10 AEW Moments You Totally Don't Remember
Wardlow Schwarzenegger.
AEW has entered a cold period.
The ratings remain very impressive in the context - which many ignore - of the modern cable TV landscape. On Wednesdays, anyway. The gates however were poor last year, and are alarming now. Dynamite - the strongest draw - ritually struggles to draw over 3,000 fans. Compared to AEW's white-hot 2021 zenith, the promotion looks closer to peak TNA than 2024 WWE.
AEW set a standard of seminal. Anything less than that feels, and this is the tricky bit, like a failed promise. With its ultra-cocky early rhetoric, AEW literally promised to change the world. At its very best - CM Punk Vs. MJF, the rise of Hangman Page, the first Anarchy In The Arena match - AEW somehow contrived to do it.
Generally, it feels like AEW has done everything. They've signed every hot free agent, promoted every style of wrestling, brought back everything - blood, unscripted promos, stable warfare - that you ever wrote down on your mid-2010s wish-list. In a very real and bleak sense, it's hard to feel much for AEW's future when, in doing literally everything, it feels like AEW has "completed" wrestling.
And, because AEW has indulged itself to a now deflating excess, there are many moments you've undoubtedly forgotten...
10. Wardlow's Introductory Vignette
At All Out 2019, a vignette was shown heralding the arrival of a 'Wardlow'.
This was...inexplicable. The upstart sports-adjacent promotion - with no developmental system - had just signed a new talent that had escaped the radar of even the ultra-hardcore fringes of the online fandom. The initial presentation of the character was jarring; framed in a scene that radiated '80s energy, Wardlow, complete with a Terminator-style scar and mandatory hot babe, beat the sh*t out of loads of people at once.
It was a strange vignette, and a bit too grimly-lit and Zack Snyder to resonate as the badass action movie short it was intended to be. It resonated as a drab, gritty reboot of an old school Fed vignette. This Terminator character was dropped; Wardlow instead debuted as MJF's heater in what was a far better story shot through the lens of pro wrestling.
You could argue that Wardlow is right back where he started - as the browbeaten henchman destined to turn on his boss - but if that were true, he'd actually kicking the living sh*t out of Brian Thompson while stark b*llock naked.
Sounds much better than the Adam Cole feud, to be fair.