The Road Is Jericho Blu-Ray Review
Chris Jericho's new DVD/Blu-Ray The Road Is Jericho: Epic Stories & Rare Matches From Y2J released this week, without a ton of promotion from WWE. The set is a follow-up of sorts to Chris Jericho's extremely popular and successful Breaking The Code set that came out over three years ago.
This Blu-Ray is formatted much different than Breaking The Code, with the feature being split up and divided with matches interrupting. Jericho introduces us to the set and explains that he's always working, just not with the WWE. He talks about how he balances wrestling, podcasting, music, writing, and TV work.
In between matches, Jericho tells stories, which I won't detail here. They typically run a couple of minutes each. Although the matches alone are fantastic, I feel like they could have really benefitted from inset videos of Jericho watching along and offering his thoughts and memories on them.
Some of the topics that are tackled include his brief ECW career, jumping to WCW, and finally getting his heel turn and working with Dean Malenko. He also tells a really interesting story about how he had to adjust to WWE's style, and how X-Pac basically became his personal road agent to get him acclimated.
Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of the set is how many things Chris Jericho had a hand in creating, proposing, or helping launch. Little things like the cables that suspend cages from the ceiling come into play, as he shares previously unheard information in nearly every segment. Jericho also gives inside stories about how some of the stunts he was involved in were pulled off.
There were some matches on the set that Jericho had admittedly not watched, or even remembered. One in particular was a match with Stone Cold Steve Austin that included Mick Foley as a special guest refereee, that Jericho said he wanted included for the people involved alone.
The match collection itself has followed a fantastic recent trend of WWE using primarily rare gems from forgotten Raw or pay-per-view shows, as opposed to repeated classics that you could catch on any number of sets. Matches with Jeff Hardy, Edge, Ultimo Dragon, Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, CM Punk, Shawn Michaels, Rey Mysterio and others are included.
When I found out this wasn't a documentary feature, I wasn't optimistic. WWE's stop and start pace to similar DVD's crippled the viewing experience for me, but not in the case of The Road Is Jericho. On almost every single clip of Jericho talking, he provides fans with information that hasn't been spewed over and over on previous programming. This makes for a fantastic watch, and an excellent buy.
Overall rating: 8.5/10