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During this week’s AEW Dynamite, WWE announced that it was cancelling this Friday’s SmackDown in Detroit and moving it to the WWE Performance Center, where NXT emanated from due to a scheduling conflict at Full Sail University. The NBA suspended its season after the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for Coronavirus. With this…
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Dynamite rolled into Atlanta this week, Cody Rhodes’ hometown and one of the most significant wrestling cities in America. That concept—individual cities being wrestling hotbeds—has largely been lost to the sands of time (the exceptions being New York and Chicago), but Atlanta’s roots run very, very deep, and the card AEW put out in…
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AEW has a lot going on lately. Hangman Page is drunk all the time. The Dark Order are, for some reason, trying to recruit Christopher Daniels. People keep losing eyes. Britt Baker is stomping out teeth. Oh, and MJF whipped Cody Rhodes with a belt on live television. With all of that going on…
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AEW ran a show on a boat, y’all. In the grand tradition of wrestling at malls, junkyards, motorcycle rallys, military bases, nightclubs, and New York City subway stations, last night’s Dynamite was part of the festivities at Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘n Wrestling Rager at Sea Part Deux: Second Wave, on tape delay from a…
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A funny thing happened while Hunktears and I were watching AEW Dynamite last night. We were talking, as geniuses do, about Diamond Dallas Page, doing our level best to ignore an SCU promo, when Adam Page showed up on the scene, three fingers of whiskey on hand, to sploosh that liquor all over Christopher…
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At the risk of repeating myself, I want to talk a little about commercial breaks and their function in wrestling in an era where advertisers are so desperate to be seen that they’re willing to share space with what they used to interrupt. NXT made a big deal about running Finn Bálor and Adam…
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Sometimes a wrestling show is just a wrestling show. Given the need to make everything meaningful and worth the time one is asked to invest in it, it sometimes works to the advantage of a reviewer to find significance where there isn’t any, to make an ordinary night seem like the greatest night in…
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Y’all ever stop to think about how good professional wrestling is? I mean, sure it’s a terrible cesspool of weird boomer energy, a medium of entertainment that thrives on manufacturing and disavowing controversy on a minute-to-minute basis, but beyond the crushing despair of constant exposure to the flaws of humanity there is this: few…
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I have a confession to make. I am one of the mythical lapsed fans AEW is always going on about capturing the attention of. Before the debut of Dynamite (and this column), the last major American wrestling event I watched live was WrestleMania 35. Before that, it was an NXT house show in Atlanta.…
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This week we decided to experiment with a different format: LB Hunktears and Colette Arrand typing paragraphs at each other in Google Docs. It’s kind of like a podcast, but for your eyes. You could get a computer to read it to you, if you want. We hope you like it! Hunktears: Hey Colette,…