On January 25th, 2018, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon made the unexpected announcement that he was re-launching the XFL, his failed football league from 2001 that ceased operations after only a single season. Reporters greeted the announcement with a combination of surprise, curiosity, and incredulousness. The mere act of a reboot in 2018 isn’t so surprising; after all, the past two years have seen classic TV series such as the X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Roseanne resume…
Tag: Vince McMahon
On Sunday July 2, 2017, in his Twitter war with CNN, the president of the United States dropped a gif meme like an awkwardly-aimed missile, in which footage of him pounding on Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania 23 was altered so that McMahon’s head is the CNN logo. Behold: It’s so bizarre to be writing about this. I shouldn’t be surprised after the recent trajectory of increasing surrealism in the Trump storyline—the orb, covfefe, Reality Winner,…
I am thrilled and honored to present this guest post by Tom Breen, from whom I very much hope we will see more in the future. It was Tom who just a couple months ago turned me onto Joey Janela, the indie talent whose brilliant carny antics have reinvigorated my love of professional wrestling in a major way. Tom articulated so much here about a wrestler whose work I’m just scratching the surface of how…
Part of me wants to delete every post on my blog and start from scratch after listening to the CM Punk podcast. Punk’s revelations changed everything from a critical perspective. He pulled back the curtain on the company’s ugliness, which I submit we were all aware of and just didn’t know how to confront. Somehow we accepted it as part of the drama, but in fact there are real people sacrificing their bodies and being…