I know wrestling isn’t for everyone, but during the pandemic I finally broke down and bought a subscription to Peacock so I could go back in time and watch the WWE (then called WWF) at it’s very height of popularity.  Looking at it through the eyes of today, it’s definitely a trip in both good ways and bad.  On the one, the roar of 20,000+ people for every single Monday Night Raw is something special that we’ll probably never get back.  On the other hand it includes a number of very “90s WWF” segments that are horrible by today’s standards and that I mostly skip.

I started by journey through the Attitude Era with the PPV that supposedly started it all, King of the Ring 1996.  Any good WWF/E fan knows that that was the PPV where Steve Austin uttered the famous Austin 3:16 line, which catapulted him into superstardom.  Except… not because Austin was really just a mid-carded in these early days who was a really cool wrestler but wasn’t yet the character who would be known and loved by everyone.  Much more hullabaloo was made about old legends from the 80s like Ultimate Warrior and Jake the Snake, people way past their prime who the WWF was desperately using in a bid to boost their standing against the soon-to-be white hot WCW’s NWO.  

So as I watched the Raw episodes throughout 1996, the one thought that kept going through my head was “man this sucks.”  For supposedly being the start of the Attitude Era, this year mostly has some of the worst New Gen Era crap that I’ve ever seen.  Where to begin?  You have Henry O. Godwinn and Phineas I. Godwinn, two hillbilly pig farmers.  If you didn’t catch it, the subtle pun is that their initials spell Pig and Hog, and they also come to the ring a few times with a god damn petting zoo.  They… are not good wrestlers.  Then there’s people like Farooq walking around looking like Disco Power Rangers, and oh god so many mid carders are just crap crap crap.  Even the top of the card isn’t usually much more than “watchable.”  Shawn Michaels is great once he steps into the ring, but Raw is for character work not wrestling, and his character kind of sucks.  Vince McMahon on commentary keeps pulling out the line that “he’s got more courage than he has brains,” which actually isn’t much of a compliment when you think about it.  And aside from being a stripper, Michaels doesn’t really seem to do much or say much that’s in any way interesting.

In fact the most interesting bits by far from this era are the stories that are compelling for historical reasons rather than on-screen reasons.  Marc Mero wouldn’t be anyone’s favorite wrestler, but while watching 1996 Raw he was a breath of fresh air because he could actually wrestle and he did cool moves that made me go ooh and ahh.  Yet his career in the WWF is pretty short and uneventful, mostly being a vehicle for his wife and future WWF sex symbol Sable.  I think I know the exact moment he killed his WWF career stone dead, when he won the Intercontinental Title and gave an interview that sounded like he was accepting an Oscar.  WWF is a soap opera with fake fighting so the interviews are supposed to tell a story or be funny or compelling or make us cry or feel SOMETHING, they’re not supposed to be a place where Marc Mero thanks God and his family and his parents for bringing him to this moment.  I’m sure that was genuine emotion from Marc Mero, but it didn’t make for good soap opera TV so it just sounded awkward.  Then later Marc Mero gets a knee injury and suddenly the reason I liked him (his high flying offense) is out the window as he had to work gingerly on his injured knee.  What could have been though, he was really cool.  I’ve heard it said that Mick Foley was really upset that Marc Mero came in and got a bit money contract when Foley was still working for peanuts, but that just comes off as crabs in a bucket mentality.  Mero was good, and honestly a better move-doer (not wrestler though) than Foley, and Mero’s big money contract pushed the amount of money wrestlers could demand higher and higher, so in the end it helped Foley.  

The other time capsule from this period besides Marc Mero is Ahmed Johnson.  AJ is a big, super-steroid of a man who WWF seemed intent on pushing as their next top star.  There’s a series of episodes early on where they’re trying to make him Shawn Michaels’ friend so that the fans love him, but then he got injured and had to be taken off TV for a while.  This would be the pattern with Johnson for the rest of 1996 and 1997, they try to put him in a big central storyline but he gets injured and taken off the air for a few months.  I guess he was just unlucky, but I don’t think it was as much of a loss as Marc Mero, I never really saw anything that compelled me except his Pearl River Plunge move.

Aside from that, the best work that WWF actually put on deliberately was Mankind vs the Undertaker, but even here I have a small asterisk.  These two are exactly what WWF is good at, they are CHARACTERS more than they are wrestlers and move-doers.  Mick Foley in particular is a joy to watch as the deranged Mankind, JR talks about how he’s disfigured and has one leg shorter than the other, and you believe it watching him because he deliberately moves so awkwardly and does so much interesting stuff.  Mankind makes you believe that you’re watching someone who escaped from an insane asylum and not a happy-go-lucky weirdo named Mick Foley who loves hardcore matches.  As for the Undertaker, this is some of his best work in large part because he doesn’t have to talk, Paul Bearer talks for him.  Undertaker has never been the best talker in the world but like Mankind he is great at the physical work that makes you believe his character, this unfeeling zombie wizard who is somehow the good guy in this fight.  Every single match between the two of them was a masterclass in two characters even if the actual moves they did were usually kinda lame (outside of the amazing novelty in the boiler room brawl).

So yeah that’s the WWF attitude era, or the start of it at least.  I’ll keep writing some of my thoughts about it for the rest of this week, then get back to stocks or science or whatever it is I write about here next week.