It’s a big weekend for Impact Wrestling, as Turning Point hits on Saturday and will feature a card full of anticipated match-ups in every division. Before that gets going though there is another huge event later on tonight, and it’s going to be an unforgettable affair. That would be Talk N’ Shop A Mania 2, and the Good Brothers (Doc Gallows and Karl Anderson) are at the center of both events, though they’ve got even more happening thanks to The Real Gimmicks animated series and even a liquor line on top of hosting Talk N’ Shop with Rocky Romero. We had a chance to talk to all three about everything they’ve got going on at the moment, and we started things off with the Good Brothers’ big match against The North and what hope to gain from it.
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“I think for us, the triple crown, we keep saying,” Gallows said. “We’ve had the IWGP tag team titles multiple times. We had the titles up in WWE multiple times. The Impact Wrestling tag team championships, with the lineage there, with the guys who’ve held that thing, that’s the one that’s eluded us. So Saturday night, November the 14th, Turning Point, that is our chance. That is our time to show people why Impact Wrestling opened up those purse strings and then went after the best tag team in the world. It’s thrown around a lot but hey, we didn’t say it about ourselves. Everybody else says it is a fact. We’ll finally show Impact Wrestling why.”
“And The North is good. They’re good, man. We didn’t know a lot about them when we left WWE. And then once we researched them and found out about them and then got in the ring with them and got to know them both personally, it was like, ‘Man, these guys are stars, man, and they’re good.’ It’s going to be a hard-hitting match, I can promise you that. And man, I think people are going to open their eyes and see how good they are, and the future’s bright for them, but right now it’s just literally our time,” Anderson said. “And it has been since Slammiversary, and it’s going to be for the foreseeable future.”
The Good Brothers are synonymous with the Tag Team Division, and while they’ve had singles matches over the years, they’ve had quite a few recently. Despite all that they’ve achieved in professional wrestling, they still feel like they have something to prove in that regard.
“I think we have a lot to prove as singles wrestlers,” Gallows said. “Karl talks about it a lot when we’re doing press stuff, but he’s one of the professional wrestlers, pound for pound, in the entire business, he is. And I think he gets hidden because we are such a good tag team, not to toot our horn, but as Arn Anderson would say, ‘Toot toot.’ I think that it hides the fact that we can both go on a singles classic. I’ve been saying I’m still a fan. Give me Karl Anderson versus Eric Young in a big singles pay-per-view main event any day of the week. I’ve seen him do it in Japan and the G1. I’ve seen him do it with Shinsuke Nakamura. The dude can go.”
“And I feel the same way. I feel like there are layers to me that people have never seen before because whether it be a faction, a tag team, whatever, there’s never been a real standalone moment,” Gallows said. “And I think Impact Wrestling gives us the opportunity to show people how good we are. We’re young veterans, we’re in our prime, and we’re surrounded by a great roster of talent that can go out there and tear it up every night. So it’s very exciting for us, I think, as a tag team and as singles wrestlers.”
Now, while we’re all looking forward to the match at Turning Point, later tonight is another huge event that is in no way supposed to be taken seriously, and that’s the absolutely nuts Talk N Shop A Mania 2, which really spawned from the podcast.
“Well, it’s funny that you said the word, ‘Nuts,’ because nuts are literally on the line in the Ball for a Ball match,” Gallows said. “Anyway, to get back to the question, I think that it’s a tough time in the world right now, there’s social unrest, we’re in the middle of a pandemic like we’ve never seen before throughout history, and we love professional wrestling. All three of us grew up on it, the good, the bad and the ugly of it. And hey, it doesn’t always have to be serious. We want you to laugh along with us. We’re not making fun of anybody. We’re having a damn good time. We’ve created this alternate universe.”
“If you watch that pay-per-view and get nothing else out of it, look at how much fun everybody who’s participating in is having,” Gallows said. “You see guys that are legitimate big stars, big draws around the world, and they’re going to step out of their comfort zones and they’re going to do stuff that’s really fun. I think that it’s a fun little universe for us, and fun for the fans, too, because I love just sharing professional wrestling storylines and brilliant ring work, but I also love the bulls*** of it, too, and that’s what we’re giving you. It’s supposed to be fun and we want you to have fun right with us.”
It all started with the podcast, and Romero loves how the events just grew out of the conversations they all had just for fun.
“Yeah so we have our weekly podcast that drops every Sunday, Talk N’ Shop, Romero said. “It’s three best friends, shooting the s*** and having a good time, and we tell stories and talk wrestling, talk about our personal lives, and what’s going on. We don’t really have a format or a script, and through just joking around with each other, these different characters were created, and we’d always go back to them when we’re describing stories or things. And we just saw how creative we were with the podcast and the following that we have with that, and it grew into this thing.”
“Basically, Gallows was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to throw this pay-per-view in my backyard, and we’re doing it with or without you guys, and that pushed the concept of calling it Talk N Shop A Mania, and then really, all three of us put our heads together and came up with like, ‘What is the craziest, funniest, silliest things that we could do? And what would make us laugh?’ It’s really just our podcast, but turned up. If you gave us a TV show and a pay-per-view platform, this is what we would come up with. It’s the worst podcast of all time, and turned into to the worst pay-per-view of all time.”
“These guys like to regurgitate this story like I bullied them into doing this, but if you watch Talk N Shop A Mania, and then now when you watch Talk N Shop A Mania 2, their handprints are all over it,” Gallows said. “They couldn’t love doing it more, and they’re the reason that it’s magical. It’s the three of us going through literally the outer reaches of our minds to come up with the zaniest, craziest s*** we can come up with. And it’s all in the vein of entertaining you guys. We used to work for a company that said that our job was to put smiles on people’s faces, and I didn’t always believe that was exactly what we were doing, but I promise you, if you watch this thing, you’re going to smile, that’s what it’s all about.”
They aren’t pulling any punches with Talk N Shop A Mania 2, though they have some ideas for part 3 if it comes to be.
“I think we just need to apologize because this one is so … either it’s going to be a massive hit… or a huge failure and we’ll never see another one because we go all the way out there,” Gallows said. “We push every line we can possibly push beyond, TV-MA time, and it’s Good Brother humor to the max. If you know us personally, it’s just us, so we’re putting ourselves out there on this one, man. I think that we really pushed the envelope, and if we get to part three, I don’t know what the hell we’ll do next.”
Romero quickly said “I have an idea”, and then Anderson chimed in “I’ve already got ideas, but that’s what I’m hoping this one does well, so we can do three because I think three is going to be incredible.”
“Yeah, we really broke the budget on this one. We spent more money than we did on the last one,” Romero said. “We really tried to up the production a bit. We’ve really tried to make the worst pay-per-view ever slightly better, and somehow it ended up slightly worse, but we tried, so we apologize.”
“We took part two and literally, we saw what the fans liked of one, and we just literally amped it even more,” Anderson said. “We have more s***** wrestling, we have more of us laughing on commentary. We took Chavo versus Chico, they had a good match in the first one. We took that, we turned it into a whole spectacle.”
“We took the main event, ball versus ball and we made it like the Boner Yard, but we took it to a different level, and I think, if you don’t laugh, I don’t think that you have much of a sense of humor at all,” Anderson said. “But I feel like, sit back, have a cold beer, or a non-alcoholic beer, or a CBD oil. Do whatever you do to get your head right and just enjoy yourself. Put the kids to sleep, though, because it’s rated R.”
If they do get a part 3, we had to ask if there would be any sort of superhero crossover, and it turns out that is an idea that has been throw around, and we’re hoping it ends up happening.
“Man, I think in the Talk N Shop A Mania world, I think anything is possible,” Romero said. “So I feel like, especially in that alternate universe, having some kind of superhero show up at one point would be ridiculous and really, really fun to play around with, just that concept. Like imagine if a Superman type character shows up, or a Batman type character shows up in the TTalk N Shop A Mania world, what would happen? And I feel like that’s where Talk N Shop A Mania could be going. For number three, would just be even crazier and more outlandish, not just within the wrestling world. So maybe a cameo from a Wolverine type character or something would be pretty hilarious.”
Count us in on that by the way.
Impact feels like it’s capturing more and more of the spotlight ever since Slammiversary, and there seems to be more of the mainstream audience paying attention to what Impact, New Japan, and others are doing in the space.
“Yeah, absolutely. I think for a long time, obviously, WWE had the spotlight, just being such a massive, international company, but the ease of being able to watch product like New Japan here in the US and all over the world, has just become easier with technology,” Romero said. “And then Impact on top of that, they’ve been killing it ever since Slammiversary and Bound For Glory, and they’ve just really been hitting it out of the park and really taking advantage of this opportunity. Especially the Good Brothers becoming free agents, they really took advantage of that.”
In addition to several projects and all the wrestling, they’ve somehow found time to also get in the liquor game with a distillery in Nashville, which started because of Talk N’ Shop as well.
“We all love to drink. We like to hang out and have beers and just chill and talk, and that’s how Talk N’ Shop came about,” Anderson said. “We would be in Japan and we just would grab beers from the convenience store, or wine, and just sit there and talk. Then we decided to put it on a podcast because we knew we made each other laugh, and then it turned into this. The second we had an opportunity to maybe create a beer or a whiskey or a wine, we wanted to jump into it. So we have a whiskey that’s available at the Leatherwood Distillery in Pleasant View, Tennessee, and we’re still trying to work through some loopholes with shipping, and we’re noticing that getting into the alcohol world is crazy. There’s a lot of different rules and laws you have to go through. We have a red wine and we have a white wine, it’s actually available on tnsmania.com, and it’s live and it will be shipped to you from a spot in California.”
You can check out Talk N Shop A Mania 2 tonight at 9 PM and Turning Point can be seen on Saturday at 7 PM, and both can be seen on FITE TV.
Which event are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments and feel free to talk all things wrestling with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!
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