BRM Reviews the 4/11/2017 Smackdown (Superstar Shakeup Part 2)

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 4/11/2017 Smackdown (Superstar Shakeup Part 2)

Post by Big Red Machine » Apr 13th, '17, 15:44

SOME NEW PEOPLE HAVE COME TO SMACKDOWN-
1. Kevin Owens, who is in a suit and now clean-shaven. I assume everyone expected this the moment Ambrose showed up on Raw, but the way they have booked Owens since he won the title means that we now have TWO wrestlers who have pinned the US Champion cleanly that won’t ever get a shot at the title. Oh. And Jericho still needs his rematch.
Also, it means we’re going to have to hear JBL shout “THE PRIZE FIGHTAAAAH!” every time he comes out. I’m not looking forward to that at all.
2. Speaking of JBL… Byron Saxton has now moved to Smackdown, where he will inevitably be constantly belittled by JBL, because someone thought THAT was a good thing to put on TV right now.

Owens comes out and cuts an anti-American promo, then says that he is “the new face of America.” Then Baron Corbin of all people comes out to challenge him. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense because Corbin did actually get screwed out of a title shot by Ambrose getting drafted, but heel vs. heel is very unusual for WWE, and I can’t see either of these guys turning.
Corbin cut a promo that was good on one level, but he also came off like kind of an idiot for saying that Owens and Ambrose left their former brands by choice. All throughout last night in segments like Zayn’s and Rollins’ it seemed like the wrestlers had no say in the matter.
Anyway, Owens dismisses Corbin’s comments but then Sami Zayn comes out… and I was actually annoyed at the prospect of Zayn vs. Owens again. Not because it won’t be an awesome match with very believable hatred, but because they built up the idea that their match at Battleground last year could possibly be their very last match for a long time… only to keep them on the same show and always having matches against each other that were made to look unimportant, and now that we’re having our Superstar Shakeup… they’re STILL keeping these guys together. It just doesn’t feel like a “shakeup” at all.
So yeah, Sami is on Smackdown now despite Kurt telling him he would stay on Raw and Sami desperately not wanting to go to Raw because he’s prejudiced against McMahons and Smackdown is run by one… so when Sami shows up and talks about how excited he is to be here, it feels completely phony.
AJ comes out, so he’s still here. It’s good to see that they didn’t totally gut Smackdown (they already lost Ambrose, Bray, Orton, Bliss, and Miz).

Daniel Bryan then came out to make some announcements. First, because Owens vs. Jericho for the US Title was already announced for Payback, that match is still happening (which is good) and whoever wins that match will become a member of the Smackdown roster. This is the part that makes no sense to me. That seems to imply that the titles are static to the brands, but if that’s the case then shouldn’t Ambrose and Owens have had to vacate theirs when they switched brands? And if that suggestion sounds odd to you then it should because that has never been how this has worked, going all the way back to the original brand split and every single draft and signing since then… which is why this stipulation that the winner of the Owens/Jericho match will be on Smackdown rather than the belt going home with the winner to whichever show he is on is so mystifying. Even in THIS brand split when we’ve had this situation (like Darren Young and Zack Ryder’s respective challenges for the IC and US Titles at Backlash or the Miz vs. Zayn IC Title match at Survivor Series) have always had the belt going home with the winner, not pulling the winner to the belt’s show, which is why this stipulation absolutely baffles me.
Anyway, due to that stipulation, Owens won’t be able to defend the title until after Payback, so we’re going to have a match tonight between AJ, Corbin, and Sami to decide who is the #1 contender after Payback.

RANDY ORTON IS WALKING AROUND BACKSTAGE- Wait… isn’t Randy on Raw? Didn’t Bray say they were having their Chamber of Horrors match at Payback, which is a Raw PPV? Or will that match have the same stips as the US Title match with the winner (and the title) staying on Smackdown? I SHOULD NOT BE THIS CONFUSED!

RANDY ORTON vs. ERICK ROWAN- DUD!
Oh right. There is a Wyatt Family on Smackdown… and they- or just “he,” I guess- are (is) now separated from Bray. Again. Because that worked out SOOOOOO well the first time.
It’s been a week and, as JBL put it “we still have absolutely no idea what a House of Horrors Match is.” Just taken on its own this is stupid on multiple levels, but in the greater context of WWE right now, this is also them rehashing the same basic idea that they used to hype up the Smackdown Women’s Title match at WrestleMania where we never found out what the rules of the match were going to be.
They did a small amount of stuff which was mostly Orton just dominating Rowan. Then f*cking Bray Wyatt magically took over the TitanTron and I actually shouted “NO! YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!” at my TV. This isn’t fair. It just isn’t fair. The whole point of this brand extension is that each wrestler can only appear on one show, which means that I only have to put up with Bray Wyatt’s stupid bullsh*t once a week, and I just did that last night on Raw so why am I being subjected to it again?
Bray said that he was “everywhere and everything,” at which point I resumed screaming at my television. If someone gets to be “everywhere and everything” then why can’t it be Alexa Bliss! Cesaro or AJ Styles or Seth Rollins or Kevin Owens or Samoa Joe or Nattie or American Alpha or The Revival or Sasha or Charlotte or Kane or Rhyno or anyone I actually WANT to see more of on a regular basis. But no. Instead it’s got to be the guy who is quickly driving me towards installing a punching bag in my TV room lest my walls once again start to look like the crater-scarred surface of the moon the way they did when I used to watch Impact.
And of course we still don’t find out what a f*cking House of Horrors match is, so this was completely pointless. I don’t think he even mentioned Payback at all, so it was worse than pointless. When Bray stops talking, Randy randomly decided to roll out of the ring where Rowan is waiting to hit him in the face with the ring steps for the DQ, then beat Randy up a bit, but I can’t take it seriously because 1) he’s been treated as jobber for the past two and a half years, and 2) he look like a gigantic Yosemite Sam. This feud continues to sink to new lows, even though I didn’t even think that was possible after all of the sh*t we’ve seen at this point. Now that I think about it, I’m sure the culmination of all of this horsesh*t will be the House of Horrors match, which I’m sure will be filled with idiotic special effects, because everyone just loved those so much at WrestleMania. F*ck this company.

WWE SMACKDOWN TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: The Usos(c) vs. American Alpha- 7/10
The champs not only come out first, but don’t even get their freakin’ entrance shown. Meanwhile, this big title match isn’t even at the top of the hour slot, never mind the main event. Are they TRYING to bury the titles?
The Usos’ current ring-gear makes it look like they lost their ring gear and these were the only clothes they had with them.
This felt like a twenty minute match that got cut to ten a few minutes for they went out to the ring, but in those few minutes someone did a wonderful job of figuring out exactly what to cut and what to keep so that they could still do all of their big spots and tell the same story and it would all still flow well. It was still great, but if it had been given more time to breathe it could have been quite awesome.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- The Shining Stars have come over from Raw and they attack American Alpha. So Jordan and Gable not only lost clean in a title match, but then got jumped by jobbers. Ouch. Not a good eleven minutes for the only tag team on this brand that people actually care about.

MOJO RAWLEY vs. JINDER MAHAL- 1/10
Yeah. Now we’ve got a whole feud stemming from the fact that WWE are giant attention whores who just had to shoe-horn a celebrity appearance into this stupid match that no one cares about because its only purpose is to let jobbers be on the WrestleMania card (yes, I understand that the reason they do it is so they have an excuse to pay said jobbers more than usual for that one match, but I’d rather they just gave the jobbers a bonus WITHOUT clogging up the card with this idiotic match that no one cares about and the built for it always sucks).
Speaking of… yes, that’s right. Gronk is in the crowd again. Hopefully he doesn’t jump the barricade this time, even though everything WWE did last time has basically encouraged him to do so again instead of kicking his ass out of the building and banning him from WWE events for life like would probably happen to anyone else who tried that.
Mojo wins once again with help from his friend Gronk, who this time through a drink in Jinder’s face after Jinder distracted himself with him. Again… throwing a drink at a wrestler will get you kicked out of the building… unless, of course, you’re a celebrity.

SHANE MCMAHON “ADDRESSES THE STATE OF THE SMACKDOWN WOMEN’S DIVISION”- terrible.
As Shane came down to the ring Tom Phillips said that Bryan and Shane have spent all week “trying to decide what starpower they want to bring to Smackdown Live.” This, to me, implies that there are either trades being made or some kind of drafting going on. The former doesn’t seem to make much sense with the way things have been presented (and, quite frankly, if Owens and Zayn or the Shining Stars came over in trades for the guys who appeared on Raw last night, then they shouldn’t have been on Raw last night at all because they would have been Smackdown guys already), and the latter just makes Bryan, Shane, and Kurt look dumb for wasting draft picks on he likes of Jinder, Hawkins, and the Shining Stars.
Shane comes out and blathers on for a while, putting himself and Bryan over for doing such a good job. Then he asks the fans if they “would like to find out who the newest Superstar is to join [the women’s division]?” Then he continues saying, “well there’s a few others who would also,” and asks the entire SD women’s division to come out. You’d think they all know who it is already because they’ve probably seen her walking around backstage or something. Unless Bryan and Shane are going out of their way to keep the whole division in the dark for absolutely no reason.
Each woman got her own individual entrance here, which I would normally be happy about, but when you consider that the f*cking tag team champions didn’t get an entrance, this felt like a much worse use of that time. Actually, another good way to save time would be to cut Shane’s pointless presence out of this segment.
The segment suddenly takes a left turn and becomes about Ellsworth doing his thing so Naomi goes over and shuts him up… then the Smackdown Women’s Champion walks back to her place in the line, apologize to the teacher for having disrupted the class, and then asks him to please kindly tell them who their new classmate will be.
They decided to swerve everyone into think it would be Charlotte but then giving us Tamina instead. That’s like telling someone that you’re going to give them ice cream but when they open their mouth you tell them that “ice cream” is actually a slang term for a root canal performed without anesthesia. But hey. You fooled us. Good job there, Creative. Enjoy… whatever benefit exactly it is that you get from doing a pointless swerve (never mind a disappointing one).
Oh. And we’re getting Charlotte, too. Good job, Creative. You fooled us again. Now please explain to me exactly what benefit you get out of that?
So Charlotte walks out onto the ramp and… nothing. We cut backstage to Sami Zayn on his headphones. This whole segment was nothing but one big huge, waste of time. There were a million f*cking better ways they could have debuted both Charlotte and Tamina, but instead we got the one that was long, drawn out, annoying, and made the babyface champion look like a geek just so Shane McMahon could give a big, pointless speech and they could do two pointless swerves. This is exactly the sort of thing that TNA would do with Dixie Carter or Billy Corgan over the years, but with a pointless Russo swerve thrown in.

They showed us a nice, big graphic will all seven of Smackdown’s acquisitions so far… and three of them are jobbers and a fourth is a woman so unimportant that she’s been cleared for action for four months now but still hasn’t been used on TV until tonight, and who is basically a jobber as well except she doesn’t quite come across that way because she’s so much larger than the average competitor in her division. And now they’re getting Sin Cara, too, so another jobber.
AND RUSEV WILL BE ON SMACKDOWN! This… I should be happy about, but a short show means less time for Rusev to cut his awesome promos.

AIDEN ENGLISH PROMO- he’s back to his NXT singing gimmick. He starts to sing but he gets interrupted by Tye Dillinger for what I hope is a “Winner And Loser Leave Town” match.

TYE DILLINGER vs. AIDEN ENGLISH- 0.5/10
A battle of NXT jobbers. Oh boy. I’m so excited I think I’ll go find some paint to watch dry.

AJ STYLES VIDEO PACKAGE- pointless.

LANA VIDEO PACKAGE- Um… why is she a burlesque dancer all of a sudden?
Also, why is she not with Rusev?

DOLPH ZIGGLER PROMO- terrible. He buried the whole idea of the Superstar Shakeup by telling us that it wouldn’t feel very exciting in a few weeks. He also said typical Ziggler stuff. Then he got interrupted by Nakamura. Nakamura showing up was the first entertaining thing on this show since the tag title match ended a good forty minutes ago.
Dolph said he didn’t know who Nakamura was. Nakamura responded “do you want to know who I am? I’m Shinsuke Namakura.” I thought it would have been a lot funnier (and a lot more Nakamura-ish) if he had responded by casually saying “I’m Nakamura” and left it at that. Dolph tried to superkick him but Nakamura blocked it and tossed him down. Dolph then backed down from a fight. Obviously I’m not in a position to judge this, but I don’t think they’re booking Nakamura in a way that gives him the opportunity to show casual fans who he is… to show them why casually responding to Dolph’s insulting comment with “I’m Nakamura” is the only way to “explain” who he is because you really can’t “explain” Nakamura; you just have to experience him. And I don’t think that the way he has been booked so far as given casual fans the opportunity to do that.

BARON CORBIN VIDEO PACKAGE- snore.

MORE PEOPLE ARE COMING TO SMACKDOWN- New Day are coming to Smackdown, so there will be no payoff of any sort to The Revival showing up and breaking Kofi Kingston’s ankle just because they could. Well… at least them being on Smackdown means there will be less time for them to talk. Also, this means we won’t get to hear Corey Graves insult them on a weekly basis.

SAMI ZAYN VIDEO PACKAGE- short

TJP PROMO- decent.

WINNER BECOMES #1 CONTENDER TO THE US TITLE AFTER PAYBACK: AJ Styles vs. Sami Zayn vs. Baron Corbin- 8.25/10
AWESOME match! But… the win kind of feels like a step down for AJ, while Zayn eating the pin doesn’t help him at all in his first show on the new brand.


This was a boring, bad episode of Smackdown aside from two great matches. To be perfectly honest… I don’t see much to be positive about for the future.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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Re: BRM Reviews the 4/11/2017 Smackdown (Superstar Shakeup Part 2)

Post by cero2k » Apr 13th, '17, 15:56

the only thing i care about right now is seeing Rusev in Talking Smack
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Big Red Machine
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Re: BRM Reviews the 4/11/2017 Smackdown (Superstar Shakeup Part 2)

Post by Big Red Machine » Apr 13th, '17, 16:14

cero2k wrote:the only thing i care about right now is seeing Rusev in Talking Smack

That will be good. Owens, too.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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Re: BRM Reviews the 4/11/2017 Smackdown (Superstar Shakeup Part 2)

Post by Serujuunin » Apr 13th, '17, 16:56

Only just got past the opening segment, but...

Why on Earth can't a Canadian heel get heat any other way than belittling Americans? It's old hat, and boring besides.

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Big Red Machine
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Re: BRM Reviews the 4/11/2017 Smackdown (Superstar Shakeup Part 2)

Post by Big Red Machine » Apr 13th, '17, 20:35

Serujuunin wrote:Only just got past the opening segment, but...

Why on Earth can't a Canadian heel get heat any other way than belittling Americans? It's old hat, and boring besides.

They can't get heat any other way because there is a subsection of the fanbase that has been systematically destroying any avenue that isn't cheap heat. And I do agree that it is quite boring.
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