I grew up in the Hulk Hogan era. Junk Yard Dog, Superfly Snuka, Hillbilly Jim…those guys. I kinda grew out of it when I was, you know…12 or so. Now my friend’s son is 7 and watches when I’m over there sometimes and I just can not believe how stupid it has gotten. I mean I’m sitting here watching two men argue in the ring. They don’t have a few words then wrestle…no, they just argue and head back to the locker room. And there are grown adults (chronologically speaking) in the audience eating it up. What is this world coming to!?
Linda McMahon, wife of Vince McMahon, is running for the Senate again. The WWE will be pretty bland for the forseeable future. Students of political history and other high minded folks can probably find video on the internet of her barking like a dog in one of the Ted Dibiase/Millon Dollar Man skits from back in the day.
The WWE became lame long ago, because they totally dominate the market. After WCW ceased to be any sort of competition the WWE killed the Attitude era almost completely to appeal to a broader market. It got worse after they bought WCW and ECW. Now they have no reason to take chances, and it’s stale, worse than it ever was when Wrestling Challenge and Superstars were the flagship shows. Back then they had fun with it. Now it’s angry posturing, bad promos, and general sameness. When the biggest heat in a long time is The Nexus attacking Ricky Steamboat and other old-timers, the product sucks. If you have to reach back into the past like that it’s time for something else. It’s sad when you can probably generate more interest by bringing back the NWO.
None of that has anything to do with Linda McMahon’s political aspirations. It’s just tired.
The soap opera aspects have been there since at least the late ‘90s. It can be pretty entertaining at times, but yeah, some of it is really over the top, and it seems more and more like if you want to see some good wrasslin’, you need to buy their PPV programs.
In other news, Francisco Franco is still dead.
Well I could come in and complain, and then try to defend them, but it’s just the Cycle Of Wrestling at work again. Every era in pro wrestling has it’s gems, but often they’re smaller than grains of sand and sparsely spread. Despite the best efforts of promoters to destroy their own source of income, new ideas eventually will creep in and the Sport of Kings will once again regain it’s splendor. In the meantime, support your local independent wrestlers.
Going to move this to Cafe Society (from IMHO).
Could it be that the reason it’s stupid now is that you’re not 12 any more?
It always was. You have grown up.
I don’t remember pro wrestling in the 80s and 90s being nearly as chatty as it is now. I don’t watch very often at all anymore for a couple reasons. 1) Too much chit chat. 2) The level of performance in the ring has declined. The WWE doesn’ thave the depth it once did. They’ve got maybe a couple guys who can put on a decent show and then it’s a whole lot of filler. I have no idea how the WWE is doing financially, but I would suspect that maybe the emergence of MMA fighting has damaged them.
That’s because they’ve killed off nearly all the training grounds for wrestlers to learn. Now most just learn from the WWE minor leagues, and those that come in from outside have to be 300% better than the home-grown talent to get company backing. It’s a closed, incestuous ecosystem.
It also suffers from being overscipted in and out of the ring. And the big bosses (Vincent McMahon and Kevin Dunn) have juvenile senses of humor and neither accepts criticism well, even constructive.
That said, I still enjoy certain wrestling performances. I appreciate that these men and women are essentially performing athletic stunt person duty in front of a live crowd.
I think complaints about “depth” are all bullshit and faulty memories. People hang on “big names” from the past that weren’t always such “big names” when they were in their prime, and they fail to give newer talents half the credit they deserve.
The other half of it is the hold-back process. Only so many people can be top talents at any given time, and they want to milk those people for all they’re worth. So there is little room at the top for new people, and consequently (WWE being a huge offender at this), they fail to push or develop that next wave of top guys in a timely manner.
It also comes down to the business still being run like it’s some small town sports team, with stupid self-destructive punishment of talents for petty assed reasons and mistreatment of people that could be bigger stars if, for example, Vince McMahon wasn’t such a petty jackass.
That’s what I think. Its always been corny, cheesy entertainment.
the lights, the music, the costumes who would have thought Kiss would change a sport.
Jerry Blackwell that was wrestling.
This is a pretty good description of the situation. Wrestling promoters have always tried to monopolize the market. It’s a typical modern business strategy, but does little to provide quality sports entertainment, and can contribute to a long term decline.
We just started getting the Ring of Honor show on Saturday nights on a local channel. It’s a high end independent promotion, but barely competition for the WWE. And if the WWE looks bad, all you have to do is take a gander at iMPACT Wrestling to see how bad it can get.
You pretty much answered your own question.
You are not in the target audience.
Your friend’s 7-year-old son, on the other hand, is.
This has been the formula for decades - the only real exception was the “attitude era” and the years of the annual WWE issue of Playboy, but as long as Linda McMahon thinks she has any chance of being elected a Senator, these aren’t going to return. (It wasn’t limited to WWE, either - in Ric Flair’s book, when he describes the small plane crash he was in, he tells a story about how another wrestler drove for hours to the crash site solely to get another of the wrestlers in the plane away from the crash because if word got out that a good guy and a bad guy were flying in a small plane together, fans would stop believing the storylines!)
The target now (sort of like it was in the 1980s) appears to be pre-teen boys and their ticket / pay-per-view / merchandise-buying parents.
How can you say the “lack of depth” claim is bullshit and then go on to explain why the WWE lacks depth? I mean, I completely agree with your description of the hold-back process and I think that was a non-issue back in the 80s and 90s because there was competition. Competition breeds excellence.
My God, I remember that! That was HER? Holy crap!
More to the OP, the McMahon promotion has really dichotomized their shows since the mid-1990s. It used to be that what the TV audience saw, essentially, an edited version of what went on at the arena–a surrogate live show, more or less. The last time I went to a show (which is right around the time HHH came to the promotion, so a good long time ago), the audience sat through all the staginess that the OP describes with very little in the way of actual matches. After that taping portion was over, then you saw the REAL show–straight up worked wrestling.
In other words, the product that you grew up with still exists, but, increasingly, you have to go to the arena to see it.
If you want to see good matches, you have to watch the PPVs. That started the moment Steve Austin gave his famous Austin 3:16 speech. After that, the TV shows solely set up the PPVs. Attitude Era meant 20 minute speeches and 3 minute matches and it’s been that way ever since. That was why I switched over to ECW for the weekly show in 96 or 97 and just watched WWF PPVs after that.
Sure, you can catch a good match on Raw once in awhile, but most people save their best for the big money that the PPVs bring them. There’s a handful of people who gave 100% every time they went out, but they’re retired or getting up there in age. By that I mean HBK, Edge, Mysterio, etc.
Another reason it seems lame now is because WWF picked up on the hardcore aspect pretty well from about 97 through 2009 or so. Now that’s it’s rated PG, even Hell in a Cell matches aren’t allowed to have any blood. Chair shots to the head aren’t allowed. Piledrivers, Shooting Stars Presses, and other high risk moves are only allowed by a small handful of people.
Keep watching though, there’s some break out people that can wrestle that are working their way up. Dolph Ziggler and Cody Rhodes are two in particular that I can see holding the big belts one day.
With that said, “The good ol days” and Hulk Hogan do not go together. Only a handful of stuff from the 80’s is even watchable now. The match almost has to have Snuka, Savage, or someone like that to be good. When Bret Hart, HBK, and The Undertaker took over from the older guys was when WWF’s in-ring performances actually got great.
Hmmm. I can remember the days when the wrestlers used to bleed copiously from their foreheads during hotly contested matches. Of course, that was done by razor blades hidden in their wrist straps.
I was a big Bruiser and Crusher fan back in the day, when Chicago had it’s own Bob Luce as a promoter out of the AWA. I went to a couple of the matches at the Chicago Ampitheater with my father as our daddy-daughter outings. Ah, memories. Ox Baker. Wahoo McDaniel.
I always smile when people mention Hulk Hogan and the Junkyard Dog as old time wrestlers.