Anyone remember the mid card feud between Kidman & Paul London?

Watching some old tapes I remembered what a good little middle of the card feud this was with Kidman injuring someone (can't remember who now!) with the Shooting Star Press and then he was really guilty and wouldn't use it for ages until he did it on London and f***ed him up with it and turned heel.

It was not a main event feud or anything serious but I just remember thinking what a damn good Angle to get the 2 guys who weren't really getting much time involved in something that turned out being really entertaining.

Anyone else feel this was a good angle and what was your opinion on it?

It was one of the last few things that I remember being semi-into as I was drifting further and further away from the product in 2004.

I have vague memories of really not being too keen on Billy Botchman around that time, and also remember being high on the Kool Aid that had me thinking WWE needed to re-sign Brian Kendrick and pair him with London ASAP. By the time WWE did, I was so far removed from the product that I didn't really have the vaguest notion of what was going on.

Someone more familiar with Kidman's history can maybe school me... was his SSP always so hideous and dangerous looking? Or was it a consequence of him putting on WWE weight that caused it to start looking like the shittiest SSP ever?

The Shooting Star definitely got worse in the WWE, but even towards the back end of his time in WCW he started looking very sloppy.

This thread just makes me sad that Paul London and Brian Kendrick were like the Smoking Gunns or the La Resistance of their generation. A good tag team at a time where tag team wrestling was dead and anybody associated with it was just filling time on the show. They should have been pushed as hard as The Rock N Roll Express and been major players on SmackDown. Book them as a strong tag team for 5 years, with single runs spread every so often to freshen the team up. Use them to build a tag team division around and voila you've got a division that can help make new stars and gives you someting different on each card that fans actually care to see.

If nothing else, at least Vince has learned from this. My biggest take-home of WWE 2017 is that the tag team division on both shows is stellar and so many guys have benefited from being paired up.

Oct 14, 2017 14:00:50 GMT Arrogance_Personified said:

with Kidman injuring someone (can't remember who now!) with the Shooting Star Press 

Chavo was the wrestler Kidman hurt with his ugly Shooting Star Press. Iirc Kidman's knee landed on Chavo's face.

The Kidman/London SSP feud was alright, I guess. It at least gave some midcard cruiserweights a thing to do but I can't pretend I was super into it or anything.

I'm with PI on WWE Kidman. He was one of the guys I was most looking forward to seeing after the buyout due to all the hype he had from WCW but he disappointed time after time and the ship had sailed on him by this point.

I liked London a lot in ROH so I wanted him to succeed in WWE. Therefore you'd have thought I'd be into his first real feud. Yet I viewed it as nothing more than slightly above average time killing filler.

SmackDown was in really rough shape at the time. The two biggest feuds on the show were between Show/Angle and Taker/Heidenreich. I still remember liking the show, but that may have been because of all the good-will that had been built up over the years.

They wasted their shot to rebuild any good will in Kidman in WWE. Him tagging with Rey in 2003 should've been way more of a thing, as should've been their rivalry with the WGTT. It was the first time in a long time where I was like, oh wait... ok, maybe I should give Kidman a shot. But then it pretty much turned out to be a one-off deal.

I'm also surprised they didn't do some bitter-at-Torrie/align-with-a-heel-Diva angle. I feel like brickhouse Kidman could've been a semi interesting heel in 2002 or 2003... Instead of a bland face. At least that way, his ugly/dangerous SSP would've almost made sense and fit his character: fans don't want him to hit it because it's ugly and hurts their favorite faces, and Kidman loves hitting it because nothing ought to ruin Torrie's boyfriend's good looks like a Shooting Star Knee Crush to the face.

What it keeps coming back to is Cruiserweight wrestling and how it doesn't have a place in modern Pro Wrestling. When the Cruiserweight division started blowing up in '96, the key ingredient was Rey Mysterio Jr and his ability to get the fans invested in him. Then in Souled Out '98, Rey passed the torch so to speak to Chris Jericho who used his run to introduce his heel persona and he became one of the best performers in the industry.

When the WWE tried to relaunch the division, they didn't have that guy to build the division around. The title was lost in the midst of the Invasion era and the focus was never a major priority for the company. The only time it seemed to receive any attention is when they wanted to give Rey something to do, so we'd get a Rey/Matt Hardy program but by that point Rey was above the championship.

Had the WWE just quietly dropped it during the Invasion Era, brought it back on SmackDown and brought in guys like AJ Styles, Amazing Red etc. it would have been a good platform to bring these guys in.