BRM Reviews the First Three Minutes of the 5/21/2021 Smackdown

[Big Red Machine]

They always call the Thunderdome the “award-winning WWE Thunderdome,” but does anyone know what award they actually won? I assume that if they had won an Emmy for set-dressing we’d have heard about it non-stop so I can’t be that. I don’t even know what category of award it would fall under. Is there some group that compares and gives out awards for use of giant screens (Tronnies?).

OPENING SEGMENT- very bad

This episode of the Parade of Champions, so we start off with all of the champions (and Commander Azeez) standing on the stage in their nice little row, making them look like little puppets.
Sonya Deville is in the ring, and she announces that WWE has announced that they have “returned to touring.” This would have been fine if they hadn’t put those f*cking press clippings up. Doing that changes it from an announcement into an exercise in self-gratification. Just making the announcement would be showing someone pictures of your recent wedding. What WWE is doing here is saying “hey, do you want to see some picture of my wedding?” and then making sure that every single picture you show the person is you, your spouse, and some major celebrity who was at your wedding. Your not doing it to show people pictures of your wedding. You’re doing it to make the people you’re showing the pictures to think you’re important.
Sonya says that she wants to thank the people who have worked so hard over the past year. “Oh, that’s nice. They’re going to thank the production crew involved with making the award-winning WWE Thunderdome work,” I thought. WRONG! Sonya meant the current champions. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but somehow I was.
Sonya runs down the list of champions. She calls Nattie & Tamina “Smackdown’s own,” which is funny, because of all of the champions on the show, they are the ones now LEAST tied to Smackdown. And they’re all technically “Smackdown’s own,” which makes singling any of them out kind of strange, and especially when you do so to the only ones who can appear on Raw at will.
Commander Azeez gets Apollo a mic and he cuts the standard heel promo where he starts by whining about being made to defend his title, but then confidently said he’d destroy all of his opponents. Once he was done, Sonya went right back to going down the line of champions. She ended by welcoming Roman Reigns out to the ring. Roman, of course, had not been standing in a neat little line with the other so he could wait for the corporate spokesperson to give him his little acknowledgement because he’s a not a f*cking puppet.
It was at this point that I decided that I was not watching any more of this show, but I had to get the following thought out there, because it was too terrifying to keep bottled up inside me:
WWE KNOWS that this sort of thing makes people look bad. That’s why the biggest stars often aren’t forced to stand in the big gaggles on the stage, or why you don’t see them at whatever stupid backstage parties that inevitably turn into food fights. And that’s why Roman Reigns wasn’t standing out here with the rest of them. Or at least that’s what we all used to think, but I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.
Despite this showing being called a “parade of champions,” there is only one title match on this show (the aforementioned IC Title match). Any normal human would have just opened the show with Sonya making the big announcement, then either had her plug the IC Title match and then the announced would pitch to Apollo cutting his promo backstage, or have Sonya introduce Roman if that needs to be next and saved Apollo’s promo for later. But WWE has become so obsessed with this idea of grand presentation that they somehow thought this was a better way to do things, even though it makes all of the non-Roman champions (and especially the ones who didn’t even get to talk) feel like they’re not stars and rather just little worker bees, and then they had to come up with a ridiculous name for this thing to justify doing it and because they think calling something a grandiose-sounding but completely silly name like a “parade of champions” will make people think it’s important.
Given that their mindset has become that f*cked up, I want to leave you with the following thought: What if they actually don’t know that this makes everyone else look like lesser stars, and the reason they didn’t have Roman out here, too, is that they think it puts some sort of heat on him for not being a team player? What if a good chunk of the booking that has helped Roman’s character work so well is actually a happy accident; the unintended consequence of some other goal WWE has been trying to achieve this whole time, and they don’t realize part of what is making the character work? It’s not like it hasn’t happened before (Bryan got over because they jobbed him out and fans were angry about it, so they’ve tried to do it with other babyfaces; Rock got over by being funny so WWE has scripting everyone else to be funny for years with little success at all, and certainly no success in making the next Rock on purpose).


With that worry thought, I bid you adieu, because I realized I have much better wrestling to be watching than this crap. And I’m saying that about the BETTER main roster show.