Hang on, wasn't Dusty Rhodes' son called Dustin (and didn't they operate as a tag team back in the Warrior/Hogan era?)? Is he just Cody under a different name, or are there more sons?
Dustin Rhodes had a run in WCW in the early nineties but is better known for his WWE persona of Goldust. Cody is a much younger brother of Dustin.
I've noticed the WWE promoting Summerslam using clips from last year's promo (wrestlers in potato sack races, Mark Henry splashing a picnic table etc.) instead of an all-new promo. Perhaps the Jackass angle has been dropped, and between that and the Benoit story they haven't had time to make new promotional material.
This is a seriously bad looking show.... like a WCW show from 2000.
If I were Vince I wouldnt even know what to do, with Edge and Shawn and the Undertaker hurt and Rey Mysterio and Triple H not back yet the WWE is seriously lacking starpower, or good wrestlers. And because Lashley doesnt deserve it, I firmly expect him to win on Sunday.
Goldust...Broken Dreams... Now there's a match I'd watch.
Mysterio and HHH are due back imminently. Mysterio wrestled a couple of matches on the recent Mexican tour, and I believe he's due back at some point in August. But, yes, we're now seeing one of the obvious downsides of the roster split, which is that they don't have enough really good top-level wrestlers to fill out three separate rosters at once.
I believe it's more a multitude of circumstances than anything. Currently they have a near historic sicklist of A-List Superstars. That's nearly enough starpower to re-start WCW so to say.
Coupled with a very unlucky draft for Smackdown and Raw doing absolutely nothing noteworthy with the drafted rising stars, and, well, you end up with this.
By the numbers I do believe they should be more than able to maintain 3 shows, ECW barely takes any starpower off of the other shows, but the circumstances just led to what's available now.
P.S.
Another late addition is the CRUISERWEIGHT OPEN. Whatever happened to the Chavo-Jimmy fued ?
Anyway, recent predictions say it's going to be Rey's comeback moment, for a logical fued with the champ.
Not forgetting that Vicky's As. GM on Smackdown.
Uh, turns out not so much.
So what did everyone think. Over on a message board I frequent people had nothing but good things to say.
An unlucky draft for Smackdown? Smackdown is always sacked during drafts, and Raw always squanders any Smackdown-grown wrestlers within around a year.
Actually, it can be argued that Raw managed to make superstars out of John Cena and Edge, both Smackdown-grown stars.
Cena was cemented before he became a Raw property.
Edge, I'll give you though. Though he arguably was more lucky than the average lucky break. (Being caught in an affair with Lita/Amy cemented him as a heel, and drove his title run gimmick. Cena's split crowd response ensured Vince putting the belt on Edge. Edge even lucked up with a further cementing of status through Kennedy's injury and problems on Smackdown leading him to come to the show as the main event.)
Cena got a superstar reaction when he first appeared on Raw, I agree. His star rose even further afterwards, but he was certainly an A-list guy when he made the jump.
As for Cena's split reactions, I think those were a positive strength, as long as they were played right. Cena was never getting "go away" heat - there was something about him that turned a segment of the audience into heel fans who actively cheered for the bad guys. The crowd split made Cena's matches during that period seem like a really big deal, because you could tell the crowd truly cared.
Oh... and yes, the Jackass angle has been dropped. Apparently Johnny Knoxville got cold feet after the Benoit affair, and finally decided last weekend that he didn't want to go through with it. (His exact reasons are a little unclear - he might simply have thought that doing a comedy angle on the WWE right now would be a bad PR move.)
Without Knoxville, the WWE jumped at the chance to pull the plug on the angle.
I feel kinda sorry for the Great Khali. You can see that his knees are obviously shot to hell at this point, with the guy barely able to walk, let alone wrestle.
Also...is he actually speaking a language? Or is he just going 'Gronkgronkgronk'?
I asked a couple of my Indian mates who know Punjabi, and they say that while his little translator mate is speaking the language perfectly (and actually saying what he's suppossed to be saying), they can only understand the odd word from Kali. Which is pretty much how his English sounds, too.
I wonder if he has some sort of speach impediment.
Khali's interpreter, Ranjin Singh, is actually one of the writing crew (Dave Kapoor). I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that he really does translate for the guy backstage in real life.
However, I'd be surprised if Khali was totally inarticulate even in his native language. He was a police officer back home in India, and I can't imagine him getting by in that job with inarticulate roaring alone.
You have to love that name change.
"Okay, have we got someone to play the new translator?"
"I'm doing it, boss!"
"Okay. Do a good job out there, er, Ranjin."
"My name is Dave, boss."
"Don't be silly. That's a normal skinned guys name. You must be Ranjin. Ranjin, er, Singh."
To be fair to my friends, they don't speek Punjabi all the time. One does talk fairly fluently to his parents in it though. A quick Wiki check does show a large number of dialects though, so maybe it's like the "American's not understanding The Full Monty accents very well" thing.
Either that, or he's just roaring for effect. Still, a police officer? Imagine being stopped by him for speeding. You'd poo yourself and no mistake.
Yeah... but in fairness, that's the only thing they've done to make him more Indian. It's not like he's putting on an Indian accent or wearing "Indian" clothes.
Actually, by the WWE's standards, Khali and Singh hold up fairly well in terms of racial stereotyping. It's not like he's Umaga (who truly is a dodgy racial stereotype), Armando Estrada (cartoon character) or Cryme Tyme (who are doing a "loveable rogue" gimmick in a specifically black way). And in fairness, there are white guys on the roster doing white-specific gimmicks as well - Trevor Murdoch's dumb redneck act, for example, or William Regal's Daily Mail reader.
In comparison, Khali is really doing a stock "monster heel" character, and that's a character that you can assign to a big guy of any nationality. He's ultimately a distant cousin of Kane and Mark Henry.
(Mind you, there's no excuse for the recent WWE.com article about the reaction to Khali's victory back home, which featured villagers huddling around the television, "a western artefact." Heaven knows how that slipped through, because it was staggeringly racist even by normal WWE standards.)
Their problem seems to be not understandning the difference between "humorous refences to cultural stereotypes" (such as when last year on the UK edition of Smackdown, Bob Holly pulled out a cricket bat and got a cheer) and just plain out and out racisim (the villagers huddled around a TV, the guys with stockings over their head carrying Divari out of the ring like a martyr).
Although pushing it does sometimes lead to hilarity. Vince saying "What's up me n*gger?" to Cena while Booker was there, followed by Booker's (old) catchphrase, was comedy gold.
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