6 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Jan 17)

by Scott Carlson

1. Hype Video Hypes Match

If there’s one consistently good part of WWE, it’s their video packages. The company has always produced solid videos hyping matches and summarizing feuds. Oftentimes, they manage to take a convoluted rivalry and boil it down to something that looks 20 times better than it ever was.

Monday’s video discussing the career retrospectives of Bobby Lashley and Brock Lesnar was fantastic, tracing both of their histories, from their upbringing, to their amateur wrestling careers, to their early WWE days, to leaving for MMA, to returning to WWE and dominating. The parallels are uncanny, and the fact they had never crossed paths until Day 1 is remarkable.

The video succeeded in making you want to see this match even more than you already did, which is saying a lot. This is a rare instance where you don’t need to do a lot to hype the match, and for once, WWE isn’t screwing this one up by overdoing it.

The only regret this writer had is that the match is taking place at the Royal Rumble and not at WrestleMania, because it just feels like an epic confrontation.

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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.