Irrelevant But Awesome

Joel:  I have to say, it’s watching WrestleManias like this that make me wonder how more modern WrestleManias are going to look to an audience that is watching them thirty years from now. Yes, by this point they’re really starting to get the “WrestleMania feel” down. The show itself feels like a big deal, but pretty much all of that is centered around one match. The Mega Powers feud is a storyline that has pretty much been a year in the making since Randy Savage won the title at WrestleMania the previous year, but no other match on the card has that kind of feel to it. Instead it simply feels like there was a card to fill so they filled it. It didn’t help that so much time was dedicated to the Morton Downey Jr. segment which felt like a long Raw segment that somehow stumbled its way onto WrestleMania. (I know Raw didn’t exist yet, but you know what I mean.) Looking at this makes me wonder how we’re going to feel looking back at, let’s say WrestleMania 29. With so much buildu...

Joel:  In many ways, this episode is everything that I love about this show. It’s no secret that the show has a very strong liberal leaning. However, just because a character is conservative, that doesn’t mean that the show views that character as backwards or dumb. Case in point, Ainsley Hayes is a character that despite being a Republican is able to go back and forth with any member of the White House Staff. She is a smart, confident, and capable character and is able to hold her own opinions and back them up with facts just as well as any liberal character in the show. But what’s even better is how the show makes a point of having both a republican (Ainsley) and a democrat (Bartlet) talk about what it means to work in the white house. Despite the fact that they had very different ideals about what is best for the country, the both have the best interests of the American people in mind when they say how they feel. There is a moment where President Bartlet talks about how ...

Joel:  After two episodes to kick of the season that focus on the shooting, It’s a bit jarring to go into the next episode with the “just another day at the White House” feel that was the starting point of so many filler episodes from the last season. Yes there is mention of the shooting having recently happened. Josh is clearly still recovering, and Toby wants to use the jump in approval numbers to take a hard stance on gun control. Charlie is also working through the events of the season opener, but really what this episode does is remind us that just because the president gets shot, everything doesn’t just shut down. There’s still a country to run, issues to be discussed and citizens to provide for. This episode serves to get us back to the status quo of The West Wing, to get us back to that feel of what a day is like in the lives of these people. There’s always some new issue to discuss with it’s own obstacles to overcome. We even get a verbal beatdown from President Bar...

Joel:  A lot of times where there is a two hour episode of a tv show it’s pretty easy to see how the episode has been prepared for its eventual split when it comes to syndication. There is a problem that gets pretty much solved in the first hour, just in time for a second problem to come along for the remainder of the show. In the Shadow of Two Gunmen is not like that. Parts I and II are clearly one two hour long episode. Both the emergency room story and the flashbacks go through both episodes. However, just like the last one, in the second half of the flashbacks we see that even at that point, Bartlett had the potential to be a truly great president. Bartlett is a deeply flawed man and the show doesn't shy away from that. He’s short tempered and can be moody and rude when he doesn’t like something. He’s also not very good at letting something go. But when it really comes down to it, he’s also the kind of person who will go to the airport to talk to you if you need that. E...

Joel:  Of course there was going to be a flashback episode where we got to see everyone meet at some point. And episode like that is almost a requirement of a long running show like this one. To me though, the idea of doing this during the emergency trip to the hospital episode was a fantastic decision. This is not a show where the doctors are the main characters and the difficulties and dangers of emergency surgery are not really what we a watching The West Wing for. Instead our main characters are the ones that are sitting for hours on end in the waiting room with nothing to do but wait and worry, and be with your thoughts. Showing the flashbacks here help to give us the feeling of waiting for news from the doctors as we all wait anxiously. It’s also worth mentioning that the flashbacks themselves happen to be fantastic. In just a quick moment we learn a lot about how the relationship between the president and the vice-president formed and why it is the way that it is toda...

Irrelevant But Awesome Productions and Inside Pulse presents: Trashy Ring Attire's TRASH-UPS VOLUME ONE! Mixed by TRA's Jonah Kue, this is the first collection of wrestling/hip hop mash-ups that are often used as the opening and closing themes for Trashy Ring Attire! The track listing is as follows: 1. Brock Lesnar X Kendrick Lamar - "Brockseat Freestyle" 2. Bayley X Eminem - "The Bay I Am" 3. Randy Orton X Kanye West - "Voices Can't Tell Me Nothin'" 4. Rusev X Childish Gambino - "Bulgarian Bonfire" 5. Roman Reigns X 50 Cent - "Reigns Over Many Men" 6. Seth Rollins X Drake - "Trophies for the Architect" 7. Dean Ambrose X Busta Rhymes - "Dangerous Asylum" 8. Bray Wyatt X Lil Wayne - "A Milli for Sister Abigail" To download your free copy of this mixtape, click here or on the album cover:

SideShowBob:  Two things became apparent with this Wrestlemania.  1) As their budget grew, the Wrestlemania hype and packaging crew was starting to show what they were capable of, given the limitations of the time; and 2) ‘One Night Pay Per View Tournaments in WWF/E’ work great on paper but not so well in execution.  This is as good as one of those gets.  Macho Man’s arc was blatant, but he had the crowds support already.  The rest of the tourney matches were crap, with the shock being Hogan or Andre weren’t crowned. Speaking of Hogan Andre 2, the leadup to that was a complete mindfuck to kids of my generation.  You were left wondering how the hell did they do that...  Think I’m alone, go read the excerpt about this from Chris Jericho’s book.  It was madness… Speaking of madness, they couldn’t possibly pass on Savage Steamboat 2 in the same tournament right?  Oh wait, yes they did..  Along with an absolute snoozefest time li...

Joel:  The season one finale of The West Wing start off on such a high note. We get a “town hall” meeting with the president that seems to be running very smoothly. Charlie is happy about something that Bartlett said because it came from information that Charlie provided. There is a signal being passed around by the staff and everyone seems to be happy or relieved to be seeing the signal. It looks like it’s been a long day, but a good day in the end. And we’ve seen this type of setup before back in an earlier episode where Josh was a guest lecturer. We know that this is the end of the story and most of the episode is going to be told in flashback. So whatever problems we learn about over the episode, they’re going to be solved in the next 40 minutes or so. And that’s pretty much what happens. We learn about the downed pilot who is found and rescued by the end of the episode. Toby’s brother is safe. Everything is all wrapped up in a nice little package to close out the seaso...

SideShowBob:  Why does this seem like the first real Wrestlemania as we know it?  I think it’s because it took itself seriously.  The names were by now familiar.  The builds were far better, and are now available on the WWE Network.  That shit alone is worth my $9.99/month (Seriously go watch the old shows).  The visual of the arena is still awe inspiring.  The matches weren’t great, the one obvious exception in Savage/Steamboat.  It had the idea of the defining “Wrestlemania Moment” when Hogan slammed Andre. The rest of the card was what you could expect for its time – the tag teams were the workhorses of live shows.  All in all, this is by far my favorite Wrestlemania for where I was at the time.  This defined how a larger than life show should be done to me.  That said, Bundy is relegated to elbow dropping midgets, the Bulldogs and Tito lost to the Hart Foundation and Dangerous Danny Davis.  Honkytonk beat Jake the S...

Joel:  This episode is largely framed around the forty-eight hours that it takes to put out a national poll. I love how everyone in the episode is trying to act optimistic about what they think will surely be bad news (save CJ who ends up being right) and at the same time still have a whole country to run. I think that might be my favorite recurring theme in the show. There’s never just one thing to address. No matter what there are always more fires to be put out than there are staff members to do so. But that people just start rolling up their sleeves and facing the impossible tasks anyway. And that’s worth a boost in the polls. I also want to point out that Charlie is the very definition of taking the high road in this episode. He clearly has very strong feelings about Cochran and they aren’t positive ones, yet he does nothing to hurt the man or his reputation even though he is clearly in a position now that he could if he wanted. Getting to see somebody you hold in low r...

Joel:  This isn’t the last episode that we’ll see Mandy in, but it’s pretty much the last time that a story revolves around the character in any way so I wanted to take this time to talk about Mandy for a second. The character of Mandy was a really good idea to have on a show like this where the audience would get to see the PR side of politics. It’s a great thing to explore, but as the season went on, so much of that got wrapped up into CJ’s storylines with her having to spin something bad as good to the press, or try and spin something that’s a very big deal as a non-story. By the end of the first season, most of CJ’s issues had to do with some sort of PR situation, at least in some degree and Mandy as a character was becoming a bit of a redundancy. Plus, due to the fact that the character was intentionally written as a force outside the White House staff, Mandy as a character had a hard time fitting in with the rest of the cast that was already becoming a very tight knit ...

SideShowBob:  How did I finally get to see this?  My grandmother showed up with a bootleg on beta.  It was a type of VCR.  Yes the damn thing even had a remote on a wire like I mentioned in the last article... So what do I remember of the build…  For starters, Roddy Piper spent the full year being a total dick to Mr. T wherever they overlapped.  Sometimes they would show up on each other’s sets.  That’s called cross promotion my friends..  Piper on the stick was pure gold antagonizing T, he even shaved a midget, and we got a boxing match out of it, because you know, Clubber Lang…  Also, Big John Studd and King Kong Bundy teamed up under Bobby The Brain Heenan since the last Wrestlemania..  Which led to Bundy “avalanching” (a splash in the corner) Hogan several times, setting up their steel cage match.  There was going to be the debut Wrestlemania match of Jake the Snake Roberts.  George Steele was chasing another “rook...