Often in wrestling, writers will book an old angle all over again, but stupider.
In 2000, The Rock led a walk-out against the ruthless heel authority figures for firing Mick Foley.
Eleven years later, Jerry Lawler led a walk-out against the fan-friendly authority figure for negligence and anal bleeding.
In 2006, DX dropped simulated fecal matter on the McMahons and Spirit Squad.
Six years later, John Cena did the same thing to Dolph Ziggler and AJ Lee, but with what appeared to be melted ice cream that no one was allowed to explicitly call feces.
And speaking of John Cena and pranks and poop, in 2005, the Doctor of Thuganomics offered JBL a custom paint job for his limo.
Just three years later, he was at it again, claiming to “help” JBL’s limo pass inspection by smashing his windshield for the sake of ventilation, installing speed holes to make the car go faster, etc.
The re-hashing of storylines and segments was particularly blatant in this case. Just look for yourself:
2008 Cena vandalized JBL’s limo.
2005 Cena vandalized JBL’s limo…
2005 Cena spray-painted, “JBL sucks”…
2008 Cena spray-painted, “JBL sucks.”
No, scratch that. 2008 Cena spray-painted, “JBL is poopy.”
If you were looking for proof that Cena had lost his edge over the years, this was your smoking gun. Or, if you will, your steaming pile of excrement that shared many properties with JBL.
I’m not saying that saying somebody “sucks” makes you a badass, but if the word, “poopy” is in your vocabulary at all, you probably never even saw 2005 John Cena unless the TV in the delivery room was tuned to UPN.
As if the “poopy” stunt weren’t stupid enough already, JBL’s revenge for it would be an even bigger overreaction than when Kevin Nash fought lipstick with poop.
The whole reason Cena and Cryme Tyme busted up JBL’s limo in the first place was because the Texan had gotten his own private security team (including his Mexican understudy Alberto Del Río) to bar Cena from the arena a week earlier. Of course, Cena snuck back in and, along with JTG and Shad Gaspard, cost JBL his title match against CM Punk.
Cena didn’t think that his distraction the week before was revenge enough though, probably because, as the designated jobber to paper champions, JBL was due to lose to CM Punk anyway. (See also Mysterio, Rey)
Thus, Cena and his buddies of the month smashed up Bradshaw’s limo. The next week on Raw, JBL would get his payback. Now, 2005 JBL had John Cena arrested for vandalism…
…but 2008 JBL, having already ordered a group of men in uniform to detain Cena two weeks before, decided to step up the retribution ever so slightly by murdering him.
The plan was simple: lure Cena outside of the arena…
…jump him in the parking lot…
…prop him up against one car…
…and smash into his head with another car going about 20 mph.
And just to make sure his plan went off without a hitch, JBL obviously executed the whole plan earlier in the night and had the production truck simply air it at the end of Raw.
Really, the whole murder plot was pretty fool-proof, aside from the presence of half a dozen camera men filming the scene from an impossible number of angles…
…including one inside the parked car…
…and one on the hood of JBL’s own car, apparently sitting in the passenger’s seat to capture a shot of an unconscious Cena, continuity errors be damned — uh, darned. Just look at poor John there, splayed spread-eagle as if to say, “You can’t see me… but you can see my perineum!”
Even after filming take after take of vehicular homicide, JBL felt no joy when the scene was completed, instead looking remorsefully at the atrocity he had just committed and leaving the premises.
If even JBL was sickened by what he saw, it must have been a gruesome sight indeed. So, you may be asking, were we to believe that John Cena lay pinned between two cars, bleeding through a skull smashed into a million pieces? You just answered your question, because John Cena never gets pinned, even if it is between two cars.
More importantly, he had a match in just six days at the Great American Bash, so he couldn’t afford to be dead. As it turned out, rumors of Cena’s demise had been greatly exaggerated (and comically over-produced), as readers of WWE.com learned that he had managed to escape in the nick of time, having only been grazed by JBL’s car.
Cena, who just a split-second before impact had been completely unresponsive, was able to move out of the way with a minimum of contact with the oncoming car. Which part of the car grazed him, we’ll never know. Did he leap to the far side of the car and avoid detection by the hordes of cameramen, or was he stuck underneath JBL’s car when Raw went off the air?
By the following Sunday, someone in WWE had remembered that later that week, its programming was to be certified as TV-PG, so storylines about attempted murder would have to be spun into something tamer, like, say, harmless mind games!
Yes, explained Michael Cole. When JBL tried to smash his car into John Cena’s cranium, it was just to scare Cena. What was presented one week as attempted vehicular homicide was the next week passed off as a prank from Swerved gone a little far.
John had the chance in a Parking Lot Brawl to exact revenge on JBL for, uh, scaring him.
Cena was lucky he only had to wait six days to get his revenge; Steve Austin was sidelined for almost a year when he got brutally startled by a car.
It seems that everybody in WWE was brought up to speed on the whole “scare tactics, not murder” cover story, except for JBL himself, who set fire to a car with Cena inside it. Fortunately, the announcers passed that off as JBL just topping himself in the edgy pranks department.
In the end, it was all just another night’s work for Super Cena, who, after a few Irish whips in the parking lot…
…and some fun with jumper cables…
…overcame the odds as he always does to beat —
What? JBL beat Cena? I bet Cena didn’t see that one coming…
…unlike JBL’s car, which he famously avoided in the nick of time.