Rewind-A-Wai #164 will be released this Thursday, September 5 at POSTWrestlingCafe.com.
This week, we look at WWE Beast in the East from July 2015 at Sumo Hall in Tokyo as selected by Espresso Executive Producer @NealFlanagan.
Leave us your comments and feedback for the show and tune in this Thursday.
Watch WWE Beast in the East (WWE Network account required):
WWE Beast in the East
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Tokyo, Japan at Ryōgoku Kokugikan
*John Cena & Dolph Ziggler vs. King Barrett & Kane
*NXT Championship: Kevin Owens (c) vs. Finn Bálor
*Brock Lesnar vs. Kofi Kingston
*WWE Divas Championship: Nikki Bella (c) vs. Paige vs. Tamina
*Chris Jericho vs. Neville
The WWE network was experimenting with televised house shows for a while. This one stood out with Lesnar being the focal point.
Owens/Balor was the clear standout and it came at a time when NXT was on the upswing. They did stuff they couldn’t do on a taping, I popped seeing KO hit the sleeper suplex. Bálor getting his homecoming made for a great match.
I’d want to see them do more of these when the Netflix era starts.
1 Like
Cory from Long Island
This is a show that I remember less so for the actual show itself but moreso for the 48 hour period surrounding it. The night before this program I went out to go see future NXT entrance music makers Incendiary at (the iconic, and now recently departed venue) Saint Vitus in Brooklyn. While standing outside the venue between bands, a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while came up to me and we struck up a conversation. I had told him that I had recently come back to Wrestling as of Wrestlemania 31 and had been inundating myself with the product to get caught up on everything. The subject ended up shifting to the recent Becky Lynch vs. Sasha Banks match at NXT Takeover Unstoppable that happened only a couple months prior. This was what I would really consider the start of the “NXT is better than the main roster” narrative, and that match was really one of the early examples of that. One incredibly violent hardcore show, a fairly long car ride, and an incredibly short night of sleep later and I found myself watching Beast In The East.
It’s fine. It’s a house show; I’m not sure exactly how much more I can speak to the quality of it. The Jericho/Neville match was novel if only for the fact that I was really high on Neville at the time and Jericho was a legacy name that I had not seen in WWE since coming back to wrestling. The NXT title match was far and away the best thing on the show, though I do think the gravity of the title switch was lost on me simply due to the fact that I was not totally dialed into everything yet. This was also the exact moment where - after seeing some of the shirts int he audience - realized that Bullet Club shirts were about to become very, very popular.
If there is one thing of note about this program, its the production. I am sure you two have already discussed Michael Cole’s more loose and less produced tone so I will not litigate that, but I was more interested with how Sumo Hall looked. I’ve always found that WWE Production - especially around this time - tends to anonymize their settings in a way that creates this dull homogeneity. Shows would just be this blur of highly santized arenas, and I can’t say that Sumo Hall wasn’t a victim of this to some degree. I do think its distinctive architecture still creates a unique setting to some degree - especially with the entrances - but once the matches hit, it once again melts into the same miasma as every other WWE show. Maybe this is just years of New Japan Programming talking, maybe my morning coffee hasn’t hit yet, who knows?
Once the show was over I figured I’d just run on a sleep deficit for the whole day. The fourth of July was on a Saturday so I could sleep in on Sunday. My girlfriend and I got incredibly drunk in my friend’s rich girlfriend’s backyard. I most certainly slept in on that following Sunday. I think I drunkenly talked about how cool Neville was to one of my friends that night, and that is ultimately the extent of the impact WWE’s Beast In The East had on my life.
