Riho vs Hikaru Shida looked kinda bad mostly because Riho is fucking tiny as hell, something I didn't realize from the match preview images I've seen featuring her. To make it even more ridiculous, she looked as though she were dressed like a little girl. Between those two elements, I couldn't get into the match at all. The kind weird thing is that Shida is listed as only being 3-inches taller than Riho, but she looked big standing next to Riho. I'm already planning on watching the rest of the AEW Women's tournament (which thankfully will mostly be on YT -- including some of the American side -- so I won't be stuck having to watch Dynamite, other than for the Riho vs Serena match... which I don't have any hopes for now)

The Bucks vs Lucha Bros was fucking terrible. There was a lot of synchronized, coordinated stunt shit where both sides were doing the same thing at the same time. If they hadn't been doing it at the same time, MAYBE some of that shit might have seen neat. However, it was a ladders match which I'm already predisposed to dislike because those are almost always stupid, and this probably one of the worst uses of the gimmick I've seen. You had the classic shit like "Gee, it's nice that those tables he set up earlier were there to break his fall!" (and yes, it's almost always the guy to set up the table who later goes through it, which I imagine is them verifying that the thing they're going to fall through is set up properly) and them doing moves that clearly looked like they hurting themselves or a teammate far more than an opponent. The only cool stunt in the entire match might have been a Lucha brother doing a jumping "cutter" from one side of the latter and grabbing his opponent on the other side. That I hadn't seen before and it looked great. Otherwise I'll never understand how the Bucks have fans. There are probably a thousand tag teams who do the things they do better, have a better look, and many of them can actually cut a promo.

The main event was Jericho vs Adam Page, which... honestly I stopped paying attention during. I had broken the 3-hour or so PPV up between 5-6 hours of real time, but a combination of boredom and disinterest set in pretty quickly after I started watching the match. It was also just a long match.

Oh, and there was a match between the Dork Order (accompanied by gimps -- is this supposed to be a sex cult gimmick? I didn't get that vibe from the newer stuff) and the Best Friends. It was two teams I dislike in a match that looked like shit.

So the PPV had one incredible match, a bunch of things I was okay sitting through (Express v SCU, Pac, and the Cracker Barrel 3-way), a bunch of things I dlsliked sitting through (goddamn Bucks and Dork Order/BFs...), and a match I wasn't really paying attention to half the time. I guess Riho falls somewhere between okay and disliked.

And thus ends my grand AEW experiment... no, wait. Technically I have to do one more thing to be thorough... I need to watch some TNA >_< Granted, the show isn't on Hulu and they don't have full episodes on YT so... maybe I won't.

It wasn't a total waste of time. I saw one great Cody match, which was also probably the best wrestling match I've seen since... well, it's been a minute. I was happy to see that AEW has at least a few wrestlers on its roster, like Bear Country (and I guess Comoroto, although he still needs a lot of work). It was great seeing a few ex-WWE wrestlers like Pac. Then it gave me a reason to watch some WWE again. The two elimination chamber matches I watched were fantastic. The episode of SD would have been great if it didn't have so much filler. And while NXT doesn't look as good as it used to, I'm kinda tempted to check out a few more episodes.

In general, it's kinda tough because -- just like before -- there are some wrestlers I want to follow, but there's a lot of stuff I don't care about (or dislike) in the way. In the case of Hulu, it's kinda hard to skip to where you want to be. YT is a bit more responsive, but it's still hard to dissect a program (as I realized while trying to skip through that second episode of AEW Dark).

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