March is a great month for UFC fans, with a ton of great events lead­ing the way towards this year’s install­ment of The Ulti­mate Fighter. With the UFC on Ver­sus on March 21st,  fol­lowed by UFC 111 - St. Pierre vs. Hardy on March 27th, and of course, Ultimate Fight Night 21 on March 31 ‚the UFC has all the bases cov­ered in terms of pro­mo­tion and great events lead­ing towards TUF’s Sea­son 11 pre­miere — also on March 31st.

This sea­son, a new for­mat will debut that plans to freshen up and rein­vig­o­rate the TUF pro­gram. With coaches Tito Ortiz & Chuck Lid­dell, you can expect great coach­ing, great fights and bad blood between these two that will make this another must-see season.

It’s a  great time to be a UFC fan. Here are this season’s competitors:

The Ulti­mate Fighter pre­mieres on SpikeTV on Wednes­day, March 31st — check your local list­ings for showtimes.

Iron Man 2 is due in the­atres in two months, and this new trailer makes me appre­ci­ate the work that Jon Favreau has put into this fran­chise. Of course the big sell is the onscreen debut of War Machine — now played by Don Chea­dle, who replaced Ter­rence Howard.  We can’t for­get  the Black Widow as well, who looks like she will make things inter­est­ing for Mr. Stark.

Mickey Rourke and the always awe­some Sam Rock­well are your vil­lains from what we’ve seen so far. Rourke will play Whiplash (who may or may not also become Crim­son Dynamo) and Rock­well is crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind and busi­ness­man Justin Hammer.

Iron Man 2 looks like it has the right spark to start the new sum­mer block­buster sea­son and quite frankly I wouldn’t have it any other way.

For months now I have been cov­er­ing the newest char­ac­ters is SSF4 and I had heard that one more remained to be revealed. It turns out that this new chal­lenger was going to be com­pletely new. Hakan appears to have a very slip­pery and oily appear­ance which aug­ment his attacks and give him a unique fight­ing style which appears to be sim­i­lar to Hugo with a bit Zang­ief and Alex as well . My 1st impres­sion was that he looked kind of hokey but after watch­ing some game­play footage I feel he may prove dan­ger­ous in the right hands just like Rufus.The bat­tle begins anew in April!!!

Enjoy!

Video Credit: IGN & Kotaku

Image Credit:Geek Week

I started this weeks episode pretty tame but my com­po­sure slowly unrav­eled over the course of the broad­cast. Here are some of the things that were discussed

MMA

• UFC on VS was discussed
• UFC PPV events
• Andrei Arlovski returns to Strikeforce
• Strike­force on CBS
• James Toney signs with the UFC and will trained for MMA by Juanito Ibarra.
• UFC will run an event on 4/17 to com­pete against Strikeforce

Wrestling

• Umaga’s cause of death revealed
• Awe­some Kong’s TNA status
• Upcom­ing RAW guest hosts
• Recently released WWE superstars
• Impact becomes the “Whole Dam Show” on 3/8

Video Games

• Heavy Rain is # 1 in the UK
• Activi­sion vs Infin­ity Ward
• Splin­ter Cell Con­vic­tion Xbox 360 bundle
• Sony acquires Media Molecule
• Halo Reach — Multiplayer

Movies

• DC movie plans
• Max Steel becomes Stretch Armstrong
• Tron:Legacy a trilogy?
• My thoughts on Zoolan­der 2 & the Arthur remake star­ring Rus­sell Brand
• Trans­former movie news
• Abra­ham Lin­coln: Vam­pire Hunter– WTF!!!
• Gilligan’s Island : The Movie
• Iron Man 2 on Kim­mel after the awards on 3/7
• Doo­gie Howser and the smurfs ?
• Green Lantern in 3D
• Marco Polo the movie?

Spe­cial thanks to Don Ander­son from Tum­blin with Tum­ble­weed for his awe­some call with the late Dud­ley Moore

This weeks plugs

• GirlGamer.com
• MMAValor.com
• MMAHotstuff.com
• Darksiders.com
• Haydndalton.wordpress.com
• VGNRadio.com
• ClevelandSportsRadio.net
• Bornstubbornradio.com
• OCRemix.org
• MMAJunkie.com
• 411mania.com
• Filmdrunk.com

Next week : Dark­siders returns to MTR!

It feels like only yes­ter­day when I watched my first MMA event - which hap­pened to be the orig­i­nal UFC Super Fight. After watch­ing, I real­ized that this sport could only be on PPV due to the sheer amount of vio­lence it pre­sented. Since those days, the UFC obvi­ously has come a long way — not only in terms of fights but also in allow­ing MMA to tran­scend the moniker of a “bar­baric” sport­ing event. While the sport has numer­ous orga­ni­za­tions and tons great fight­ers, the suc­cess of sport has always hinged on fans and it cross­ing over into the main­stream. The UFC slowly started get­ting real spon­sors like Harley David­son, Burger King and a host of oth­ers. MMA was slowly gain­ing accep­tance and com­pa­nies were embrac­ing the pro­mo­tion the sport got their prod­ucts. Com­pa­nies like BSN, which aren’t usu­ally widely heard of, are a per­fect exam­ple of MMA help­ing them become known in main­stream media. Now when I enter a GNC and see a Syntha-6 bot­tle it has a lit­tle UFC logo next to it. It is things like this that help move the sport forward.

Nowa­days, you open a mag­a­zine and you see MMA fight­ers (both male and female) endors­ing prod­ucts. Whether it’s t-shirts, sup­ple­ments or apparel, Mixed Mar­tial Arts has become a viable mar­ket­ing machine that cap­tures the key demo­graph­ics for a lot of prod­ucts across the board.

Let’s not for­get that MMA is now seen on broad­cast TV, thanks in part to the now defunct Eli­teXC, as well as Strike­Force, which broad­casts on CBS. In addi­tion to that, com­pa­nies like Fat­head are now acknowl­edg­ing MMA fight­ers as “main­stream” ath­letes with “main­stream” appeal. You can now hear names like GSP, Fedor, Gina Carano, Chuck Lid­dell and many oth­ers men­tioned in the same sen­tences as ath­letes like Michael Phelps, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade. This shows that com­bat sports other than box­ing have now assim­i­lated them­selves into today’s sports cov­er­age and beyond. 

Here are just a few exam­ples of how MMA is now part of main­stream media.

(con­tinue reading…)