AEW All Out was a dark turn for the popular wrestling promotion, with numerous moments featuring bloody assaults, syringes, asphyxiation, and more at the violent event. The build-up to the pay-per-view was no sunny day either, as it featured Hangman Page burning down Swerve Strickland's childhood home.
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On the latest "What Happened When" podcast, AEW broadcaster Tony Schiavone shrugged off the mayhem at the September 7 show.
"Within the last year, I got to see a home invasion, someone burn someone's house down," Schiavone began. "Why not see a couple attempted murders? First attempted murders I've ever seen."
Schiavone is mostly referring to the feud between Page and Swerve, which has featured them invading each other's homes and came to a fiery end some weeks back. The promotion has also seen a lot of over-the-top violence on AEW programming as wrestlers have been hammered with chairs, Jack Perry set on fire, and Bryan Danielson the victim of a previous-mentioned asphyxiation.
ECW legendTommy Dreamer was critical of the amount of violence the show featured, though he admitted it wasn't as serious as indie wrestling's predilection for lighttubes. His "Busted Open" colleague Nic Nemeth disagreed, believing that the incendiary lead-up to the PPV, as well as the already extreme nature of the Hangman/Swerve feud, made the violence called for, at least from a narrative perspective. WWE Hall of Famer Booker T chalked up the ultraviolence to AEW needing to stand out, much like ECW did in the late '90s with similarly extreme violence.
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