A&E Monday Nitro...?
The old Monday Night Wars had WCW VS WWF (no - not the Panda's Wildlife Fund)The new Monday Night Wars will have...
A&E VS WWE?!?
This time out, the competition for the Vince McMahon circus is an actual "sport" - that can be both as colorful and as violent as wrestling is - just not as outrageous (though it seems to be trying to be, real hard...)
Rollerblade has always been at the very least a "contender" for this sort of thing - it retains an aura of legitimacy, through its being a team sport, that "sports entertainment" has not and never will have, since it is more theatrics with singular athleticism thrown in just for good measure...
There is "characterization" here too, for sure... Teams go by concepts - there are the Holy Rollers for instance; Catholic schoolgirls who do not turn the other cheek though! There are the Rhinestone Cowgirls too (Dolly Parton groupies I surmise...)
And then there are... Las Putas! 'Nuff said.
A swift deevolving process right there...
It is... well, odd really, to see two rollergirls bond in-between games (or bouts... or... let's just call them "events" I guess) and come to the conclusion that, since they both have had no luck with men, maybe they should marry each other. Never mind the fact that they are on opposing teams either... *Ahem*
What is REALLY perplexing in all this though?
The fact that A&E is showing it in the first place!
With DOG, BOUNTY HUNTER (who, ironically, looks like the clone of a famed wrestler too - DDP himself, Diamond Dallas Page!) plus that companion series shot in the same vein (whatsitcalled again - not THE KING OF QUEENS, that's a bad sitcom on another network! Although, knowing A&E's recycling habits, they might recuperate that type of programming too, one day SOON... Anyway, it's a would-be KING of SOMETHING... an umpteenth reality show! Where are the "Arts" and where's the "Entertainment - with a capital E" in all that, I ask you? But that's another story I suppose!) and now with Rollergirls, A&E is really letting itself go here...!
Banacek must be rolling in his grave...
posted by Luminous (\ô/) Luciano™ @ 10:00 PM
3 Comments:
A&E's Rollergirls skate the thin line between blue collar and white trash
LARRY MCSHANE
December 30, 2005
NEW YORK (AP) - One of the ladies featured on the A&E's newest series describes the action in its debut episode as "beer, booze, music, babes." She left out cigarettes, catfights, cleavage, cussing.
It doesn't sound very ladylike. But then these ladies answer to aliases like Miss Conduct, Venis Envy, Jail Bait.
Clever, no? Classy? No.
That's pretty much the point with Rollergirls, where The Real World meets professional wrestling on roller skates. The whole shebang debuts Monday, when the rest of the world gets a behind the scenes look at the resurrection of roller derby in Texas.
The Lonestar Rollergirls league was founded in 2001, and features five all-female teams following in the skate marks of old school roller derby legends Joanie Weston and her Bay Area Bombers. Their home is the Thunderdome, a former airport hangar where the bouts are held for wildly enthusiastic crowds.
This new generation of roller derby queens skates that thin line between blue collar and white trash, balancing nights of tequila shots with days of their real-life careers as nurses, teachers and rubber-lingerie designers.
The show comes with a built-in demographic: viewers who enjoy sweaty, scantily clad women waging war on roller skates. Rollergirls just needs to lure them back from the Internet.
Despite their penchant for fishnet uniforms and rump-shaking celebrations, they bristle (in episode two) at the suggestion that roller girls are easy. Still, they smoke and drink and curse like sailors and extend their middle fingers liberally. When Miss Conduct is missing in action at a practice, a teammate offers this explanation: "Miss Conduct is drunk."
Fellow skater Cha Cha could have offered the same excuse when she mistook an alley for a ladies room during a girls' night out with her teammates from the PDFs, which stands for ... ah, forget it. It's enough to know that one of the PDFs proudly tattooed part of the team name inside her lower lip.
Fair enough. These girls are roll models, not role models.
The arrival of reality television at the roller rink is no surprise; the real question is what took so long? The show belongs somewhere in the mix. Maybe in a slot between Bobby Brown and Martha Stewart. Or between the suicidal guy from The Partridge Family and the ex-Dallas Cowboys quarterback on Survivor.
Rollergirls boasts a bit of a pedigree. It was created and produced by Gary Auerbach and Julie Auerbach, the makers of the hit MTV reality show Laguna Beach.
Episode one features the clash of the old and the new, when veteran Lux and the Rhinestone Cowgirls square off against rookie sensation Venis Envy and the PDFs. Lux, the cocky star who's presented as the league's Raquel Welch (remember Kansas City Bomber?), learns she shouldn't skate braless.
Its follow-up focuses on Sister Mary Jane, a special-ed teacher whose skating wardrobe generally features low-cut tops, tiny skirts and panties with the message "No Pain, No Jane." The episodes end with a roller derby showdown where many issues are resolved on the track.
Ah, the track. When two teams square off, it's just like the roller derby you remember: headlocks, fights, dirty tricks. One difference: these skaters occasionally suffer from "fishnet burn," a scrape left by stockings skidding on the track.
Some highlights from the first two episodes:
-Best name for a skater: Blanche Davidian.
-Best line of dialogue, delivered by Cha Cha: "She also messed up her foot at that Jell-O wrestling, when she was on the trampoline."
-Best bit of voyeurism: Lux prepping for the first bout of the season by gently moisturizing her legs.
-Best team uniforms: The Catholic schoolgirl outfits favoured by the Holy Rollers.
-Best pre-game meal: Venis Envy's cigarette while driving to the Thunderdome.
And does roller derby get any sweeter than this? After Miss Envy's first match - but before she goes out drinking and returns to her motor home - she shares a quiet moment with her boyfriend Palmer.
"I could not be prouder of you," he says.
And it sounds like he means it.
The wiley WWE is fully aware of this latest competitor and potential danger for their usual demographics (...)
Lately, they've stepped up the gore factor it appears...
"In one of the more gory scenes transmitted recently by WWE throughout the world on pay-per-view, one wrestler appeared to plant a screwdriver in his opponent's skull, but the victim battled on."
What is regrettable is that the "victim" was one of the classiest wrestlers of all time... Ric Flair!
Of course, he "battled on" - he is used to bleed from his forehead and truly, to him, it made no difference if he was lacerated by a tiny blade concealed somewhere or by any cutting object whatsoever - it is called "juicing" and it adds to the... ah... "spectacle".
It adds believability (up to a point, really) and that is a brand of it the rollergirls will never have... I hope, for them!
Flair has cut himself on the forehead so many times that he is now scarred for life there!
So are many other "old school" wrestlers, of course...
What I object to here, is that a legend like him is reduced to doing things usually only seen in underground acts like the ECW... (which stood for Extreme Championship Wrestling - where ANYTHING went... and I do mean ANYTHING!)
We saw it happen too with Hulk Hogan - in his case, a PENCIL was used to "juice" him up... And it was planted there by Vince McMahon himself too! Ric Flair has a screwdriver used on him by... McMahon's son-in-law, Triple H!
It runs in the family...
This has to be payback for the days when Flair's Horsemen and Hogan's nWo were a huge reason why WCW nearly put the WWE (then still known as WWF - but a judge changed all that...) completely BANKRUPT...
Some people never learn...
Others never forget...
Others never learn, forget nor forgive!
But that is another story...
Surely, thanks to the gore factor alone, (plus their dimwit so-called "divas" too) the WWE will hold on to its fans on Monday night...
The rollergirls have little in terms of hang-ups of any kind... but they won't use screwdrivers or pencils like that!
It's against the Lonestar Rollergirls League's rules!
Personally...
I'll take LRL over JBL any day of the week - not just on Mondays!
*LOL*
Heck, I'll take LRL over "Good Ol' J.R." and the insufferable burger king, J.L. any day of the week too - and thrice on Monday!
Speaking of the "king" - Jerry Lawler - he was referencing ECW as "Extremely Crappy Wrestling" recently... in an obvious effort to actually gain fan support and build momentum for it! That is what "sports entertainers" do best... They are like politicians, really - they mean the opposite of what they say. The good aspect of it here, is that the worst that can happen when "sports entertainers" do that to you is that you will be screwed out of a few bucks... When politicians do it, lives can be lost...
As for that OTHER king... the one on A&E... I will not flatter A&E by adding to the numbers of people who visit their website just to find out what he really is called... I seem to recall that it was a word that started with a "C"... The KING OF COOL? No, that's not it... The KING OF COKE? Too debasing for a network that still wants to be viewed as classy - what would Bill Walsh, host of many a "real-life crime" show on A&E (that is HIS name - right?) say about that?!? He'd go back to... CNN? (That is where he came from - right? Anyway...)
I will guess that that "brotha" to DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER can only be known as one thing and one thing only... THE KING OF CRAP!
Dog... poop... crap! It all holds together! Besides, he has the vague allure of a pimp who spends a lot of time in casinos, at the craps table...
;)
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