Website / Botchamania

The limo-flyin', jabroni-eating, pie-beating—?
FACK!

"If you think for one second, McMahon, that I was just the right ga—guy, at the right place, at the wro—at the right time..."

— Hulk Hogan to Vince McMahon

Even though Professional Wrestling might be "fake", it still requires a lot of athleticism and discipline on the part of all the performers involved. And granted, it's hard to watch what would look like a really cool move fail and fall apart — which usually amounts to things from selling a kick that doesn't really hit to high-risk-high-reward routines that crash and burn horribly. But if a performer does it repeatedly, and develops a reputation for screwing up frequently, well, then...it becomes entertaining (especially in regions like the Northeast US, where "You fucked up!" chants can spring up the very second someone botches).

Botchamania is a YouTube video series started and run by user Maffew^note sometimes short for "MaffewGregg", who compiles botches sent in from many of his viewers, usually set to video game music and/or remixes of video game music (with actual rock music thrown in every now and again). The number of subscribers to his videos grows with each new video, and he regularly comments on them in the movie description.

WWE, WCW, TNA, and a cavalcade of obscure indie and foreign promotions are all represented in the series. Notably absent are Ring of Honor, EVOLVE and New Japan Pro-Wrestling, who sent cease-and-desist notifications to Maffew - and, really, anyone who uses their material without their consent - which forced him to take down several of his videos, which he re-released with the compromising footage excised.

Maffew had a website dedicated solely to Botchamania - botchamania.net - but towards the end of March 2010, there was a sudden surge in the cost of hosting, and Maffew needed $500 to cover the traffic the site was getting. Donations poured in, covering the cost in roughly two days, but other technical difficulties caused the site to basically stall out; Maffew eventually started up botchamania.com, and fans are hoping the site will actually stick around this time. (Now that it's sponsored by CHIKARA, that's looking more likely.)

Maffew's first YouTube account has long been suspended, and while Maffew promised not to "Billy Gunn" his second account (i.e., get it deleted by posting non-Botchamania videos), the copyright overlords at YouTube eventually suspended it anyway. He is currently on his tenth YouTube account for uploading new Botchamanias.

He was featured on Reviewtopia, but was part of the mass exodus when it reformed into RVT in early 2013. Also in 2013 he became a featured contributor for WrestleCrap. He's also been guest-hosting OSW Review of late and has also contributed to Cultaholic.

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Tropes associated with Botchamania include:

• Accentuate the Negative: Some viewers and smarks get the impression that the individuals on Botchamania only ever botch, particularly Sabu, who following his recurring appearances in the videos causes some to assume that all of Sabu's matches contain botches even though they don't. This is lampshaded in #150, which states "Why Botchamania Sucks: It can make great wrestlers look like terrible wrestlers." He then shows several clips of the usually very competent BxB Hulk of Dragon Gate making a mess of his matches.
• And I Must Scream: The Cornette Face video linked above states that this is the fate that Cornette is doomed to whenever the Face is invoked.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Victory Road 2011 was so awful, even Jim Cornette himself was looking forward to the upcoming Botchamania for it. Maffew was happy to oblige.
  • Speaking of Cornette, he can often be seen wearing a T-shirt featuring himself making the Cornette Face. He once stated it's because he can't purposefully repeat that expression.
  • Recent Botchamanias have been graced by wrestlers of varying fame with introductions and submitted botches from them, from a number of independent wrestlers to one Mick Foley.
  • At National Pro Wrestling Day 2013, there was a CHIKARA atomicos (8-man tag) with The Colony (Fire Ant^note Better known today as Orange Cassidy and Green Ant) and 3.0 ("Big Magic" Shane Matthews and Scott "Jagged" Parker) vs. F.I.S.T. (Icarus and Chuck Taylor) and Los Ice Creams (Ice Cream Jr. and El Hijo Del Ice Cream). Early in the match, Matthews and Hijo did a bullfight sequence with one of the Colony's capes. Matthews wrapped Hijo's head in the cape and climbed up for a crossbody. It missed. Specifically, Hijo was standing with the cape around his head and Matthews landed at Hijo's feet. A fan stood up with a sign that read "CORNETTE FACE". However, given the participants, everything in the match was Played for Laughs.
  • A number of clips have been put up from independent promotions where, rather than chants like "YOU FUCKED UP" or general laughter, when one or more wrestler(s) makes a blatantly horrible mistake, the chants go "BOTCH-A-MANIA! *clap, clap, clap-clap-clap*"
  • You can't get much more ascended than Dolph Ziggler mentioning Botchamania live on Raw.
• Author Appeal:
  • Sonjay Dutt deserves better.
  • Songs by The Wildhearts.
  • A true child of the 90s, Pierce Brosnan will always be Bond in Maffew's eyes.
  • Maffew is a huge Simpsons fan; expect many gags and endings featuring the show.
• Bilingual Bonus: Maffew inserts foreign words or full sentences in some episodes.
• Big "OMG!": CZW clips are usually preceded by a clip of someone pulling a lever, flipping a switch, or pushing a button while John Zandig shouts "JYEEZUS!"
• Big "YES!": Botchamanias 152-167 and 172 open with Bobby Heenan's reaction to Ric Flair winning Royal Rumble '92.
• Blasphemous Boast: Botchamania 149 proclaims itself to be "The hottest thing since the Qur'an."
• Bold Inflation: Whenever swearing in a non-G show appears, it is highlighted via special emphasis subtitles.
• Camera Abuse: Some videos feature cameramen and or their cameras themselves taking some sort of unintentional abuse.
• The Chew Toy:
  • Sin Cara.
    THIS WAS SOMEHOW SIN CARA'S FAULT.
  • CZW would be so prone to feature botches on their shows that they got their own segment, introduced by Conan O'Brien activating his "Walker, Texas Ranger Lever" from Late Night with Conan O'Brien (and for a while, a clip of just about anyone pulling any kind of lever). It went to the point that CZW had the "honor" of getting two segments in the episode 402 for two of their shows... For the same problem, with different contexts.^note CZW Night of Infamy, where they decided to do an Exploding Barb Wire match...without informing the arena or anyone else. Naturally the fire alarm went off and the fire dept came. Then at CZW Cage of Death XXI, the fire alarm goes off again, this time without any apparently reason, and it goes though most of the show, ruining Alex Shelley's surprise return.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: When multiple people are talking and it's a verbal botch, Maffew uses coloured subtitles so you can tell who's talking more easily.
• Corpsinginvoked: "Someone's corpsing? Send for the man!" This is a Running Gag throughout the series where anytime someone laughs or smiles when they shouldn't, footage of an incident in WCW where Randy Savage walked into a room and slapped Torrie Wilson in the face when she started corpsing to get her to stop laughing will be shown. Past Botchamania 380 or so, this can also get replaced with footage of Becky Lynch, whose Red Baron nickname is "The Man." These will always be set to a chiptune of "Beat It" from Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.
• Couch Gag: After Hulk Hogan was removed from the Botchamania intro following his scandal, Maffew inserts a timely wrestling image or meme in his place, which changes every episode.
• Country Matters: Maffew is an Englishman, and he has used video clips of English programming where the C-word is tossed around liberally.
• Don't Explain the Joke:
  • Inverted, actually. Once in a while there will be a match in which the victory stipulations will be one thing and the finish will be something much different. For example: a stretcher match (you have to wheel your unresponsive opponent out of the arena on a stretcher) ends with a clean pinfall finish; or a new, young wrestler is set to beat an older, somewhat established star, and the older, somewhat established star cooperates by no-selling and sandbagging his opponent. There will be captions pointing this out (for example, in the first case, "A STRETCHER MATCH ENDS WITH A PINFALL"), and these are just a few such moments.
  • Rarely ever, some moments are not clearly explained via captions in the video; they are rather more likely to get the detailed description on the wiki. One example would be an infamous match on Victory Road '11 between Jeff Hardy and Sting, with the former being drugged so much he couldn't even wrestle.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: A couple of the earliest episodes featured occasional bits of ridiculous Backyard Wrestling, something noticeably lacking in pretty much every other episode due to the non-professional nature of it.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even for a guy who makes his living off other people's mistakes, there were botches that Maffew felt were too much:
  • One Botchamania featured a wrestler getting thrown into a trashcan of light tubes, and his leg was so mangled that Maffew censored the injury, a rarity for the series.
  • After Enzo Amore suffered a concussion after a freak accident during a match, Maffew refused the show the botch in its entirety, instead doing a Bait-and-Switch showing Enzo being thrown off, before switching to something else. (Apparently the Bait-and-Switch was because people were asking him if it was going to be on Botchamania while Enzo was still being carried away in a stretcher.)
  • Mike Adamle's CTE diagnosis, implied to be almost certainly the reason behind his verbal gaffes, was serious enough to remove "Jeff Harvey" from the intro.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Where Hulk Hogan used to reside in the current intro, Maffew has begun splicing funny and timely wrestling-related images that only appear for a brief half-second; for instance, when Botchamania came out the week Hogan won his $100m lawsuit against Gawker Media, the intro gag had Hogan dancing while clutching wads of cash at WrestleMania IX with the caption "Fuck Gawker".
• Freudian Slip: Could practically have its own page.
• Halloween Special: 105 which featured different matches/events from WCW's Halloween Havoc.
• Incoming Ham: It's Tazz!
• Ironic Echo: Botchamania 184 shows an incident where Kurt Angle throws Sting into the railing, knocking over a black audience member. This is repeated with a clip from a WWE promo years earlier in which Kurt ironically makes outrageous statements as a face, one of which was "Truth be told, I'm not a big fan of 'the black people'."
• Lampshade Hanging: Happens frequently either in the descriptions or the videos.
• Madness Mantra: In the Hulk Hogan/Roddy Piper cage match in WCW, which was dreadful, Maffew apparently loses his mind over the inanity of what's going on (the object of a cage match is to escape the cage and win). When Hogan and Piper take the brawl to the outside of the cage, the phrase "THEY BRAWL OUTSIDE IN A CAGE MATCH" is scrawled repeatedly over the action.
• Memetic Badass:invoked The infamous Japanese Table. The most formidable opponent in professional wrestling. The only foreign object to beat the streak Goldberg held over wrestlers. Such is the reputation of the Japanese Table it has been traded so it can perform for numerous companies including 1PW and CZW.
• Mood Whiplash: Setting a botch montage to "The Impossible Dream" has a rather... different effect than Maffew probably intended.
• Musical Gag:
  • INSANE DUSTY COMMENTARY. Fitting that his theme would be from something weird and Japanese.
  • "EVERYONE TALKS TOO MUCH", accompanied by someone getting choked in some way. Some wrestlers who do this a lot got their own custom intros:
    • John Cena got "Homeboy, you never shut up!"
    • And later Paige is getting the treatment. (Bonus: the deaf WWE fan.)
      Maffew: This guy gets it.
  • Lampshades his plugs for CHIKARA with "Money" and "Rich".
  • "Look At All Those Idiots" from The Simpsons Sing the Blues. Vinnie Mac sings it while overlooking the Raw attendees. Rusev sings it when the crowd chants "U.S.A!"... during his match with Khali.
  • Another one adds an extra segment to the Japanese Table joke: after Iori's maniacal laugh, you're gonna be singing to the I AM THE TABLE song.
• Narm: One of the major staples of the series. From Botchamania 104: invoked
  Shelton Benjamin: You wanna try to fight me? You better BRING A LUNCH!
• No Ending: The final ending from Botchamania 403, in reference to The Sopranos, as well as how the camera kept cutting away from Edge's spears during his comeback at the 2020 Royal Rumble. Subverted with a brief frame of Simon Gotch right before the video ends.
• Person as Verb: Whenever someone is censored on WWE, Maffew refers to it as a "Benoit," in reference to the network's erasure of him after his murder-suicide in 2007.
• Promotional Consideration: CHIKARA clips are sometimes introduced this way.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Botchamania 92 entirely features the TNA pay-per-view Victory Road 2009. A reviewer of the events (Bryan Alvarez) expresses disbelief that EARL! FUCKING! HEBNER! outran James Storm to the ring, and awards another match from the pay-per-view MINUS! FIVE! STARS!

• Running Gag: Many, many examples.
• Scenery Censor: Whenever nudity appears, cue to Stevie Richards holding the Censored sign from his Right to Censor days.
• Shout-Out:
  • Botchamania 95 used as soundtrack music "Push It to the Limit", "She's on Fire", and "Rush Rush (Get the Yeyo)" (plus the instrumental "Tony's Theme"), beside opening with an audio clip of Tony Montana's "You're fucking with me, you're fucking with the best!" and having an ending based on the "Say hello to my little friend!" scene. Hilariously enough, the video ends with a dedication to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, the director and screenwriter of the 1932 version, respectively.
  • Botchamania 145: WARNING: An awful wrestler (Lacey Von Erich) is approaching fast.
  • Botchamania 194 uses Animaniacs' "Good Idea, Bad Idea" format to prove a point about a certain match ending at TNA's Turning Point 2011.
  • When a WWE wrestler gets hurt or frustrated and says something that's censored, the name "Benoit" flashes on the screen to fill in the blank.
  • After Hogan became persona non grata, his spot in the opening titles has been overtaken by a reference to a recent event, which may or may not be wrestling-related, on each episode.
  • Whenever an audience is clearly "booing", a Boo Buddy appears. Roman Reigns has a bad case of them.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: Doc Gallows and Karl Anderson. While WWE was more than happy to strike down Maffew's video on YouTube any chance they got, they also tried to springboard off Botchamania's popularity by filming a pilot for YouTube called Botch Club, starring Gallows and Anderson as they snarked MST3K-style on a video compilation of blown moves. Despite Botch Club never going beyond its sole episode, Maffew admits to deriving a little more pleasure featuring botches of Anderson and Gallows than he does for most workers.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Happens frequently given the nature of video game music.
• Special Effects Failure: Another series staple, incidents include pyros not shooting off on cue (if at all), "electric cages" selectively electrocuting wrestlers, the infamous Shockmaster incident, etc. invoked
• The Stinger:
  • Later videos would take the pure text taglines out from the endings and replace those with videos featuring wrestling-related gags. These in turn would end with The Iron Sheik shouting "Facking bullshit!".
  • At one point Maffew ended up with so many fan-submitted endings that he had to create a series of special videos consisting of nothing else but them, 'Endingmania', just to fit them in.
• Take That!:
  • Botchamania 165 was prefaced with a note saying that "We've had three TNA World Champions since the last one", the last one being the one dedicated to Victory Road 2011.
  • Some of the endings and descriptions take pot shots at WWE Raw.
  • After #173 was removed by CZW, it was resubmitted without the offending footage. It opened with a special message from Bobby Heenan:
    (showing CHIKARA logo) "You listen to me—you go to the top! You don't listen to me... (switches to CZW logo) you're never heard from again!"
  • #72, which was made shortly after WrestleMania XXV, ended with a note saying "There was going to be a tag match in this vid but there wasn't enough time." At Mania, the tag title match (featuring The Miz and John Morrison) was bumped from the event in order to make time for a performance by Kid Rock and a Divas battle royal.
• Visual Pun:
  • Botchamania 153 ends with a picture of the Left 4 Dead cover with the Four Horsemen's theme playing over it.
  • Botchamania 157 has a very elaborate Mongo setup: A clip of the German version of The Countries Song plays, and when Yakko points to Mongolia (which is Die Mongolei in German), the screen is covered in Mongo faces.
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Averted and lampshaded, especially with anything involving TNA or Vince Russo.
• You Just Had to Say It:
  • In #191, Michael Cole brings up Big Show and Mark Henry destroying the ring with a top-rope superplex as something part of "a night of firsts." Cue footage from the early 2000s of a similar incident on WWE SmackDown, of which The Big Show was a part of and Michael Cole commentated on.
  • And in #192, Mark Henry walks to the ring and Cole says they're going to show what happened at Vengeance 8 days ago, which is the ring getting destroyed. Jerry Lawler says that he's never seen anything like that before in his entire life. Cue the same footage again. They'll never learn, will they?
  • During a tag team tables match between Natalya, Beth Phoenix, and Lay-Cool, Jerry Lawler notes he's never seen a woman go through a table before. Cue the montage of the Dudleys putting women like Mae Young, Stacy Keibler, and Lita through tables.

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