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The Katz Files – Arnie Katz

TNA Gone Wild!

The Kingfish Arnie Katz takes deadly analytical aim at the controversial 1/29 episode of iMPACT

Last Thursday night, as is my custom, I tuned the television to Spike Network at a little before 9:00 PST to start the recorder to capture TNA iMPACT. Well, I thought I tuned it to Spike, but when I started to watch what I’d recorded, I found to my surprise that I had somehow linked to the Bizarro Channel.

You remember the “Bizarro” stories in Superman comics? DC’s writers introduced an off-the-wall version of Superman called Bizarro. He looked and acted like an extremely flawed, somewhat contrary version of the genuine Man of Steel. Later, in the name of artistic expression and the right to run any idea into the ground, it developed that Bizarro came from an entire world that was a funhouse mirror view of our own reality.

There really isn’t a Bizarro Channel, but there might as well be. That’s how iMPACT looked last week. I embed my analysis with a rousing recap of what fans saw and heard, but that’s all beside the point this itme. Tall the matches were just aspects of the gimmick.

A two-hour gimmick!

The concept for this dubious television achievement is obviously the nWo. Veteran fans will surely recall how Nash and Hall took over the announce table and presented an nWo show.

This was the same sort of thing, except that the matches were completely pointless and Kevin Nash wasn’t nearly as dynamic at the mic as he has been on previous occasions. Maybe he is still suffering the lingering effects of what was apparently a very serious staph infection. He needed to take charge, but Booker (as “Black Snow”) did most of the talking.

And when Mick Foley “rescued” the program, it really wasn’t all that much better.

A string of handicap matches is just not that entertaining. They also can cause problems for the promotion down the road.

Take the “main event… please! Let’s skip past the fact that it is not exactly babyface to schedule a bunch of punishment matches. The match between LAX and Kurt Angle hurt everyone involved. It made the tag team look weak and, I think, took some of the appeal of a Hernandez-Sting world championship match.

I can’t recall a worse episode of iMPACT, certainly not in the last three or four years. TNA bookers must remember that the cleverest angle is worthless if the audience is not entrained.

And for too much of those 120 minutes, entertainment was in very short supply.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with another installment of the Internet’s fastest-rising daily wrestling column. I hope you’ll come back to join me – and bring your friends.

— Arnie Katz
[email protected]
(2/3/09)