Dark Match

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

We Start When The Lights Go Out

A weekly internet wrestling podcast started by about a dozen or so members of the Spoony Experiment forums to fill in the gap for a faltering schedule and a need for their opinions to be known, but not affiliated with Spoony in any way other than being fans of his work.

Darkmatch [dead link] features a revolving door of hosts each week that are rotated in groups of 4 people each, who spend a good hour or so recapping the weekly wrestling shows. Namely, Raw, Smackdown, TNA and sometimes lesser shows such as NXT and Tough Enough, and even untelevised/unaired shows. WWE and TNA Pay Per Views are also covered in separate episodes.

The first episode covered the 2011 Royal Rumble and featured The Spoony Experiment forum members Teefus, Ironbite, Revolverman and Matt the Paranoid Katt.

As of their one-year anniversary reviewing the 2012 Royal Rumble (the year being measured in PPV events as opposed to days) their shows can also be seen hosted at TRE Productions.

A number of side projects and segments have been started by the hosts. These include:

  • 'Headlocked' by Teefus, a Q&A session where Teefus answers questions as different personas , such as a Smark, a TNA fan and a Lucha fan
  • 'Lars The TNA Mark', the much maligned alter ego of Backlash who is acting like a TNA fan who would defend it with his life, a Running Gag on the forum is to act in Kayfabe and hate on any video he makes.
  • 'Faker Than Pro Wrestling' by No Leaf Clover, who reviews things that seem completely bullshit like Rebeca Black or Chris Brown and their bad music.
  • 'Doctor Magpie and the Women' by Magpie, who asks random women he finds and sees their opinions on various professional wrestlers.
  • 'Wrestle Retro' by Digi-Fox. Who converses about retro wrestling shows, making some jokes about it and wearing a Nice Hat
  • 'My Dog Sam Is Smarter Than...' also hosted by Digi-Fox, in which he makes convincing arguments his dog Sam is smarter than wrestling personalities'
  • Jobbers Need Love Too: The Arrow has taken it upon himself to do a weekly review of the WWE's C, D & F shows. Tough Enough, Superstars and NXT respectively.
  • 'Independent Thinking' has Magpie, and various other cast members reviewing different indie wrestling shows they can get access to in a timely manner.

Darkmatch has gained some notoriety on twitter from the likes of Shane Helms in a Crowning Moment of Funny that involved hamburger jokes and also holds the distinct honor of being blocked by none other than Hulk Hogan.

Several feuds between cast members and various alternate personalities exist.

Tropes used in Dark Match include:
  • Accentuate the Negative: Pretty much the entire basis of the show, though they do try to give credit where credit is due.
    • No Leaf's lone defense of TNA is that if it were to go out of business, they wouldn't have anything to talk about anymore and the show would die.
  • Acting for Two: Lars The TNA Mark played by Backlash. Also Teefus and Digi-Fox have played alteregos in their side projects as well.
    • Digi-Fox has played the role of Matt Hardy in his latest My Dog Sam video.
  • Affectionate Parody: Digi-Fox doing a Razor Ramon impression in his first episode of Wrestle Retro.
    • The reading of The Iron Sheik's latest tweet every week qualifies. It could be seen as mocking him, but really, they do it out of love for him.
    • Averted with Digi-Fox' Matt Hardy parody which is meant to overexaggerate how crazy Matt Hardy is.
  • The Alcoholic: Jingus pretty much every episode he's on, others have been known to delve in this trope as well.
    • Teefus as well, when he played the TNA drinking game, taking a shot for every awkward promo in one episode, resulting in 17 (or 18, the number is disputed) shots of American Honey in 93 minutes. Drinking is now banned during the show.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: At least in Magpie's show, "Doctor Magpie and the Women". Everyone woman interviewed admits Dolph Ziggler looks like a douchebag, but they all give him high ratings (based on looks) anyway.
  • All Men Are Perverts: Not all of the time, but everyone in the cast has at least one moment.
  • Angrish: Happens with alarming frequency
  • April Fool's Plot: An entire April Fool's Episode, wherein the hosts talk about how much they love TNA Impact.
  • Awful Truth: The S.K.Y.P.E? It's powered by the trapped soul of a TARDIS, "borrowed" from a dying Time Lord that No Leaf either couldn't save or didn't bother saving.
  • Bash Brothers: Magpie and Mr. War Machine. Well, at least until their tag team broke up when Duos Angel shows up and Magpie is nice to her.
  • Borrowed Catchphrase: "WRESTLE! WRESTLE!"
    • "I'M IN THE DANJAH ZONE!"
      • This ends up being an extended Shout-Out. Not only is "the Danger Zone" borrowed from Top Gun, it is then used by Archer, while also being a shout out to "Macho Man" Randy Savage. Teefus was the first to say it, which leads to No Leaf stealing it.
  • B-Show: The WWE Tough Enough, NXT and Superstars Review, done by The Arrow.
  • Butt Monkey: This role can rotate throughout the cast.
  • Catch Phrase:
    • Lately, the hosts have begun ending the show with the phrase "Good night and good luck."
    • "Oh we'll get to (insert something enraging here)!"
    • "HI-YO!"
    • "Logic does not dwell here."
    • "We are PROFESSIONALS!"
  • Caustic Critic: A whole bunch of them
  • Chainmail Bikini: Madison Rayne's outfits both entice and annoy the guys on a weekly basis.
  • Cliff Hanger: The April Fool's episode sees TFS smoking himself to death, Backlash being killed by someone who wields a microphone, and No Leaf ends up being locked out of his house while someone takes over his computer.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Occurs regularly
  • Cool Mask: Subverted with Sagrieto; no one likes his mask.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: First invoked by No Leaf. Happens often.
  • Despair Event Horizon: A collective one everytime a TNA episode airs
  • Driven to Madness: Once again, whenever the cast has to review TNA.
  • Drugs Are Bad: The whole cast bashes TNA endlessly for their lax drug policies, in seemingly every show.
  • Early Installment Weirdness: Though the first few episodes did feature a theme song, many of the gags (such as the Tangent Counter) hadn't been invented. The conversations also tend to be more stilted, as people still were learning one another, and in general are less natural sounding than the later reviews.
  • Fan Disservice: The shirtless scenes with Matt Hardy V8
  • Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: Averted. Through TNA's many, many Psycho Lesbian or Lipstick Lesbian angles, the casts never seems to be turned on by them. In fact, they all are annoyed by those kind of angles in general.
  • Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Teefus during the first Headlocked, who played a Smark
  • Guilty Pleasure: Played with. Though the cast generally dislikes TNA, they do want to see it succeed, and sometimes enjoy their shows, if for no reason than it gives them a reason to hang out and talk about wrestling.
  • Heroic BSOD: Backlash suffers one nearly every time he has to review TNA.
    • No Leaf in Episode 4 of Faker than Pro Wrestling. Justin Bieber dating Selena Gomez breaks the hell out of him
      • Also in the newest episode of "Faker Than Pro Wrestling", which even caused him to kick over his camera
  • Kayfabe: The show maintains it's own in universe kayfabe.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters:
  • Mirror Universe: Digi-Fox gets trapped in one by Matt Hardy V8.
  • No Budget: The show's pictures are done in Paint, it's edited using the free audio program Audacity, and compiled in Windows Live Movie Maker.
    • In comparison, the Lars the TNA Mark videos look far superior in quality to everyone else's videos.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Noleaf's response to Hulk Hogan calling Edge out on his retirement.
    • Also, Noleaf's rant on everything that's wrong with TNA in his Victory Road 2011 video.
  • Running Gag: Early episodes had a gag counter.
    • The counters make a return in later episodes, though they aren't inserted into the show quite like they were before they changed showrunners.
    • "What is Iron Sheik Tweeting Now?"
    • "What Gets More Screentime Than X? (X being a wrestler who barely appears on TV or was fired, recently or otherwise)
      • On TNA shows: Jay Lethal
      • On WWE shows: Interchangable between the various jobbers and midcarders WWE employs
    • The numerous run-ins used to be a once in a while thing, but recently, No Leaf has done a run-in on just about every show, whether he's actually hosting or not.
    • When a cast member either enters into Unstoppable Rage or is Driven to Madness, the "glass" over their specific picture will crack, signifying that that cast member has been "broken".
    • Overused Running Gag: The Bruiser Brody jokes were starting to get a little bit old at one point...
  • She's Got Legs: Christopher Says makes reference to Winter silky smooth white legs on a couple occasions.
  • Shout-Out: Being on Spoony's forums and everything, there are more than a few references to him on the show.
    • Averted with the original showrunner, who went through painstaking detail to remove every last mention of Spoony from the show.
      • Getting into Running Gag territory, as they primarily do it now to annoy those who say they steal Spoony's material.
    • Sin Cara's Dark Match theme song. "SIN CARA! HE IS A MAN, PLAUNCHA, WEARS A PRETTY MASK..."
    • Noleafclover's name is a Shout-Out to the Metallica song of the same name.
    • Magpie usually starts the show by quoting a line from The Beatles.
      • During the TNA Lockdown 2011 Review, Magpie begins to sing the lyrics to the song "Let It Be" to soothe himself.
      • He sings "She Loves You" at the end of the 5-15-2011 review.
    • "And on that bombshell, we must end..." is No Leaf's Shout-Out to the show Top Gear.
    • Mr. War Machine's name, is a Shout-Out to the superhero of the same name.
      • He also happens to share the same first and last name of the hero in real life.
    • Megafighter3 tends to make references to Wrestlecrap inductions.
  • Smart Mark: Teefus adopted this gimmick during his first Headlock episode.
    • Really, the whole casts is made up of smarks, though they try (and sometimes fail) to keep there more smarkish tendencies under control.
      • Magpie usually can't get through an episode without comparing whatever they're reviewing to Ring of Honor.
  • Theme Tune: The show has a theme song; just no one has any idea what the theme song is called...
    • The switch from one showrunner to another meant no one ever found out what the name of theme song was.
    • It has been recently discovered to be "King of the Mountain" from the Fighting Vipers soundtrack.
    • Real Song Theme Tune: 'Faker than Pro Wrestling' has one; it's "Totla Mad" by Periphery
      • 'Independent Thinking' has "High and Dry" by Def Leoppard and "Get Back" by the Beatles
      • Magpie's other show, 'Doctor Magpie and the Women', has the theme "Whatta Man" by Salt-N-Pepa
  • Tomato in the Mirror: it's implied that Digi-Fox and Matt Hardy are the same person, or at least clones of some kind, or Matt Hardy has possessed Digi-Fox, or any or all of the above.
  • Unstoppable Rage: Backlash and Mr. War Machine are guilty of this, but it's not their fault; TNA makes them do it.
    • No Leaf recently developed this on a new episode of "Faker Than Pro Wrestling" based around Twilight.
    • During one WWE episode, Subrick lost it when Alicia Fox defeated Natalya by roll up, and spent most of the rest of the episode pissed off and in rant mode.
    • Every member has their moments, usually triggered by Teefus going out of his way to trigger it in them.
  • Up to Eleven: Much of the rage towards TNA can be seen as this. No one could stand watching something they hate as much as they claim they do.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: The Wrestlemania review was cancelled. There was also a handful of 'missing episodes' that were recorded but mysteriously vanished when the original editor jumped ship, or various Skype/recording issues here and there.
    • Word of God says this happened because the original showrunner had set the Wrestlemania review for April 20th; more than two weeks after Wrestlemania originally aired. The original show was pretty much going to be a giant scale clusterfuck with every member of the cast in on the recording. Unable to make any sense of the madness, No Leaf (the show's current showrunner) just said eff it, as by the time anything had been worked out, they had already made their opinions on the show known on the TSE forums, and the Wrestlemania show would've been a week late anyway.
    • The TNA Sacrifice review also went this way for much simpler reasons. Hey something had to be sacrificed.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Dark_Match?oldid=1725050"