10 Times AEW Turned Trash Into Treasure
8. The Debut Process, General
Tony Khan was a huge ECW fan, and used an old Paul Heyman trick on his very first show: at Double Or Nothing, the lights went out after Best Friends defeated The Hybrid 2.
The expectation was rampant, even if CM Punk was hardly going to make his debut running in after a midcard tag match - but that's what the lights out gimmick elicits. The Dark Order were revealed to blanket silence. It bordered on embarrassing. As mentioned, the Butcher and the Blade also debuted in less than auspicious circumstances. This felt like such an open goal of a booking flaw; Khan could nail an angle and sell the sh*t out of a pay-per-view. but he couldn't pen a vignette?
He did eventually - well, not pen a vignette, but refine the process.
On that subject, as a small aside: what has a vignette ever actually told the audience?
"Hi, I'm Razor Ramon. You may remember me from the film Scarface. Also I'm mean to wimps."
There's no ideal way to debut a brand new act, and if Tony Khan is yet to crack a code that doesn't really need to be solved, he has perfected the debut of the established star.
Sting's wintry introduction was majestic in the strictest definition; the viral marketing campaign that heralded CM Punk's introduction was so great that countless wrestling fans between them fantasy booked an infinite amount of programmes; the cryptic build of Mr. Brodie Lee made the Dark Order fascinating where they were once irredeemably atrocious.