[Toddzilla]

I was at the Verizon (nee MCI) Center last night and had a great time. I wore my 4 Horseman tshirt an got a million "Whooooo!"s. Very cool. My observations: (***Smackdown spoiler warning***)

• The wrestling - as expected - was pretty bad.
• Dark match was Gregory Helms vs. some random asian wreslter dressed as a cowboy. Wow, Helms is wasted in the WWE. What happened to the WCW Cruiserweight that was awesome to watch? He's a plodding punch/kick WWE wrestler now, and it sucks.
• Batista making his return to his "hometown" was pretty special - biggest pop I've ever seen to start the show. The crowd was kind of deflated that he didn't cut a promo and his match lasted about 25 seconds - totally squashed Sylvan Grenier.
• Mr. Kennedy's entrance schtick is over, but his wrestling is most certianly not. Very loud "boring" chants throughout the match.
• Don't know how the Undertaker/Khali match will come across on TV, but it was a lot of fun in person. Knowing neither were going to be on the PPV gave this a PPV-style feel. Cookie-cutter "last man standing match" formula, however.
• Turkay is a monster. I didn't know he's using Samoa Joe's musclebuster as a finisher. Boo.
• Vito won - his dress schtick is lame.
• Finlay defended against Lashley and won - via DQ help from Regal. The crowd was more into the midget. Sigh. Nice spot after the match when Finlay was retreating to the back and Lashley threw a chair from the ring about 20 feet and drilled him dead on.
• Booker promo at the end was pretty cool, but hearing Sharmel say "Bow down to Booker" a thousand times was annoying. Batista came out and it was a neat ending to the show.
• No Rey/Chavo. They didn't have a stage entrance so that Rey could have done his typical intro, so that kind of gave it away.
• Big break as they changed sets to ECW. They covered the main entrance and put the small ECW entrance in the middle of the floor seats to give it a smaller-venue feel. It was kind of neat.
• WORST moment of the night - they run an extended promo for the 3-way between Angle, Sabu, and RVD. Angle, by far, was the most over. Then, not 5 seconds later, they run the taped Paul Heyman promo saying Angle wasn't going to wrestle. 20% of the crowd left before the show even started.
• Mick Foley comes out to cut a promo, and my hopes that Flair may make an apprearance jump from 0% to 2%. You saw the show, so after the awful dance, Flair runs out and the place, including yours truly, goes postivley ape shit. Everyone in my section was looking as me as I jumped up and down like a 9-year-old. Whooooooo! BEST moment of the night, easy.
• CM Punk/Justin Credible stunk, they were out of synch, not on the same page.
• Test is a monster, no question. He can be he next real big monster heel in ECW if they keep feeding him smaller guys, because he looked incredible. Mike Knox didn't do anything - feh.
• We left after that to beat the crowd and semi-protest pulling Angle. Boo.
• Overall, the crowd was kind of cold for ECW. Big arenas don't translate well for the product, and it was impossible to get chants going. The Smackdown crowd was hot from start to finish.

Whoooooooo!