Welcome, cats and kittens, to yet another installment of the only reviews that have a time machine that only goes back 9 years, Cewsh Reviews! We have a special treat for you tonight, as we review an absolute masterpiece from the recent past, WWE Great American Bash 2004. Recently we here at Cewsh Reviews Headquarters realized that we were spending a lot of time reviewing shows that were, well, good. Or at the very least mediocre. It turns out that it has been an awfully long time since we reviewed a show that we knew full well would be hysterically atrocious, and that’s just not fair to you readers. So we dropped everything and eagerly looked for a terrible show to sate our snarky appetites.
Initially we considered the rich tapestry of WCW failure, and we’ll get back to them don’t worry, but eventually we settled on this show. Oh this show. If you don’t know what the card for this show is, I urge you not to look it up, and instead to just follow along with me as we explore 3 hours of something that WWE actually charged people money for. I promise, promise, promise you will not be disappointed. Unless you appeared on the show, in which case you might want to just go on repressing those memories.
So without any further ado, let’s do a motherfucking review!
Cewsh: This is one of the Smackdown only pay per views that have grown to mythical proportions in their misery, so let’s take a moment to examine what was going on over on the blue show in the summer of 2004. First we have Eddie Guerrero as our champion, which is awesome, and he’s feuding with the newly minted John Bradshaw Layfield, which is a feud that is either fondly remembered or bitterly spat at depending on which section of the IWC you happen to be talking to at any given time. The month prior to this saw Eddie retain the title, despite losing about 3 truckloads of blood, and now he’ll have to work that magic again.
Then we have Kurt Angle as the General Manager during that brief period where he was in a wheelchair and wearing beige suits to everyone’s dismay. He’s trying to get the United States Championship away from this disrespectful newcomer named John Cena who is probably washing cars or something these days.
And finally we have our main event, which is perhaps the most singularly unique match in the history of WWE. It is a 2 ON 1 HANDICAP WIN OR YOUR FATHER WILL BE ENCASED IN CEMENT MATCH between the Undertaker and the Dudley Boyz. We will get more into what in the hell is going on there later on, but for now just accept that somebody in a WWE writer room lined all of those words up next to each other and everyone else just nodded along like it was a perfectly acceptable suggestion. If you worked for a car company, and during a board meeting you said, “Oh hey, I think it’d be a great idea if we made a car that punched people in the crotch every time they started it,” and then everyone agreed with you, then that would have serious ramifications. Luckily this is wrestling, so the only consequences are how hard it will be for me to see after I tear my own eyeballs out while watching it.
As for other storylines…yeah, there aren’t any of those. But hey, give them a break. When you see who made it on this card, you’ll be impressed that they actually had enough to fill a whole show.
Cewsh: It is likely that most of the people who will be reading this fall into one of two categories. Either you saw John Cena’s rise to fame with your own eyes as it happened, or you started watching, (or came back to watching,) afterwards and have mostly only heard legends of “White Guy Rapper” John Cena. If you’re in the first group, it’s very likely that you have great memories of this time in Cena’s career. After all, he rose up the ranks like a lightning bolt, and had a huge devoted following both online and off. And it is with great sadness that I am forced to point out that the John Cena that we fondly remembered, and even called for a return to for many years, was super, super, super, super lame.
PENALTY: Excessive YOs on the field.
Yeah, that doesn’t rhyme. Like, not even at all.
Homophobic Comment #1.
Homophobic Comment #2. Also, did we start calling Kurt Angle “Lumpy” at some point? Because that’s beautiful.
So…like every other night then?
Homophobic Comment #3. Also, what?
Sigh.
Putting aside the fact that that is the most awkward verse ever said by a human mouth, I also have always wondered whether or not Cena had to run these lines by anyone in the back before doing them. I like to imagine him rapping to Pat Patterson, while Pat nods along uncertainly, trying not to smack him.
Homophobic Comment #4. And a hamfisted one at that. The Semen? Rene gets excited in the presence of a particular batch of semen?
Wait, know what? I FEEL SO LEFT OUT. That you think the only kinds of insults available to a human being involve suggesting that another person is gay or has feminine traits? Because I assure you Jorty McBrickface, you are mistaken.
So there he is, the face of our current company. It would be impossible to guess from this what he would one day become, but it’s pretty easy to guess why the current version doesn’t go back to this well too often.
Anyway, there was a match!
Now, you pretty much know what you’re getting with Booker T and Rob Van Dam. They do their usual thing here to the usual results. The wildcards are Cena and Dupree, and I’ll go ahead and tell you that one of them is very good in his role here and the other one was fucking rotten. If you guessed that Dupree was the rotten one then you would be surprisingly mistaken. He was smooth, always in the right place at the right time, and drew HUGE heat from the crowd. In fact, the highlight of the whole match is Dupree doing the French Tickler to ENORMOUS boos, only to get obliterated by Booker T at the end.
And then there’s Cena. Now, i’ve been one of the great John Cena defenders walking this Earth since about the moment the world turned on him in 2005. He has steadily grown into one of the best and most dependable main event performers in WWE history over the course of 8 years through hard work, experience, and a great deal of trail and error. But at this point he was still just a green bodybuilder with the most awkward wrestling style I have ever seen, and the match suffers as a result.
The match very quickly becomes “John Cena beats 3 people single handedly” which is an old familiar tune. It has been played better, by more competent musicians, and you wont gain anything by watching it again here. This isn’t a bad match, and it evens has some fun moments. But this is a full 20 minutes long and it’s far from worth a recommendation. Now let’s have a moment of silence for Rene Dupree’s career. We can’t see him.
John Cena – Steep Incline – Yeah, he did okay.
Booker T – Incline – It seems weird that all the way in 2004, Booker would have his best years ahead of him, but the previous 5 years had been a comedy of errors with his pushes. It wasn’t until he found the role of King Booker that his whole act really came together.
This is followed immediately by Kurt Angle rolling up in a wheel chair and saying that Charlie is an enormous disappointment who makes him sick to look at. Charlie manages to say, “I could care less…” before Kurt immediately decides to punish him for talking by booking him in a match with Luther Reigns here tonight.
Raised in Hell’s Kitchen, he was left to fend for himself at 16, and actually survived being shot, stabbed, and having his throat slit IN THE SAME NIGHT. The man is a 6’6, 300 lbs walking pile of street cred who can cut a promo. What more could you want? And the hype machine was certainly in full force leading up to this match. Meanwhile, Charlie Haas was just merrily plugging along, hoping that people would forget he worked here so they wouldn’t get around to releasing him. So the winner here isn’t tough to predict.
Luther Reigns – Steep Decline – Luther Abdicated.
Charlie Haas – Push – Charlie would wind up revitalizing his career with a series of incredible tag match in Ring of Honor before going singles, getting over, and then immediately having to retire. Because, well, poor Charlie Haas.
Not that there’s much to complain about with these two in the ring together. Chavo and Rey have similar chemistry to Eddie and Rey, even if Chavo is basically Eddie’s smaller, less graceful, less charismatic doppelganger. Chavo brings the mat work and submission style and Rey brings his flippy greatness, and the mixture creates matches that won’t blow you away, but certainly will keep you glued to the screen.
The story of this match revolves around Chavo’s methodical work on Rey’s leg, which slows down the lightning fast Mysterio, and keeps him from using any of the big moves that he needs in order to get back in the match. Chavo straight up has Rey in his mercy from start to finish, employing a nasty single leg crab that not only shreds up the surgically repaired knees of Mysterio, but also looks goddamn pretty in the process.
Rey Mysterio – Steep Incline – The years between this event and the present are hugely tumultuous ones for Rey Mysterio. He’ll lose his best friend, get a mega push to super stardom, deal with a plague of injuries, and he’ll ultimately retire as perhaps the definitive Mexican wrestler in WWE history. Not bad for a guy stuck wrestling Chavo Guerrero 300 times a year back in 2004.
Chavo Guerrero Jr. – Steep Decline – It’s funny to think about Chavo now, because back in these days a lot of people were very high on him. He was really the sole reason the crusierweight division in WWE managed to work at all, and his run along with his father was genuinely great. But holy shit does his carrer ever go off the rails after this. Kerwin White, wheelchair pusher in La Familia, 8 second title loss at Wrestlemania, John Cena hater, TNA employee. It’s like Eddie dying placed some kind of wild pox on him that he’ll never shake.
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Does anyone else feel like this is going to be our most masturbated to review of all time?
Also, this isn’t even the last squash match on this show. 2 out of 3 matches have been squashes thus far to put over people that had no business being pushed. And we’re just getting warmed up for the piece de resistance. Can you feel the anticipation?
Kenzo Suzuki – Incline – Less people hate him now. That’s something.
Billy Gunn – Decline – But only because there wasn’t all that much further down to go.
I would rather fuck a box of matches than ever watch this segment again. And I’m saying that after having watched it 3 times to get all of the screenshots. YOU’RE WELCOME, READER.
The two ladies here to have what has to be called a match in the same way that a mime has to be called a human being, are Torrie Wilson and Sable, our hot tub hosts for the night. I don’t know if they were feuding over anything in particular, and I am possessed of such a powerful disinterest in finding out that if you leave a comment trying to tell me what it was, I will forcibly ignore your existence for all eternity. They are here to have tits, and fortunately they are quite gifted in that area. Unfortunately, they are also here to wrestle, and if their combined wrestling skill was expressed in a cup size, it would only fit a woman whose breasts were so far inside of her body that she’d need a team of spelunkers to find them. They suck, is what I’m getting at here. They suck to infinity.
These two titans collide again and again until Sable decides that the only way she can beat the rampaging Torrie is to play possum. She pretends to be seriously hurt, and waits for Torrie to conveniently walk all the way across the ring to turn her back, just like anyone would in this situation, before pouncing! She school boys Torrie, and gets the dramatic pin, as both Torrie and the audience at home wonder why a pinfall still counts if the person being pinned looks like this.
Torrie Wilson – Push
Sable – Push
They are both still very attractive women. Neither is involved in the wrestling business any longer, but it would be hard to say that that is a horribly awful thing for either them or us.
Mordecai vs. Hardcore Holly
Mordecai vs. Hardcore Holly
Mordecai vs. Hardcore Holly
If you are the kind of person who is reading this review to find out how this show is, then you can skip right along to the next match because this isn’t for you. However, if you’re the kind of person who has been waiting with bated breath all show long for me to get to this point then congratulations, because your moment has come at last. Now I have to review a match between MORDECAI AND HARDCORE FUCKING HOLLY. And the universe is going to owe me big for this one.
Oh, who is Mordecai, you ask? Well you see, as we moved on into the mid 00s, WWE became enamored with the idea of finding fresh and unique challenges to the Undertaker. They tried out various up and comers like Ken Kennedy and Heidenreich during the time period, but perhaps the most often sniggered about was this very individual. And that was because, well…
The entire stated purpose of Mordecai was that he was coming to Smackdown to destroy all of the sinners and demons that apparently were running rampant there, (though apparently Raw was totally free of both.) Therefore, his obvious targets for his first two PPV matches would of course be Scotty 2 Hotty and Hardcore Holly, because if anyone knows anything about sin in this company, it’s those two guys. It is also worth mentioning that this feud was started when Mordecai and Holly randomly showed up on Smackdown having a brawl. The announcers had no idea why, and 3 days later they still have no idea why. That is a storyline that led to a PPV match in 2004.
In all honestly, WWE had all but given up on Mordecai by this point just 2 months into his run. That is possibly because the crowds did not respond to him in any way at any point, and his whole gimmick was such a dollar store take on the Undertaker’s mystical persona that it looked ridiculously corny and ridiculous. But, to Mordecai’s credit, he could wrestle.
Mordecai – Steep Decline – This wouldn’t be the last time that WWE tried to fit Kevin Fertig with a supernatural gimmick. You may also remember him as the vampire Kevin Thorn, who would stand in the corner while you paid attention to his buxom, upside down valet. Shockingly, that gimmick never got him over, and was dropped unceremoniously.
Hardcore Holly – Steep Decline – He wrestled a match for TNA this year! And, um, he’s had a lot of time to get really good at checkers!
Cewsh: Out of respect to our dear, departed Eddie Guerrero, I will not actually include my review of this match here. That is because Texas Bullrope matches are so commonly bad and have such an incredible history of failure and ineptitude, that not even Eddie Guerrero in his absolute prime could do anything to make this a watchable match. I will, however, share with you how they chose to end this match.
For some context, both Eddie Guerrero and JBL had touched all three turnbuckles prior to this, meaning that all either one had to do was touch the top turnbuckle there in order to win. For some truly puzzling reason, Eddie Guerrero decides to attempt to Air Jordan over JBL’s head in order to touch it, only to discover to his dismay that he does not, in fact, have ups. He crashes into JBL, but manages to slap the turnbuckle. His music hits, the crowd goes wild, and all is well in the world. That is, right up until Kurt Angle comes out, points out that JBL actually hit the turnbuckle first, seeing as how a 180 pound man had just given him a close up view of his crotch, and is therefore the new champion. Match over.