The weird, twisting path of Global Force Wrestling doesn’t get any less surreal the further into it we get. Yes, GFW is the new identity and brand or whatever of what used to be Impact Wrestling slash TNA. But if you can think all the way back to four years ago, when GFW was first announced, it was meant to be a massive new promotion of its own, a collabo between Jeff Jarrett and country music megastar Toby Keith. Things didn’t quite work out that way!
GFW went through a lot of behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealing before finally revealing their roster and taping a big batch of episodes in Las Vegas in 2015. They went on a summer tour of minor league ballparks that same summer, and then Jarrett spent the next year or so searching for a home — television, digital, DVD, whatever — for the show, which was called GFW Amped.
Now here we are, in the year of our lord 2017, and GFW has finally overtaken Impact. What this means for the OLD Global Force is that Amped finally has an outlet for distribution, so beginning on August 11, GFW is presenting a series of four pay-per-views called Amped Anthology, which will pretty much show the meat and potatoes of all those Amped tapings. We’re promised to at least see the tournaments that crowned the four champions.
In celebration/anticipation of this PPV series, GFW has put out the “first five minutes” of GFW Amped Anthology Part 1, which is pretty much the same cold open we got a look at in 2015, but with some new footage, and with the reality of the current landscape of pro wrestling, which makes this way, way super weirder to watch now.
Yes, it has all your favorite GFW superstars! Mickie James! Bobby Roode! The Bollywood Boyz! Curt Hawkins! The Bullet Club of Karl Anderson and Doc Gallows! Sanada! PJ Black! Certainly those people aren’t marketable for different reasons than being in GFW!
Obviously there’s nothing WRONG with GFW putting this old stuff on the air. It’s probably really good wrestling! They shot the stuff, they own the rights, and they’re not presenting it as new material or anything. It’s just really, really weird that this footage is FINALLY coming out and it features so prominently so many people who aren’t with the company anymore.
But hey, weird and GFW are old friends at this point.
