Reported by Charles Ludwig of WrestleView.com
On Thursday, December 29, 2005 at 12:13 PM EST

IS EVERYTHING OUT OF CHARACTER?

Odd times, we are in.

While it sounds like something all you Star Wars freaks (myself included, to a small degree) would hear Yoda say, it’s certainly a phrase that applies to fans of WWE RAW.

Think about it: You have John Cena, a babyface champ, who cannot walk into an arena without hearing underlying cascades of jeers. Kurt Angle, the biggest potential heel in the WWE, hears cheers every night despite committing what equates to character suicide for each of the last three weeks.

There’s also no general manager, no angle involving the Intercontinental Championship (Edge’s diatribes aside – they have absolutely nothing to do with the title) and a women’s angle actually worth my time destroyed by a possible lesbian divergence (and yes, it DESTROYS the angle).

And then you have me, the rookie, the newcomer to wrestleview.com, debuting in a week where all you’re expecting is 2005 year-in-review columns of one sort or another. Or worse yet, debuting in a week where many of you will be on holiday somewhere, not even thinking about wrestling enough to navigate to your favorite wrestling site.

Well, I am setting bar early for this column – my timing obviously stinks, but we’ll work through it.

Just like WWE needs to take some time and work out what lately has been humongous problems with consistency and spacing, not to mention crowd reactions. RAW is truly in a odd period, one where not even Vince McMahon and his crack staff of Hollywood-experienced writer boys can think of a way to improve the overall quality of the bottom line: entertainment.

Take the aforementioned Angle-Cena storyline (in some cases, I have to give up on calling them angles, which is what I feel forced to do after the latest developments in this overly bad story). The problem was simple enough for the Hollywood boys: find a way to fix the recent shellackings fans have given Cena lately. But instead of doing something sensible like trying to rid Cena of his stereotypical white-rapper-wannabe ways, they decide to go over the top to get you to boo Kurt Angle; therefore you will cheer Cena as a result.

Normally, I would have no problem with this strategy. If you have exhausted all other options, then you do what you have to do to get the man you proclaimed as your ‘top guy’ over. But therein lies the problem – all other options were not explored. Fact is, Cena is at his best when he is walking the line between reality and character, like he was when he first achieved status on Smackdown! It’s definitely not what he is now. Now, he is a walking, talking caricature of every white T-shirt wearing, fast-talking Eminen rip-off. I’d be willing to bet that if the powers that be on RAW would just turn down the rap factor just a tad, a lot of the heckling would magically turn to applause, and just maybe, maybe, cheers.

Part two of the equation is even more retarded than the first. Where’s the logic in having a guy like Kurt Angle start berating troops and bad-talking America? It’s akin to Sgt. Slaughter becoming an Iraqi sympathizer. How did that work out? When I tell some of my friends my thoughts on this, I usually get a response about how I am in the military so I am somehow personally insulted.

I only wish it were that easy. I am in the U.S. Navy, so I have a vested, in not somewhat biased opinion about how American military personnel are talked about. But when I hear him saying the things he has said in the last few weeks, I don’t get angry; I didn’t start hating Kurt. It just makes me feel sad that a character as good as his is being written to stoop to that level so Cena can get some cheers.

It’s an uncomplicated formula, folks. I can get into anything, and so can most fans, if it stays within someone’s character. That’s why berating ‘You Suck’ chanting fans works for him. It’s within character. That’s why Angle running with Daivari works (actually, I see it as a stroke of genius on many levels).

And the formula is why the WWE’s current approach with Angle doesn’t work. It’s out of his character. If you noticed, Angle, after criticizing and scolding the efforts in the Middle East the way most far-left-leaning Democrats could only dream of, Angle attacked Cena and… had enough fans left to get cheers and an ‘Angle’ chant to boot.

Bottom line, it’s not working WWE.

But that’s not the only thing not working in the WWE these days. I really thought we were done with HLA with the departure of Eric Bischoff. I really did. But apparently I am so wrong on that one I couldn’t pass quiz number one in Matt Striker’s elementary school class (if he wasn’t teaching elementary school, please don’t e-mail me telling me what he was teaching – I really don’t care).

There’s nothing wrong with a little HLA, of course. I can say with 100 percent confidence that every guy who visits this site would agree wholeheartedly with that one. That’s why you’re surfing the internet right now. Go ahead, try and tell me your clicking hand isn’t ready. I dare ya…

But back to the subject at hand. The buildup to the Mickie-Trish match was pretty tight so far. The whole ‘affair’ (look, I am being witty HA) actually had me fired up to see a women’s wrestling match for the first time since Lita and Trish squared off in a match so classic, it fit in well as a RAW main event. At that time, the women’s division gave you reasons to watch talented (not that kind of talented, pervs) women in the ring. Lita, Trish, Gail Kim, Molly, Jazz, Victoria. They weren’t the best looking women in the world, but they all brought something to the table in the ring, and isn’t that the reason most of us are watching?

Then Vince (or Johnny Ace, or whoever) decided that three of those women would easily be replaced by the likes of Candice “What in the hell am I doing on Chuck’s TV screen still” Michelle, Tori Wilson and any number of Diva Search winners and losers. To make a long story short, women’s wrestling went in the damn crapper so fast a high-speed toilet couldn’t keep up.

And that is what made Mickie-Trish so damn exciting to watch. We had a chance to see something that I believe would rival that same Lita-Trish match mentioned earlier. You know what, it still might, but it doesn’t matter. One simple little kiss has ruined that angle (crap, broke my own rule) for good. Because now all the perverted, over-horny, undersexed teenyboppers in the arena and at home will think about is an awkward, out-of-character kiss.

See a theme, here? Out-of-character again. That’s the WWE’s biggest problem right now. They get good things going, and then take it just a tad too far. In the last few months, even I, at my pessimistic best, could see things starting to turn around. We get a pretty entertaining “Trial of Eric Bischoff,” then we wait nearly a month to see a new GM. We get a chance to have Chris Masters playing the role he was meant for, getting brow-beaten by Vince at said trial, and within a few weeks he is back in the freaking WWE championship picture. How can that be? Who does he have pictures of? Is he dating Vince’s double-secret never-seen-before-on-television daughter? In the words of the great Charlie Brown, ‘ARGHHHHH!’

Sorry about that, I’ll get back on track now (and to think, I’m not even a HHH hater, anyway).

We get a few great Shawn Michaels-Shelton Benjamin backstage segments, and instead of getting a feud between the two, we get (allegedly) Shelton’s mama, who will undoubtedly NOT be the mama we saw in WWE-produced vignettes in the past.

Wait, maybe Shelton has two mamas? Could it be?

See, we are indeed in odd times.