Day: June 17, 2013

AAA TV (SUN) 06/16/2013 Arena Ciudad de Mexico
***TripleMania XXI***
1) Dinastía, El Elegido, Faby Apache, Pimpinela Escarlata b Mamba, Mini Abismo Negro, Silver King, Taya Valkyrie
2) Heavy Metal b Chessman [#1 Contenders, AAA HEAVY]
Metal pinned Chessman with a casita.
3) Crazy Boy & Joe Lider b Angélico & Jack Evans and Drago & Fénix and Daga & Psicosis and Mr. E & Sexy B [AAA TAG]
Mr. E & Sexy B are from WWL, and beat Angelico & Jack. Drago & Fenix beat them. Lider & Crazy beat Perros del Mal. Crazy Boy gave Drago a piledriver for the win. Mexican Powers became 11th champions. Vampiro presented them with the belts, which brought out Konnan for an argument and a teased match between them.
4) Jeff Jarrett, Matt Morgan, Monster Pain b Monster Clown, Murder Clown, Psycho Clown
Jarrett won and Marisela and Karen feuded.
5) Texano Jr. b Heavy Metal [AAA HEAVY]
Texano Jr. beat Metal, making his sixth defense.
6) Blue Demon Jr. b El Mesías [AAA LA]
Hugo Savinovich seconded Mesias. Axel seconded Demon. Clean match which the crowd didn’t like. Blue Demon Jr. won the title. LA Park made a surprise appearance, announcing he was leaving AAA (he’d already left), handing Blue Demon the title and talking up both men. They all hugged.
7) Dr. Wagner Jr., Electroshock, La Parka, Octagón b Canek, Máscara Año 2000, Universo 2000, Villano IV
Goyito Perez was not with Octagon. Dorian Roldan was with the legends and interfering often, though it wasn’t clear they wanted his help at the end. Wagner beat Universo.
8) el Hijo del Perro Aguayo b Cibernético [hair]
tons of interference and blood. Cibernetico had Perro pinned, but the ref was down and the back up didn’t arrive in time. Perro came back to win with the double stomp. He dedicated the win to Hector Garza and his family (Garza was also honored before the match.) Cibernetico was shaved clean.

The actual talk about the show itself has gotten passed over for talk about the iPPV. I’m going to try and do both, but I’ll do the talk about the actual show first.

The tag match sounds like it was the best match of the show, and the legends match the least in quality. Main event is the style thing – if you like the bloody, interference and controversy style match, you’ll like it.

The big omission from those results was Abismo Negro being added to the Hall of Fame. Abismo family and Mini Abismo accepted on his behalf. That was an easy call and probably in the works for a while. Hector Garza should be added next year.

One big correction on the results: Goyito Perez was NOT at the show. He posted on Twitter about 90 minutes before the show that he was not going to make it. (Deportivo was the first to pick up on this.) Octagon later mentioned Goyito suffered a knee injury, which is an odd thing to crop up just 90 minutes before a show. Perez’s previous posts were about flight issues. I dunno. Whatever happened, it may explain why Dorian Roldan was involved in the Legends match, a storyline he didn’t really fit in at all – either he was there to get hit by Perez, or Perez was supposed to hit someone in the match and they needed a new way to set up a questionable finish. It still seems like a spot that might have better fit with Konnan – remember, he was the guy being credit for putting the team together at the AAA Press Conference – but maybe it’ll make more sense when it airs.

That match kept the Villano IV vs La Parka feud. That’s a pretty great mask match for Villano IV if he’s getting it. It also continued a theme on the night: as much as AAA has talked up it’s great new young stars, it went strongly behind the older names tonight. Ray Mendoza Jr. (Villano V) was brought in to face Texano Jr. in a title match down the line, the Legends match was moved to the semimain and even the tag team title match turned into background for another Vampiro vs Konnan match.

There’s a good line of thought that you need recognizable names if you’re heading to new places, but it’s a disappointing turn of events to anyone who likes the current AAA product for the exciting young luchadors. There was not a big break thru moment for any of them on this show. Vampiro is far more popular than Fenix because of his fantastic 90s run. The problem is all the fans of Vampiro are the fans from that time; anyone new is going to see a man who does not have much left offer. Lucha libre in general is obsessed with bringing back those fans from past glory periods, but they might want to give reasons for new fans to come aboard at some point.

Texano could be pointed as the young break thru luchador, but his impact has been greatly minimized. It sounds like they gave his title match all the treatments of a major match, without actually positioning it like one. Positioning it fourth on the card, behind another title match, and setting up a retired luchador as the top challenger makes it a secondary title. AAA also has become weirdly reliant on fan’s knowledge and interest in CMLL storylines to make the challengers to this title. We were supposed to care about Heavy Metal vs Texano because (among other reasons), they had a hair match that even I couldn’t remember. We’re supposed to take Villano V seriously as a challenger not because of anything he did in AAA years ago, but because he beat Blue Panther in a mask match. For a promotion who has no regard for CMLL’s creativity (for good reason!), this is so weird.

Of course, the heavyweight title is still better than the trios titles.

I’ll talk more about the show after we see it.

Next taping: heck if I know.

iPPV notes.

People who contacted uStream about a refund have been told refunding is in process. Really just a form letter, but it’s a good sign about getting their money.  AAA’s comments on this suggest this part of the deal is not in their hands – it may be something where uStream holds the money until the show airs successfully and so AAA doesn’t have access to it themselves to return it. This may not be a speedy process; uStream customer support seems off on the weekend (which sure didn’t help here) and so they’re just starting to handle it today. uStream should refund everyone, but it would not hurt to contact customer support to ask for one. If you did order the show, let me know how your refund works out.

AAA has been very apologetic about the situation, but also are shifting all the blame  to uStream. I find it hard to believe it’s completely uStream’s fault based on other promotions having no problem with the service. It does not absolve AAA from handling the iPPV failure horribly on the day of the show. There was little word on what was going on, there was evidently no backup plan in case of a problem (which should have been no surprise given other iPPVs) and users had to wait until about midnight to get a solution. AAA was unprepared.

Again, iPPV revenues for TripleMania were not much. If I had to guess, I’d guess it was less than they paid for Matt Morgan. There’s the issue of annoying a dedicated group of fans. There’s also the issue that AAA wants to run in two different countries as essentially two different companies, and the level of issue here doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in that. Maybe they just didn’t have the manpower to make sure affected people were kept informed about the outage yesterday, but if they didn’t have enough for that, are they going to be handle the logistics of TV tapings in different countries? 1 bad iPPV doesn’t mean they can’t pull this off, but throw in things like whatever happened with Octagon Jr.  and other issues and you should have some doubts about this. AAA was ambitious to put on an iPPV, but they were not capable of their ambitions. AAA’s ambitious to run in the US, and I don’t know.

I think there also a cultural divide going on. As a hardcore wrestling fan in the US, we’re tend to be more skeptical/paranoid about wrestling promotions. We tend to look for them to stay true to carnival roots, focused on ways to scam the money from the marks, and the entertaining stuff that happens in between is just a happy accident. That’s really not true of most promotions, but I think we’ve got our guards up for something like to happen. (Unfortunately, I think this is why the Masked Republic Kickstarter has struggled so far.) When a show takes $15 for a show that didn’t happen, that plays right into those beliefs. I’m not sure it’s the same feeling in Mexico or elsewhere. I kind of get the vibe that it’s more a “they tried, these things happened, let’s just move on” in some places, but then I also saw a lot of angry words in Spanish in uStream’s chat box last night.

Update 1:30pm: Marisela Pena is saying they flew in a uStream tech from Germany who could not get the stream to work. AAA had no problem broadcasting the show up to the point where uStream was supposed to take over, so they feel it’s uStream’s fault. The uStream tech blamed AAA.