6 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (13 December - Results & Review)

5. Saving The Best For Last

As eyeroll-inducing as the “talking head” video packages were, WWE managed to put together two videos that aired before and after the main event that worked really well.

The first one was a series of older clips of some of John Cena’s rivals interspersed with recent shots of them waving to the camera, holding up signs with simple messages, and mimicking several of his mannerisms. Other wrestlers also joined in the pantomiming throughout the video. It was a simple, fun video, eschewing comments for a more lighthearted tribute.

The post-match video featured a lot of the wrestlers who had appeared throughout the night, but rather than wishing Cena well, they spoke about what Cena meant to them, their careers, and the wrestling industry as a whole. This ended up providing a more meaningful commentary, closing out the night on a stronger note than had one of the platitude videos aired.

The closing video also included a brief archival clip of Vince McMahon saying a couple of nice things about Cena. That easily could have torpedoed this as an “up,” but considering what they could have done, digging up a 10-second clip and slipping it in there is about the only pass anything to do with Vince will get here. (It did knock this ranking down a notch or two.)

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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.