Samoa Joe kidnapped by ninjas

It's February 2010. Joe has been in TNA for going on five years at this point, and Vince Russo, who was head writer at the time, wanted to freshen Joe's character, so after a match with Orlando Jordan on Impact, they ran a kidnapping angle where a bunch of masked men jumped Joe and threw him into a van:



This generated some buzz as to how Joe would be brought back -- rumour had it that he would get a complete gimmick makeover. But Joe came back two months later as a mystery partner in an eight-man tag match, and the kidnapping was never mentioned, let alone explained or paid off.

What happened? I'll let Señor Joe explain:

I love how so many of the worst moments in three different promotions can all be traced back to Vince Russo.

I like Sexy Star. I really do. The backstory is good, and she had had a few decent matches over the first two seasons, as well as an incredible "No Mas" match with Mariposa. But strapping her with the title was a terrible decision that seemed to be made just to give a woman the belt.

To be fair, they had the sense to do it at Aztec Warfare (LU's answer to the Royal Rumble), but having her pin Mil Muertes clean 1v1 at the end was ****ing absurd. I'm trying to think of an appropriate WWE parallel. Maybe Bayley pinning Bray Wyatt clean?

What's worse is even if they absolutely HAD to shoehorn a women in that spot, Sexy Star wasn't even the best choice. Ivelisse, Mariposa and Taya are all better wrestlers and that's not even counting the Black Lotus Triad.

Just an absolutely stupid decision. At least they had the sense to get the belt on Johnny Mundo one week later.

Draft:
Fingerpoke of Doom
Giant falls off roof, then immediately wrestles without explanation
Gobbledygooker
Undertaker murders Big Boss Man
Big Boss Man/Big Show feud
The Renegade Bait-and-Switch
Vince Degrades Trish
WWF Spoils Bischoff Shocker
Blackface Roddy Piper
Worst Ending in WrestleMania History

CM Punk pours out Paul Bearer's ashes onto Taker

Paul had died THREE WEEKS earlier. Three weeks. So what does the wwe do? Obviously use his death as a storyline where Punk pours out his ashes while Paul Heyman dresses up as him.



How did Bearer's son find the segment?

Mae Young Hand
Dawn Marie/Al Wilson
Claire Lynch
Lost in Cleveland
Goldberg refuses to follow the script
Kurt Angle gets divorced, wife leaves him for Jarrett, it plays out on tv
SF 49ers match
YAPAPI
Aces and Eights
CM Punk pours out Paul Bearer's ashes

No Holds Barred: The Movie: The Wrestling Match

So Hulk Hogan made a lot of terrible movies while trying to become a movie star. That's not so bad. And as bad movies starring wrestlers go, No Holds Barred isn't particularly notable.

Except that Tiny Lister, who played the protagonist, Zeus, in the movie, decided for reasons that he, not Hogan was actually the star of the movie, and made a few appearances on WWF TV, to challenge Hogan. This eventually led to a tag team match on PPV featuring Hogan and Brutus Beefcake against Zeus and Randy Savage.

I still have trouble wrapping my mind around which levels of reality this match is supposed to inhabit. An actor is angry about his billing in a movie, so the fictional character he plays challenges another actor from the movie (who is, of course, just a character played by Terry Bollea) to a wrestling match. To add to the confusion, Jesse Ventura, Mean Gene, and Howard Finkel play themselves in the movie.

The match itself isn't really that bad, as Tiny Lister is a pretty good athlete. I couldn't find a great video of it, but here's one.

In April of of 1996, WCW started airing promos for the debut of a new wrestler who would eventually be named Glacier. He was obviously a bad ripoff of the Mortal Kombat character Subzero. We would have to wait until September for his debut. In the interim, a little something called the nWo got its start.

Anyway, his entrance was one of the most elaborate and expensive of all time, with estimates of it costing close to half a million dollars. His debut was met with, shall we say, a bit of indifference and mockery by the fans. The cartoon era of wrestling was over, and the attitude era was just getting started, and Glacier was obsolete on arrival.



Of course, that didn't stop Bischoff, who introduced two more Mortal Kombat inspired wrestlers, the appropriately named Mortis, and later Wrath. Glacier had no problem dealing with his long time enemies with a complex shared backstory that I'm sure they would have told us about if they ever cared enough to think of one. He actually went undefeated for over a year, but didn't get a title opportunity in that time, because of the challenges in integrating such a silly character with the rest of the WCW roster.

Eventually, even Bischoff got bored with the gimmick, and Glacier became a jobber. He got hurt for a few months, came back and kept jobbing. Finally, in typical WCW fashion, Glacier revealed he wasn't actually a highly trained ninja, he was just a guy playing a character, and he sold the character to Ernest "The Cat" Miller and Kaz Hayashi. Miller actually came out as Glacier a few times, before even that was dropped.

Katie Vick
Death of Mr. McMahon
Winter Roofies Angelina Love
Undertaker Murders Paul Bearer
Fake Diesel and Razor
Three Minute Warning Destroy HLA
Jenna Morasca vs. Sharmell
The Reviving Elbow
The White Castle of Fear
No Holds Barred: The Match
Glacier, Mortis, and Wrath

I was expecting this one to be gone a while ago, and I was perched and ready to call it recency bias, but then you bastards never gave me the chance. Anyway, this has to be pretty solid value in the 11th round.

Shane McMahon returns to Raw, causing a big markout moment. He runs down the state of the current product, and then attempts to blackmail his father on the basis of a secret that seems to leave Vince shook to the core. Rather than simply leverage his way into a position of power with this blackmail, he has to compete in a match. Vince puts him in the ring with The Undertaker. Why does Undertaker just willingly take on this task for Vince? Nobody knows.

Anyway, Shane loses the match, so he has to go away. Except, instead of going away, Vince just gives him control of one of his shows anyway, basically giving him exactly what he was wrestling for at Mania for no particular reason. Also, whatever the blackmail material was has been forgotten.

This was storytelling at its very worst. Just absolute nonsense cobbled together to justify Shane jumping off the top of Hell in a Cell.

Draft:
Fingerpoke of Doom
Giant falls off roof, then immediately wrestles without explanation
Gobbledygooker
Undertaker murders Big Boss Man
Big Boss Man/Big Show feud
The Renegade Bait-and-Switch
Vince Degrades Trish
WWF Spoils Bischoff Shocker
Blackface Roddy Piper
Worst Ending in WrestleMania History
Shane vs. Taker Feud