WWE Beast In The East: 10 Awesome Moments

When WWE announced that they were planning on beaming most of a house show event from Japan live on the WWE Network, there was a lot of excitement. When the company then advertised that Finn Balor would challenge Kevin Owens for the NXT Heavyweight Title, that excitement turned giddy, mainly due to Balor's history in the country.

As it turns out, that pre-show excitement was largely justified, because WWE's 'The Beast In The East' special was an event unlike any other on the WWE calendar, something which only helped it stand out. This was a very different feeling broadcast for the promotion, one which felt refreshing outside of the regular week-to-week grind.

There were only 5 matches on the WWE Network presentation, with a further duo of 'dark' match collisions taking place away from the cameras. In the first, Cesaro defeated Diego, before The Lucha Dragons emerged victorious over The New Day.

Despite only a handful of bouts, all were worthwhile, and there's absolutely no reason why WWE shouldn't be doing this kind of thing regularly. With that in mind, what were some of the best and most intriguing moments from the show? Some of these are interesting because of how unique they felt, whereas others were entrenched in nostalgia.

In many ways, 'The Beast In The East' is exactly the kind of thing the WWE Network was made for. Not only does the service offer pretty much every Pay-Per-View from WWF/WWE, WCW and ECW, as well as a plethora of different content, but the Network also eliminates worries about time zone differences when broadcasting shows, due to the on demand nature of the thing.

Usually during telecasts, WWE's announcers are thus so concerned with promoting the Network, talking about social media, discussing main event storylines, and practically everything else other than the match taking place in the ring before them. That's partly because there's so much to get through for the commentary team during shows, but things felt different in Japan.

Yes, Michael Cole and Byron Saxton did talk about Twitter, and yes, they did allude to main event angles such as Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins, but they did so at the correct times. Better yet, who thought that they'd hear Cole discussing Dragon Gate on a WWE-branded show? Or how about talking about Finn Balor's history in the Orient as 'Prince Devitt'?