Guest Blog: Slammed Is a Hit

Mike Lortz, aka Jordi Scrubbings, is back again with another guest piece, this time on Slammed: Inside Indie Wrestling. The show aired last night, so think of this as somewhat of instant feedback. Also, visit his site, because he's a cool dude.

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Danny Inferno, one of the stars of Slammed

National Geographic aired Slammed: Inside Indie Wrestling last night. Being that it was Wednesday and no other wrestling action was on, I felt it was my solemn duty to watch. I was curious how Nat Geo would handle the subject of indie wrestling. Would the fans be depicted as ignorant rednecks and the wrestlers shown as Neanderthals? Would it even show the promoters’ perspective – a view not seen in many shows or even in the movie The Wrestler?

I have never wrestled, nor have I ever put together a show, nor have I promoted one. Despite that, I know quite a bit about indie wrestling, especially the Florida scene. I have been backstage throughout events at several different promotions and even tried to put together a documentary on former ECW manager Bill Alfonso (long story, maybe one day I’ll write about it).

That said, within the first five minutes, I loved Slammed.

The show starts with an indie fed having trouble with talent showing up on time. Promoter Dapper Johnny Falco of National Wrestling Superstars is on the phone with wrestler Danny Gimondo (aka Danny Inferno). Inferno claims to be lost and that he “found the directions on the website”. Falco then asks another behind-the-scenes guy if the directions were on the website. I did social media for All-Stars Wrestling of Florida, a small indy fed in the Tampa area, for six months, so of course I was curious about the NWS website and their web presence. Like most indie feds, it is poor, very, very poor.

Here is their website (which still wishes people a “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”) and here is their Facebook, which doesn’t have any videos of their matches, announcements of new shows or any pictures from their profile. In this day and age, that’s pathetic. The fact that the promoter doesn’t know what’s on the site said everything I need to know right from the start. Why promoters don’t hire local college kids to do their site or run their social media is beyond me. Newsflash: it would look great on a resume. It’s an unpaid internship where you get to be as creative as you want.

But I digress…

After introducing Danny Inferno at NWS, Slammed weaves the story of the wrestler, his quest to re-join the high ranks of wrestling celebrity, the continued story of NWS and their continued attempt to break even – which I now I know is an almost impossible quest for indies nationwide. All this time, I thought not drawing was just a Florida thing.

Along with Danny Inferno – who we learn was once in the WWE developmental – we are also given the story of Michael Paris (aka Shiima Xion/Zema Ion). Both of these wrestlers, one young and exciting, the other the old grizzled stocky veteran, are trying to make the Ring of Honor roster in an attempt to make living wrestling. Slammed shows both men at their home, in training, and then at the RoH tryout, where they are watched by none other than Jim Cornette and wrestling internet community superstar David Lagana.

Meanwhile at NWS, Nat Geo captures an often heard but rarely seen battle of egos between wrestler and promoter as a 150-lb. grappler named JD Smooth is forced to take on two Kamala-looking monsters. Of course, the diminutive hero doesn’t want to be squashed, but the promoter gives him no choice, leaving him with the eternal command of promoters everywhere: “Entertain me.”

After the NWS show, we hear the promoter again lamenting the poor turnouts of his fed. Unfortunately, that’s the catch-22 most indy promotions find themselves in – they don’t draw without a big name and big names cost money, meaning more fans need to show up. Fail to get the required attendance once and you’ll spend months climbing a mountain, wishing the next show will help you finally break even.

Slammed ends with the ROH try outs of Danny Inferno and Michael Paris. Both go well, as we hear Jim Cornette talk highly about both wrestlers. Unfortunately, however, Slammed does not give us a epilogue and tell us that Paris is now Zema Ion of Impact fame and Inferno is still wrestling for NWS (although he is on Twitter and his following is growing).

Overall, I thought Slammed did a great job of showing the independent wrestling scene. Although it was only an hour, it showed that there is much more to pro wrestling than the WWE/Impact and that wrestlers don’t fall out of the sky blessed with the ability to bodyslam. If you are reading this blog, odds are you know pro wrestling is hard work and making it in the business takes determination, luck, and a little bit of crazy. Kudos to National Geographic for shining a light on this seldom seen sliver of sports entertainment.

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography

Programming Note: Spotlight on Indie Wrestling Tomorrow Night

New Jersey's Nigerian Nightmares, one of the acts featured
Photo Credit: NGT

So, National Geographic in the past has looked at wrestling, specifically, the Bolivian lucha libre scene in their actual magazine. This time, they're running a special on their channel called Slammed: Inside Indie Wrestling. The show airs tomorrow night, that's Wednesday, August 24th, at 10 PM. If you have digital cable or satellite TV, you probably get the National Geographic Channel, but if you don't, I'd say call your cable company and ask politely for it, because let's face it, if you demand it, you'll probably raise your blood pressure, and your doctor told you that you should stop doing that.

You can get all the overview you need by clicking the above link to see if this is something you'd be interested in. I think though that you should watch it though, especially if you want to get a look inside the world of indie wrestling, the hardships these guys go through just to make a few shekels and get a glimmer of hope that maybe, Triple H's scouts or someone from Orlando/Nashville likes what they see. Also, it's not all that often that a publication as classy and respected as National Geographic takes a look at wrestling in a positive light, so yeah, that alone is worth your time.

The Economy of Time: Why NWA Hollywood Succeeds Where the Mainstream Fails

The Cutlers taking it to Johnny Goodtime outside the Showcase... a sampling of what you'll find each week
Screen Grab Credit: NWAHollywood.com (pardon the ad!)

One of the big reasons why I continue to go out of my way to watch NWA Hollywood online is because they have so many stories that keep my interest. If it were just wrestling like the ROH on HDNet show was, with very little serial storylines to keep me enthralled from week to week, I might skip it, might being the operative word here. However, not only do I find an outlet for good indie wrestling, they do their best to tell several stories each week.

Their show on KDOC-TV has one hour of runtime each week. Take commercials and other stuff out, and it distills down to between 40 and 45 minutes of "meat" each week, with the term meat referring to matches, promos and angles. In that three-quarters of an hour, NWA Hollywood manages to put over at least four if not more angles. Furthermore, nearly every other story in the company at least warrants a mention throughout the telecast. Contrast that with the other companies.

Impact Wrestling distills down to between 80-90 minutes of meat each week. Most of it is spent on three to four top angles for each show, some of which don't carry over into the next week. Angles are started and dropped with no resolution at times. Guys don't appear on the show for weeks at a time and garner no mention from Mike Tenay and Taz. The WWE is a little better. They have anywhere between 2.5 and 3 hours of meat each week on actual TV, with two web shows that run 40 minutes a piece on average. Those times can be cut into by fluff segments, recaps of stuff that happened barely a half-hour prior or blatant advertising for patently non-wrestling things. Furthermore, many times, their idea of a feud is the face beating the heel cleanly in consecutive weeks with no real rhyme or reason why the story is continuing after the first clean defeat.

With NWA Hollywood, you get the aforementioned 4 angles minimum each week. You also get a sense of purpose for each one, be it through promos, matches or post-match happenings. Often times, it's not anything complex, whether it's Ray Rosas, Rico Dynamite and Peter Avalon cheating to win a match or Candice LaRae walloping Buggy across the head with a chair. Hell, I think the most "complex" thing that happened recently has been the Cutlers and the RockNES Monsters brawling out onto LaBrea Boulevard, with Excalibur noting the next week that no criminal charges would be pursued from the melee. It's all simple pro wrestling stuff, but the rub is that it works. It makes everything make sense.

Now, is the storytelling perfect? No, it's not. Sometimes, circumstance dictates that they have to drop an angle, whether it's Austin Aries signing a one-month or longer deal with Impact that precludes him from coming back to tapings to continue his heat with Scorpio Sky, or Colt Cabana losing his NWA World Championship because the NWA is an antiquated model that doesn't know what's good for it, or because Adam Pearce got hurt and might have to retire. Sometimes, they tell stories that fall flat, but it's not for lack of effort.

It might be trite to talk about effort like this is some grade school exercise, but at the same time, the effort going into making NWA Hollywood what it is right now is certainly appreciated and it makes up for the lack of production values they may have compared to even Impact. Effort doesn't always equal quality, but when that effort is combined with a vision like the one that the folks who run the fed have, it can totally make for a great viewing experience.

Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!

TWIOT: You Win or You Die, but Either Way, You Get Your Face Ruled

Peter Dinklage masterfully plays Tyrion Lannister in this landmark series
Photo Credit: Boomtron.com

I don't know if you know this yet, but my new televised obsession is the HBO medieval serial Game of Thrones. The show is based off the series of novels by George R.R. Martin called A Song of Fire and Ice, with GoT being the title of the first novel in the series. I don't know, I think in terms of titlage, Game of Thrones way rules over the other one, so right there, you get the feeling that it's going to be epic.

Through the first six episodes, that epicness is justified. The show combines so many different plot devices that it really is something for everyone. It has bloody gore and violence, and some of it is so innovative. Like this one, after the jump:

.gif Credit: Matt Ufford of WarmingGlow

Just in case you don't know what's going on there, it's murder by crowning. And by that I mean the guy is getting molten gold poured over his head. The show also has political intrigue, murder mystery, gratuitous nudity, elements of horror (the White Walkers, who were only shown once so far but will figure in big later on) and Peter Dinklage playing Tyrion Lannister, the sauciest and wittiest dwarf you'll ever encounter. I think this show has something for everyone.

Despite the above exampled depiction of ultraviolence being the norm rather than the exception, it doesn't turn the series into a freakshow. The core of the series, at least through six episodes, has been based on strong storytelling and great acting, the best of which comes from Dinklage as well as Sean Bean, who plays the main character Ned Stark. Right now, there are three or four main angles swirling around that look to coalesce sooner rather than later in a big way. All the characters have some sort of intertwining. Plus, the actual history of Westeros is so rich and developed but extra care is taken to let that shine through without making it an exercise in imagined history. It's actually made a part of the story rather than clunkily tossed in with meaningless displays of lectured exposition.

Right now, my wife is reading the novels, and if they remain as faithful to them as they are now, then things are going to get even more epic as this season and Season 2 progress (the show was renewed for a second season immediately after the first one). If you have HBO and you aren't watching this? They have the entire season on demand so you can catch up. If you don't have HBO, then I suggest getting this when it comes out on DVD, because it's that good so far. I don't expect it to drop off all that much.

The thing is, HBO comes out with so many great shows that it's hard not to go by the track record. For every clunker like John from Cincinnati, they have five critical smashes that either have their finger on the pulse of culture or are instrumental in shaping said culture. From a network that gave us The Sopranos, True Blood, Treme and several other great programs, it's not surprising they delivered with Game of Thrones. The tagline for the show is "You Win or You Die", but the only way you're not winning is if you're not watching. Highest recommendations.

Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!

ROH Sale Thoughts

The second biggest news from the weekend was the sale of ROH to the Sinclair Broadcast Group with the intention that the buyer would produce a new television program for syndication. After the initial buzz died down, the big question was "is this a big deal or not?" I tend to think it is. The sale really doesn't have a lot going for it right now. SBG is not a household name for one. I had to do a double take and look them up to find that they're not a network so to speak, but a company that owns local affiliates, mostly for former My Network TV stations, the CW and Fox. On the surface, that's a good thing. Getting ROH on network TV, even if it's only in syndication, gives it penetration that HDNet couldn't dream of giving it...

...until you look at the fact that SBG's market coverage is spotty at best. It's absent from New York, Los Angeles/Southern California, Chicagoland, Houston, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix just to name a few of the large markets SBG has no presence in. It's unclear whether they have an expansion plan to get into bigger markets on actual television, but for now, insofar as getting more eyes on the product? It's not going to be as effective as they might hope.

However, there is one thing that I think might help defray that initial lack of market coverage, and that's the Internet. ROH will be taking the lead of NWA Hollywood and will stream each episode through their site (and given that Dave Lagana is a behind-the-scenes guy for both companies, that's not surprising). Doing that before they had a TV deal would have been costly, but now that SBG is going to foot the bill for the tapings? It becomes a no-brainer. NWA Hollywood is only broadcast on one terrestrial station as far as I know, so given that ROH will be on between 20-30 will at least bring in more advertising revenue to help defray the costs (which will most likely be minimal) of streaming it online.

So just like that, ROH is now ready to get back into the television game and is already in better position than what they were in on HDNet, ESPECIALLY if there's some kind of advertising push put behind it, well, something more than a Twitter/social media campaign or viral advertising that is. I partially blame the HDNet program's failure on an absurd lack of advertising, which coupled with HDNet's pathetic market penetration, did it in.

Now, I know I intimated that I'd lay off the business side of things, but that was a bit too much to ignore at this point. Still, this has to mean something for the quality of the fed, right? Yeah, I think it does, but how it'll affect the company won't be known until they actually start taping programs later on in the summer. My biggest problem with the HDNet show from a content standpoint was that it always felt like it was just unimportant window shopping for the house show and DVD business. The matches were good at times, yes, and they did have the Television Championship and Future Stars tournaments, but other than that, it felt incomplete, like they would focus on one feud for the next big house show or iPPV in the promos and build-up, but the matches wouldn't reflect it in there. And don't tell me it was because they only had one hour. I'd bet that the HDNet show had more total run time than NWA Hollywood's current KDOC show, but the latter does so much with that hour that it's a cohesive, made-for-television show. When you're WWE, and you have RAW and Smackdown to advance angles, you can afford to have a show like Superstars. When you're ROH, you can't.

If they're going to try and do TV, they need to go all-in with it. They need to make the most of what they have and develop angles that play for TV and play to build up the iPPV events. It's the Teens now. While I can watch wrestling for wrestling's sake, I always like to know that the company has some kind of story to accompany most of their matches. The days of house shows-as-driving-model are over. If they want to revolutionize pro wrestling, they need to do it on TV. Show a wider audience that you don't need to emulate 1998 WWF to make good TV. Show that professional wrestling is still alive. Are they up to the task? I hope so, and I remain somewhat optimistic, especially if Lagana has any kind of input on how things run.

Now, I'm optimistic but realistic. There are a lot of red flags with this, including ones raised by Eric Gargiulo and K. Sawyer Paul. However, the fact that they're on TV and now have a much better market penetration with the Internet-broadcasting included than they did before is still a positive in my book. If you get the product out there, then people will find it, and it can grow. Hopefully, ROH's luck is better this time around.

Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!

Politics can be fun.

About a week back I showed Barack getting rowdy. Actual video. Today, in case you missed it, here is Obama's speech @ the White house correspondent's dinner.  Obama does a stand up job ripping Trump a new one, poetically, and really makes you realize the absurd lengths people are willing to go tarnishing your name IF it will give them a leg up.  Obama, with his charm and charisma, is making politics sexy. No homo, extra bromo.

Can't forget about the TGIF lineup.

Fact of the matter is, unless you're an absolutely uncommon pre-teen, on Friday nights you were usually in the house around 8 parked in front of the rear projection boob tube to watch TGIF.  You all know what I'm talking about.  Corey and Tepenga, Steve Urkel and Laura Winslow, Will and Lisa.  It's really too bad kids these days don't have the same quality programing to tune into as my generation did. Maybe that's why they are all sucking members and running into store fronts while texting and driving.  Fact: quality pre-teen to young adult programing can posi+ively influence the actions of an entire generation in a beneficial manner.  Tell me these theme songs don't bring you down memory lane:

If you can't sing the words to this song what does that say about you? Here's my take: You are a jabrony.

My first real crush was Tepenga. Such big cans, great proportion