Welcome to Let’s Pretend It’s Any Year Other Than 2020, where the Fanfyte crew talks about wrestling from May in other, better years. There’s been a lot of Atsushi Onita coverage on Fanfyte lately. I wrote about his exploding ring death match against Terry Funk as an example of the tenderness I’d like to…
You may not know this from Fanfyte VCR or any of the non-COVID-19 related wrestling coverage I’ve done during These Uncertain Times, but I feel like my enjoyment of professional wrestling—current American professional wrestling at least—is at an inflection point. WWE isn’t just bad—they’re an active blight on American culture. AEW is dealing with…
With Blood & Guts postponed on account of pandemic, AEW Dynamite this week was a hodgepodge of matches and ideas that weren’t part of the show’s narrative plan. This being the second week of Dynamite in an empty football practice facility, it’s pretty notable as to how far scaled back the production was this…
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…
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…
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…
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…