Melissa Santos is All Elite.
Melissa Santos revealed on Instagram that she has joined the AEW broadcast team. She used the hashtags announcer and backstage interviewers.
Santos previously worked for TNA Wrestling and Lucha Underground. She is the wife of Brian Cage.
Fightful will provide more details on Santos’ role in AEW when they are known.
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Oh hell yeah! She was awesome in Lucha Underground! Hopefully she’ll be a ring announcer!
By “broadcast team” I assume they mean “random girl backstage with a microphone interviewing wrestlers in a mean gene style interview without even a trace of personality”.
What made me love Rene Young as an interviewer was she got borderline confrontational at times, while having a HUUUUGE personality. Her and Danial Bryan (during his “I don’t give a fuck, so lets talk about fisting” phase) were the main reason people watched talking smack. It also gave overlooked wrestlers of the era a chance to get their personality to come across on a show where Vince doesn’t watch, at a time when every facial expression was in the script. So it came off organic, and is the reason Rene got popular over (insert any of the other random women who have done the same job, but nobody can name any of them).
And don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a slight against this individual woman, nor is it a slight against women in general. It’s a slight at the very basic formula that WWE has trained it’s audience to know. The formula of “random backstage woman has microphone. She won’t be around in 5 years”.
And AEW has since adopted that formula. The formula is what sucks. It started with Lillian Garcia, but they eventually moved her to ring announcing.
I’d love to be wrong though. I’d LOVE for her to come in, have a personality, and for everyone on the show to know her name. But until I’m proven otherwise, I’m going to assume this is just another link in a chain of the formula.
Santos was previously able to inject a lot of personality into her work in Lucha Underground, so I’m optimistic that she can thrive in whatever role they use her in.
i mean its not like its a new thing considering they were doing it with alex marvez from the start :)
plus lexy has a great personality as an interviewer too especially on roh!
I always felt like Alex Marvez was supposed to be a huge dork character…and then I realized that wasn’t intentional. And they must have realized how it was coming off. I forget his name, but it reminded me of WCW when they would have this dorky guy call in from random cities hosting Nitro parties. You’d never see video of him. Just a still image of his face, and audio quality that you could tell was artificially made to sound like a phone line.
So they stopped using Alex Marvez. Not sure why they didn’t lean into the dorky character…but they didn’t.
As for Lexy, I don’t know who that is. Probably because ROH has like 3 viewers.
but it reminded me of WCW when they would have this dorky guy call in from random cities hosting Nitro parties.
stagger lee marshall (also the voice of tony the tiger) i loved him <3
So they stopped using Alex Marvez. Not sure why they didn’t lean into the dorky character…but they didn’t.
I mean, they kinda did. There was that one time he interviewed Joey Janela during the breakup/feud with Sonny Kiss. You know, the infamous “Nip Factory” promo.
I’ll have to google that later. I don’t know what the “nip factory” is.
Also, unrelated to the topic, but related to your comment…
Why did Joey Janella not last longer in AEW??? ESPECIALLY at a time when they only had Jericho as a big name? Their roster wasn’t bloated back then. Granted they only had 1 show instead of 3, but still.
Joey was never exclusive to AEW, so he may have only wanted to work so many dates as he was still doing GCW and every-other-indie-on-the-continent at the time which usually leads to you being ‘the occasional booking’. Same as a normal job, if you’re available only in the mornings, only on weekdays, you aren’t getting shifts.
Based on interviews he did after he left he prefers working the indies as he is since he gets to be his own boss and has already been booking his own shows for years, instead of dealing with backstage politics/having a boss/etc.
I’ll have to google that later. I don’t know what the “nip factory” is.
It’s a factory… FULL OF NIPS!
