YMMV / WWE Cruiserweight Classic

• Awesome Moments: While not every cruiserweight fits the stereotypical High Flyer mold, this is inevitable when you gather enough cruiserweights together and they pull off unthinkable feats. But nothing has elicited it moreso than Brian Kendrick unleashing a goddamn BURNING HAMMER, a move that the man who made it famous has used less than ten times in his career, in his match against Kota Ibushi. And it still wasn't enough to win the match.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Everyone. Episodes typically end with numerous people on the Internet demanding the company sign everybody in the tournament.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Gargano/Ciampa match, especially the end, is harder to watch knowing it would eventually lead to Ciampa turning on Gargano.
  • After the initial surge of interest, 205 Live and the Cruiserweight division would slowly become an irrelevant afterthought in WWE, with almost all the division's wrestlers being released in the 2020-21 mass releases until there were barely any wrestlers at all left on it, and the Cruiserweight Championship belt that Triple H had revealed before the grand final of the CWC was retired at the start of 2022 when the final champion, Roderick Strong, lost a title unification match against the NXT North American champion, Carmelo Hayes.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "SIGN EVERYBODY!"
  • Tozawa's screaming, which on fanboards and chat channels is usually either interpreted as just "A!" or the logo of AAA.
  • "DAR, DAR, DAR, DAR-DAR-DAR, DAR-DAR-DAR!" Sung during Noam Dar's matches, to the tune of the Imperial March.
• The Producer Thinks of Everything: One isolated instance revolving around Johnny Gargano. The second round matches of the tournament were taped a month before NXT Takeover: Brooklyn II, where Gargano would hurt his knee after being targeted by The Revival. The actual CWC episode broadcast just days later would show Gargano's knee bandaged up, allowing his second-round opponent TJ Perkins to attack said weakness and advance to the quarterfinals. In short, Gargano was selling a knee injury weeks before it actually happened.
• The Scrappy:
  • Ho Ho Lun from Hong Kong, an exception to the "SIGN EVERYBODY!" mentality. He didn't impress during his first round match, as it was obvious he was very green and unpolished. Justified by the fact that pro wrestling is still relatively new in China (in fact, Ho Ho started its first major promotion), so he's partially self-taught, and possibly the fact that his name is easy to make fun of. It also doesn't help Ho Ho that Jason Lee (also from China) put on a better performance despite being eliminated in the first round.
  • "The Bollywood Boys" Harv and Gurv Shira are also on this list for having mediocre matches that immediately gave their opponents "I don't see what the big deal with this guy is" reputations among fans who haven't watched the indies.
• Shocking Moments: Brian Kendrick decides that he'll use a BURNING HAMMER, a move so dangerous its creator only used it seven times, against Kota Ibushi, making it one of the only times that move has ever been performed in a WWE show. The shocking part comes from how Ibushi kicks out of it, because it's the type of move that is used to end a match.
• Signature Scene: Brian Kendrick's BURNING HAMMER against Kota Ibushi that lead to a 2-count.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Due to their impressive pedigrees and being by far the most popular wrestlers on the tournament, a match between Kota Ibushi and Zack Sabre Jr. was highly anticipated, but never pushed through due to both men being eliminated by eventual finalists TJ Perkins and Gran Metalik - a result of neither man agreeing to sign full-time with the WWE. Their loss was the gain of New Japan Pro-Wrestling, who proceeded to book both men to face each other in the following year's G1 Climax; to rub it in even further, Ibushi and Sabre - both of whom were subsequently classified as heavyweights as opposed to cruiserweights/junior heavyweights - would proceed to wrestle each other multiple times, almost exclusively in tournament settings.

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