Batson's Blog

I haven’t posted to this blog for a while, but I wanted to say something about Chyna after hearing the news about her death this past week. Besides super heroes and comic books, I am a big fan of professional wrestling. I started watching wrestling in 1997, when a lot of the wrestlers became real-life super heroes to me. Characters like The Undertaker, Mankind, Goldust, Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were all incredibly entertaining to watch. They had amazing entrances and awesome outfits, they battled each other and they did it in front of rowdy fans every week. All of those guys were incredible to watch! It was great for me because I was at the age where I'd grown past cartoons like He-Man and X-Men (at least on a regular basis), but I wasn't interested in adult shows like Law & Order or Friends or The Practice . Dozens of big-screen comic book movies weren't being made at that point, so there wasn't a happy medium until I found pro wrestling. It invo...

January 2010: TNA Impact went live against Monday Night Raw . RVD debuted. Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff were part of that show. Jeff Hardy returned to TNA. It was supposed to be a huge show in TNA’s history. They didn’t prove to be much of a threat to WWE’s ratings, but TNA did garner 3 million viewers for the opening hour of Impact . They dropped to 2.2 million by the end of the show, while Raw reached 5.6 million viewers . It was an experiment. While it wasn't a complete failure, it wasn't a huge success. It was clear: TNA wasn't ready to challenge WWE in a new version of the Monday Night Wars, despite many people hoping that was the case. I think now may be the right time for TNA to take another chance. Since 2010 TNA hasn't made a lot of progress with their ratings. The most recent edition of Impact got just a 1.07 -- that's the highest Impact rating sine April. However, a general consensus amongst the Internet wrestling community is that ...