WWE Raw Review - 21st April 2008

This week it was time for the much hyped three hour Raw special which was going to feature the return of the King of the Ring tournament but after all it’s hype it wasn’t the King of the Ring we went home talking about.

Good Points

The Presidential Candidates invade Raw

This is one of the classic examples of how far ahead WWE are of TNA. For the last week the wrestling world has been raving about the Kurt Angle vs. Samoa Joe match from Lockdown but this week the whole world including international press and media are talking about what happened on Raw. After Mayweather at Mania WWE are getting just about as many column inches for having the three major presidential candidates appear on video to address the WWE fans. Yes their speeches may have been terrible and corny at best but they’ve got people talking. I think McCain beat everyone hands down with his video message but I still like the line “can you smell what Barack is cooking.”

Solid card

You won’t get a more stacked raw card than this week’s show with a strong list of competitors for KotR and then a main event which featured the eight biggest guys across all brands in the WWE right now. Just the unfortunate thing was that we didn’t know what the card was going to be before the show and a lot of the time during the show we were left wondering what was going to happen next.

Continuing push for Carlito and Marella

Carlito picked up a win against Hardcore Holly to continue their roll and after me mentioning about Santino being out of breath last week it was good to see him standing on the sidelines and then coming in at the end to get on the mic when he wasn’t out of breath. They coined a good phrase for themselves last week referring to themselves as international superstars which we didn’t hear this week but it really needs to be used a lot.

Doing something with the Divas

It was good to see WWE creative team doing something with the divas this week by starting to create two rival factions the face divas who support Mickie James and the heel divas who support Beth Phoenix.

Bad Points

King of the Ring – Waste of time!

You knew by having the KotR on Raw they had already killed off any legitimacy and prestige this tournament once had but you thought they would at least give it a big push on Raw. However it soon came apparent that it wasn’t being treated properly as for the first round after every match you didn’t know who was going to be next. Then as CM Punk progressed to the finals to face William Regal I thought some good would come out of it with a push for CM Punk but no it was Regal who barely wrestles on Raw and who doesn’t need the win who got the result. This final match wasn’t even the main event and there wasn’t even an official crowning ceremony so the tournament in one night went from meaning something to becoming meaningless.

Why three hours

As I always say for three hour shows these should only be done for PPV’s. Expecting a casual TV viewer to watch an entertainment programme on an entertainment channel for three hours is asking a lot. Two hours you can kind of agree with as instead of watching the show in daily thirty minute episodes like most soaps you get it all at once.

Terrible build for Backlash

They should if they were going to use the KotR done it a few weeks away from any PPV. Added to this the time given to the presidential candidates and the cross brand main event which didn’t really help build anything there was very little on the show that got me pumped for Backlash except Batista and HBK who had a showdown in the ring.

Overall

Again WWE has the world talking which is good it just now needs to work on actually entertaining it’s core audience base as the storylines have become very stagnant. If the WWE fail to look after their core audience whilst trying to get new viewers they will never expand as new viewers will just replace long time viewers that are leaving the product.