Initially, I wasn’t really keen on Impact Wrestling re-branding back to TNA. There was just this bush league reputation of TNA that always stuck with me that involved Jarretts, Dixie Carter, strange booking, Cups for no prizes, convoluted booking, the six-sided ring and a drunk Jeff Hardy that I didn’t think was a good idea to going back towards. I always felt that Impact was a respectable endeavor of scaling back, restructuring, reinventing, and growing back towards respectability.
Especially compared to the questionable things that AEW does, I found Impact to be the more refreshing alternative to the predictability of the WWE, and over the years, I’ve always made a point to hit up Impact when they stopped in Atlanta, and even liked their product so much, it inspired me to get an Impact replica blet, as bootleg Pakistani as it undoubtedly was. I enjoyed what they were doing, and I respected the fact that they weren’t necessarily trying to compete with the Joneses and were out there, as a solid #3 promotion, doing their thing, letting people work, and putting out decent product.
But I kind of get it why they wanted to go back; probably if for anything, because all of the noteworthy promotions in the land are all three-letter acronyms, and being “and Impact” might’ve felt like being way too much of an outlier. WWE, AEW, ROH, NWA, GCW, PWG… and Impact. Perhaps there’s just something about three letters that means wrestling, and just like that, TNA is back, and the Impact name reverts to being the flagship television show.
Regardless, if there was one fun thing to come out of the rebrand was the inevitability that there would be new blets, because Impact blets sure as heck weren’t going to fly in the land of TNA. And I have to say, despite my reluctance to accept the TNA name back into existence, as far as their refreshed lineup of blets across the promotion, I have really nothing but praise.
They did the smart thing, and refreshed them all at the same time, so they can have something of a cohesive and uniform look to them. Not like when the WWE updates the US title in 2020, the Intercontinental blet in 2021, a 24/7 title that came and went in the blink of an eye. I didn’t know who ZBro’s Belts was, but after seeing how great these TNA blets came out, I dug to find out who the maker was.
I appreciate that there’s both cohesion as well as variation with all the blets, and they don’t all look like the same fucking blet like Ring of Honor’s entire lineup of titles look after Tony Khan bought them. Gold for men and women’s top prizes, red straps for the tag blets. The X Division blet has come leaps and bounds from when it was basically just a big red X on a blet, and looks like a solid #2 prize, and I know it gets a lot of criticism mostly for its name, but I really dig the updated Digital Media blet. I love how it has kind of a circuitboard pattern in the background, and there was obvious thought that went into its design as opposed to copying bits and pieces from Japan and UK to create a bunch of AEW midcard titles.
As for the inevitable question on whether or not I’d entertaining getting any replicas should they be available, legitimately or though Pakistan, there’s always the possibility for the right price. I’d honestly go for a Digital Media championship first, and if I ever had the disposable income, even go after a set of the Knockouts Tag Team blets for my girls, especially since these don’t have the goofy-ass Garfield Copper font on them like the old ones did. The others, would be dependent on if any workers appear to be doing good enough work to inspire me to want to get one, and if Nic Nemeth captures the world title, it just might be enough to get the job done.
