RAW is Moolah (and Maria covered in beer)

With Andy Wheeler having answered a slightly burning question of mine about how the WGA strike affects WWE (apparently, not all, as long as most of the booking team isn't in the union, HHH's line about no one writing DX's crappy opening promo notwithstanding), I can get down to the important business of talking about another underwhelming but completely watchable two hours of WWE television.
So it turns out Moolah did get a nice, long video package, which was good to see. It covered all the bases it needed to, and filled in fans who were ignorant of her outside of her appearances in recent years as a sex crazed geriatric as to why she was such a big deal. It was interesting to learn that she was the first woman to ever wrestle in MSG (well, one of two, presumably), on top of the factoids I already knew about her.

The two big tag matches were solid, unspectacular formula stuff. The DX match was about what you'd expect, and continues both feuds it encompassed at pretty much the same pace as they've been going for the last month or so. HHH as the face in peril's a decent change of pace, although they need to take every opportunity they can get to make him sympathetic if he's meant to take the belt off Orton. Also, it does never get old seeing Orton kicked in the face, so that always earns at least one snowflake for any match in my book.

Hardy/Mysterio vs. Finlay/Kennedy felt pretty short, despite being spread out over a commercial, but I guess they needed the time for the main event and the Austin/Marella confrontation. Kennedy and Finlay's tension reminds me of the feud it looked like they were going to have before Smackdown's upper card went to hell in a handbasket during the spring, and hey, we did at least get that 619/swanton combo. The Survivor Series match these four will be part of could be fun, although I have a feeling it will lack the sheer hilarity of last year, when CM Punk cheers drowned out HHH's attempts to do DX's schtick. Coincidentally, Punk was buried in ECW a couple weeks later.

As far as that goes, you're either going to see it as a fun bit of nostalgia or the pointless wheeling out of a hoary old act that gets no one over and leads to matches, depending on your perspective, with the reference to the classic "beer bath" skit from the heyday of the Attitude era on top of Stone Cold's familiar/tired schtick. I'd be more willing to lean toward the latter if we didn't get Maria in a wet dress. That pushed it towards acceptability to me. Now Santino can move on to directing his powers of annoyance towards someone he can have an actual match with. Even if that's Ron Simmons. How weird is it that he's still wrestling in 2007?

Other than Shelton Benjamin jobbing to Super Crazy for no particular reason (he and Haas don't even rate an intro anymore?), there's not much else to say about the show, other than that it lacked Kevin Federline being FU'd and the Jackass guys pissing off a 300+ pound Samoan and getting stiffed for it. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether that's a good or bad thing.