Pro Wrestling Revolution Workrate Report 11/29/14

So it looks like this show was not on TV for a few weeks, and now it's back in a new Saturday AM timeslot, changed from their Saturday midnight timeslot (which I liked as I could watch it after watching Svengoolie). They've also just gone with the name of their fed as the show title, dropping that goofy Uprising: Lucha Libre, which is good since nothing about the show was an uprising in any way, and a lot of the wrestling couldn't really officially be classified as Lucha Libre. I mean Pro Wrestling Revolution is a pretty dorky name itself as there's nothing revolutionary about what they do. It's not like guys are fighting while standing on their hands or something. Revolutionary doesn't even have to be a good thing. MatRats was revolutionary. It wasn't very good, but it could be viewed as an actual alternative. PWR is really only revolutionary in that they run a lot of similar matches, so the actual act of revolving is appropriate. I'll give them credit for coming back with some new material, as this match was from the 5/24/14 show in Turlock.

1. Famous B vs. Super Mex Hernandez

Famous B is an entertaining guy who works the Bay Area a lot (I believe he's a SoCal guy) and whose name popped up on the Lucha Underground roster (still have not seen him debut on there though). Hernandez looks almost exactly the same as he did in TNA. I actually really dug this match, despite some ongoing annoyances courtesy of PWR (we'll get to those at the bottom). Famous B looked really good in this. He throws a nice right hand and was able to take logical advantage of Hernandez, all the twists and turns made tons of sense. They played up Hernandez' size advantage and he did a bunch of cool power offense including a nice press slam spot (really love press slam spots), some cool throws, big nasty senton, and other cool little things like blocking an armdrag. As in, Famous B leaned way in for an armdrag and Hernandez didn't budge (I love that kind of stuff, and this was even better as B used his speed to whip around and drag Hernandez by his other arm. Great spot). Every time Famous B would take over it was off of Hernandez power offense backfiring. Hernandez held a vertical suplex for about 10 seconds, which allowed Famous B to slip out the back. Another time Hernandez tried holding a different suplex for too long, allowing B to shift his weight and land on him, then hit a cool low superkick for a nice nearfall. B took all of Hernandez' stuff great, really flung himself on big moves and hip tosses, really mugged to the crowd. Hernandez looked as good as I've seen him, so hats off for him putting the work boots in Turlock, CA, a lousy little town. Good match, much better than I was expecting.

So now the bad. The editing on this show is just atrocious, and it's really annoying when they stretch a 13 minute match out to fill 30 minutes of programming. If you don't think you can fill a weekly 30 minutes, maybe you should reconsider paying for a timeslot. The way they fleshed out the time was by showing "Revolution Replays" which were literally just real time replays of stuff you had just seen. So we'd get a nice arm drag sequence followed by a big Famous B dropkick…and then we'd cut to a hot Revolution Replay which was just the exact same sequence repeated, only with a border around the screen and a bumper that said "Revolution Replay". They've done this a couple times before, and it was always when they were trying to stretch time to fill the half hour. So once they hit the Replay 2 minutes into the match I knew we were seeing just one match stretched out to over twice its length. Again, either you have matches to fill the time, or you should rethink paying money to air your program. This match ended at the 23 minute mark of a 30 minute show. The rest of the 7 minutes was taken up by commercials and Revolution Replays. That is just awful. There isn't anything else you had to fill up those 7 minutes? Promos? A music video featuring great moments from past matches? Or just entire parts of the match we just saw, repeated. Awful, awful use of time.

Also, for Pete's sake stop talking about referee Tom Castor so damn much during the matches. He is a referee, nothing more. We don't need to give him credit every time he counts a pinfall, breaks a hold. If both men are down recovering from a big move, you don't need to point out that Tom Castor is counting to 10. It's this weird bizarro world Guadalajara as instead of having matches built around the local heel/tecnico referees you have a very normal unassuming referee who is not in any way involved in angles, who is getting constantly played up by the announcers as being just as important as the match itself. It would be like constantly mentioning the ring announcer during a match. It's odd and confusing as you keep waiting for Tom Castor to do something other than be a normal referee and he never has.