good dolphin wrote:
Matches Malone wrote:
Everything outside of Hogan has been a failure for Vince. That success was so monumental though that it's kept his "empire" going despite his attempts to derail it by thinking he's everything but a Wrestling promoter.
WBF - Google it.
Bret Hart & HBK only got their chance when the crowd crapped all over Luger and he had no one else to turn to.
The Attitude Era only came about because Vince threw his hands up and admitted he had no clue how to compete with WCW and the nWo. Hell, if WCW was run somewhat competently it would've been the WWF that went out of business.
XFL, WWE Films, Roman Reigns etc...
I was a big wrestling fan in grade school. I went to matches at the Horizon. I bought magazines. I wrote a paper on wrestling. I loved watching the local league and was even happier when that Von Erich league was broadcast into Chicago. I was cool with it when it got a little east coasted up with Bruno Sanmartino. I even loved the beginnings of the Vince era with Friday night wrestling on network TV.
I can't quite put my finger on it when it changed. Certainly I grew out of it but it just became too clean, even as it was becoming much dirtier.
Depends on the change you're wondering about.
Whereas a staple of territory wrasslin' was virtual isolation from the rest of the world as a means to protect the business, the product was, as a result, offered as completely legit and as such often took on characteristics closer resembling a shoot rather than, say, Vince's Rock 'n' Wrestling, with its larger than life cartoonish characters along with an influx of celebrities from outside wrestling which were basicalyl 80s "innovations" that, along with putting the territories out of business, carried on well through the 90s.
(how's that for a run-on sentence? Too lazy to clean it up.)Shortly after WM6 (Hogan v Warrior) until about a year before the NWO angle started (though my viewing was mostly limited to ECW during said year), I completely checked-out of wrestling. Once I heard about Hogan cutting a heel promo which included the phrase, "you can stick it, brother", I simply had to check out what the hell was going on.
By the time the WCW did the NWO deal, very generally speaking, things changed again towards a product intended to be perceived as more 'real' ... not the ringwork, mind you, but instead focusing on the outside-the-ring storytelling. While WM had long been portrayed as the true spectacle of wrestling, now each Monday night was basically a spectacle carried largely by the near-constant blurring of the lines of kayfabe and reality by working the s'marks as best they could since, by then, the 'secret' was more or less out (as my boy Cornette says, by then 'that horse was let out of the barn').
This, in turn, enabled (or emboldened, take your pick) American pro wrestling to more freely and readily incorporate foreign aspects, most notably the 'lucha' style from Mexico, etc., along with NJPW's Antonio Inoki's "strong style" which was portrayed as more of a combat sport including a particular deference to submission "wins", not to mention working several spots in a match, if not the match itself, awfully snug. ECW was the major (?) fed way out in front on this (along with so-called 'garbage wrestling') and, as with a lot else, WCW usurped those ideas along with quite a bit of the talent and gave it exposure on it's national shows (albeit more often than not as curtain-jerker or undercard status). An astute observer might then wonder these two forms rose in popularity at the same time seeing as spot-fests seemed to be the diametric opposite to worked shoot-fights ... like the Eagles sang, I can't tell you why.
Nowadays, with WWE
(I will never get used to those initials) having become a 'corporate-friendly' product for the most part, I don't know what the hell to call it. It's obviously not Mid-South nor NJPW or even ROH ... it's just some amalgam of everything all at once which, as far as I'm concerned, is far more often than not like mixing every Kool-Aid flavor together into the same pitcher and figuring it'll taste far out man.
Recently though, it would appear that WWE is letting a few things here and there slip a bit past the PG barrier to I'd say mixed success at best ... again, just adding another flavor to the Kool-Aid gangbang. That said, their 'NXT' product is perhaps the most inviting product to try out if you haven't been paying much if any attention for, say, twenty years or so.
IMO the two major factors in its success is a less stringent control of talent promos and also being a smaller more intimate crowd than their weekly TV shows (never mind their PPVs though that is becoming an obsolete acronym what with the aforementioned Network) ... 20k-80k feels like a spectacle, a few thousand (at most) feels more authentic and intimate.
The short version is the product you used to watch is long gone and has since mutated into whatever it is someone will describe it as 30 years from now. I basically watch at this point to make smartass comments during the show on the 'other' bored.
This probably didn't help you at all, but I took the time to write it and I can only hope more than a few people get suckered into reading it and then wonder why they wasted their life doing so, which naturally would bring a smile to my awful face.
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