Too often I com­plain about the things I dis­like in pro­fes­sional wrestling, but instead of rant­ing and rav­ing about these things, I decided to write about how I would fix some things. Some of you may agree or dis­agree with my sce­nar­ios and are wel­come to comment.

Wel­come to the first col­umn of The Arm­chair Booker!

Let’s start with the num­ber one WWE show:

RAW

• Do away with the guest host­ing and either intro­duce a GM or some author­ity fig­ure to run the show.

• John Cena-Needs a heel turn to freshen up his char­ac­ter. Bring back the freestyles and street swag. Fans will enjoy the turn I’m sure. I would have also aligned him with Cryme Tyme for a solid faction.

• Bret Hart– Should have had the Hart Dynasty with him when he appeared on Raw and align DX with Vince. Would have ele­vated The Hart Dynasty and taken advan­tage of exist­ing beef between Bret,HBK & HHH.
• Bring in the other Dib­i­ase brother and make a Tag Team in Legacy. That way you could have the Dib­i­ase broth­ers for the tag belts, Cody for IC/US title, and Orton for the World Title. I’d call the Dib­i­ase broth­ers Money Inc. as an homage to their dad.
• Reunite the Colon Boithers, Car­l­ito & Primo, since solo they are struggling.
• Ele­vate Evan Bourne into a stronger mid-card feud with Swag­ger and MVP as your core guys.
• No more Hornswoggle!
• Would make San­tino a legit threat and cap­i­tal­ize on his pop­u­lar­ity by putting him in the IC/US title hunt as well.

Smack­down

• Cre­ate a sta­ble with Finlay,Drew McIn­tyre and Shea­mus. Have a vet­eran work with both of these young tal­ents and also cre­ate a tag team as well.
• Push Edge as your num­ber one heel.

• Con­tinue build­ing CM Punk’s Straight Edge Society.
• Move Khali to an enforcer role and limit his ring work.
• Build you Women’s Divi­sion around Beth Phoenix.
• Make Dolph Zig­gler, John Mor­ri­son and Matt Hardy your main mid-card guys for the US title, but ele­vate them into the main event often. This will allow you to both gauge crowd response and inject new blood into the main event scene.
• Chris Jeri­cho & Rey Mys­te­rio need to feud at the main event level.
• Keep and Kane & The Under­taker together and have them be the cen­ter of your Tag Team Division.

ECW

• Bring back the Hard­core Matches.
• Intro­duce a TV Title to give the mid-card guys a title to feud over.
• Shel­ton Ben­jamin needs some sort of mouth piece that can help him get over as a heel. I’d go with him, Zeke and Regal.
• Koslov needs to work on not look­ing so robotic in the ring.
• Align Baretta & Croft with Zack Ryder.
• Chris­t­ian needs to leave ECW in the Draft. Bring in a new vet­eran to carry the brand.
• I would move Char­lie Haas to ECW.
• Con­tinue push­ing Yoshi Tatsu.
• Use ECW to build new tal­ent and keep call­ing up new ros­ter mem­bers to keep the brand fresh.

This is just a sam­pling of how I’d change things. I am sure many of  you will have thoughts and sug­ges­tions of your own. Feel free to share them.

As much as I love wrestling and their spin-off prod­ucts, there are times that you really need to go “What The Fuck”!!!! My dear read­ers - this is one of those times. WWE has decided to launch a series of comic books enti­tled “WWE Heroes” which cen­ters around the WWE ros­ter and their adven­tures. The back­story for the series cen­ters around an age-old feud between “The Shadow King” and “The King Of Kings” (which prob­a­bly means HHH and The Under­taker or some­thing along those lines).

While I appre­ci­ate cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion, WWE Heroes to me is just another WWE attempt to cash in on a new medium. Not to be a total douche but are any comic fans really read­ing this? Do they even care?

I admire what WWE is try­ing to do but I feel that they are spread­ing them­selves thin with so many projects. Between films and comics and poor attempts at main­stream­ing (Raw guest hosts I am look­ing at you), WWE is pro­vid­ing var­ied prod­ucts but none are par­tic­u­larly inno­v­a­tive or engag­ing. I think that the most suc­cess­ful thing that they have done thus far in terms of new projects was the flick “See No Evil” and while it was orig­i­nal, at least used a gen­uine scary lead char­ac­ter in the form of Kane.

I really would like WWE to reach that pin­na­cle of pop­u­lar­ity, but with all these hokey attempts at main­stream­ing they are tak­ing three steps back instead of mov­ing for­ward. That’s my take! What’s yours?

(con­tinue reading…)