Punchkick

So my brothers are watching WWE Raw right now, and since I am in the same room I am watching it as well.

Confession time: 10 years ago I was really huge into wrestling.

And to a smaller extent, I still am. I don't know if that means I lose all my cool points. Or like half my cool points. Did I ever have any cool points to begin with?

Anyway, it gets a bad rep because it's sort of stupid and silly and trashy and what not. Which are a lot of the reasons why I still enjoy it. I mean, it's basically pure camp, as these people do the most asinine things in the world and get away with it because it's operating in it's own little subset of popular culture. Like, ref gets distracted, bad guy hits good guy with chair, ref doesn't notice a thing even though it made a huge crashing noise, bad guy wins. It doesn't make sense, but you don't care since everything else is just as silly. So as long as you don't take anything seriously, then it can be somewhat enjoyable.

So I'm watching it now, because I'm trying to do stuff with my brothers and all that jazz. I don't know what I'm going to do with this... mainly complain that it isn't as good as my heyday (which was in 1997-1998, for the record.)

They're doing a bunch of stuff with wrestlers that were still around back then, though. Chris Jericho, Triple H, and The Big Show are all out in the ring, arguing about the next PPV... and Bob Barker and Shaq. Now, I have to say that Chris Jericho was one of my favorites back in the day... he was the "heel", but he was so awesome as this whiny, egotistical prick. Like this video, in which he's in a fued with Dean Malenko, the "Man of 1,000 Holds," trying to one up him by claiming to be the "Man of 1,004 Holds" and PROVING IT!



Well, I like it.

There's this gal with a gimmick that she's also a pop singer... and is terrible at it. Anyway, she won a title, and then celebrated by singing to everyone and getting booed like crazy. And then she lost. It was pretty cool.

Everyone else seems kind of generic, though. I think it's because the WWE is more of a corporation rather than crazy travelling circus, so they have to run everything through some "make-this-acceptable-for-our-stockholders" filters, which is kind of unfortunate, because stockholders are boring and would never approve of a dancing fat guy whose finisher is to stick his behind into other people's faces.

People wrestled. Some guys even wrestled TWICE! Wow, what a treat. Except that they really didn't seem all that interesting other than being generically good or evil.

So yeah.