10 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (July 25)

Ups..

10. New Era, New Look

It was a safe bet that WWE wasn’t going to completely overhaul the sets for Raw and SmackDown (so you probably won’t see the giant fist on Tuesday nights), but give some credit to the company for at least making some cosmetic changes to Raw for the first episode of the new era.

We got a glimpse of those changes immediately with a new intro video – which makes sense considering the roster split – set to new theme music, with a new Raw logo. The stage itself was slightly different, with an LED arc over the entire stage, and the announcer’s desk moved from ringside to off the side of the stage (similar to where it was back in the 2000s when Eric Bischoff was GM of Raw).

Those changes, along with some other tweaks, made for Raw to feel fresher than it has in quite some time. Of course, seeing new superstars and a new announce team (more on that in a minute) certainly helped things.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.