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Was the Invasion angle always destined to fail?


Liam O'Rourke

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This week's SCG podcast is going be a little different, as we are going to do a timeline of the Invasion angle - from the WCW purchase to the bitter end at Survivor Series, with the addition of notes from Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alverez's newsletters from 2001 of what was going on behind the scenes on a week to week basis, and I think it will be a very interesting show to see the breakdown, as it happened, with the overarching theme being whether or not it was doomed from the beginning.

 

I'm looking to get some of your opinions to chime in throughout the show, and as always feedback will be credited to your fine selves on the air, So, I'd like your thoughts on:

 

a) What were you thinking/hoping for when the purchase was announced?

 

b) What was the moment the angle died for you?

 

c) What was your personal high point, if any?

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I'd query whether it "failed" really.  I think we could all have fantasy-booked it differently had we had access to Goldberg, Hogan, Nash et al but  even without the main stars they built a 6 month (or longer?) storyline with some massive PPVs out of it.  I thought the final Survivor Series match was fantastic.

 

The idea of creating a separate WCW brand was never really on the cards, as WWE's broadcast partners weren't interested!  

 

Lowlights were the balls-up around DDP who should have been their one MASSIVE WCW star.

 

Highlight for me was The APA power bombing Buff Bagwell through a table whilst calling him a "pussy" in what seemed to be a legit segment.

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a) I was 14 when the Invasion happened and had not watched WCW at all. The only time I was made aware of WCWs existense was when DX did the skits in 98, so I didnt have any expectations, I was just excited to see new faces.

 

b) Good question, I cant answer it specifically but when it became apparent quite early on that the WCW guys were just glorified jobbers the angle lost its edge.

 

c) the rise of Jericho during the angle when he got into his fued with Rock.

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As someone who'd never watched WCW, had only heard of ECW through WWF, and only properly started watching WWF again in 2000 after missing most of the 90s, I actually quite enjoyed the Invasion. The Austin-Angle feud was good, RVD was a new face who made a big impression on me, Jericho and Rock were good, the Hurricane arrived, and you had drama each week about who might defect to which side, leading to that big Survivor Series match which had some amazing video packages associated with it. I kind of viewed it as a way of bringing in a load of new guys at once, which added a new dimension to the shows for a few months while they all settled in. I only found out how generally disliked the whole thing was years afterward! Which is understandable if you'd been watching WCW as well or had more idea of the history than I did (by 2002 I was more clued up) but for me at the time I was quite happy, even with the DDP thing, because (1) I liked Undertaker more and (2) it led to "that's not a bad thing... That's a GOOD THING" which I liked a lot.

 

So to answer the question ... Yes, it was doomed from the start, but to a WWF-only fan like me that wasn't really a big issue.

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a) I was hoping we'd get WCW run as a separate company with an annual event where the two companies would collide. Seemed like if it could have been done that way there'd be years of big shows. It was probably unrealistic in hindsight.

 

b) The moment Stephanie McMahon walked out as the "owner" of ECW. An hour earlier, I thought they'd just rescued the whole thing. Then that happened and you knew that everything else would be secondary to the McMahon family drama.

 

c) High point was definitely the formation of the alliance. One of those white hot angles. The pop was spine tingling.

 

I'd query whether it "failed" really.

Indisputable I'd say. They couldn't make it last beyond 5 months despite acquiring tons of fresh talent. Invasion drew a monster buyrate but otherwise apart from Survivor Series (50k buys up), the rest of the PPV's were down on 2000. SummerSlam slightly but No Mercy and Unforgiven massively.

 

By late October/early November, fewer people were watching Raw than had when Nitro was still picking up a rating between 2.1 and 2.6. Although it rebounded for Rumble to WrestleMania season, within six months they'd drop below a 4.0 average and they've only ever drawn above 4.0 a few times a year since.

 

House show attendances were also down roughly a third on 2000 in the second half of 2001.

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a) Like everybody i was dreaming of Sting, Hogan, Glodberg etc all getting involved, when they purchased WCW i wasn't aware of the golden contracts situation

 

b) I can't recall a specific 'moment' but i remember it dawned on me that the angle became based on Austin v Angle more than WWE v WCW, Regal turning heel and joining the alliance was also a 'jump the shark' moment a little

 

c) Personally i thought the Invasion PPV was brilliant from start to finish, even the B+P match was entertaing as far as those type of matches go

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a) I personally just wanted the abandoning of Smackdown to be replaced with WCW Nitro, I wanted two companies under one overall banner, with maybe one or two cross-over PPVs a year. Of course we all wanted the big stars to turn up, namely Goldberg for me or at least Steiner, and when Vince McMahon did that promo reeling off their names to get crowd reaction I truly thought they'd buy out at least one or two of those contracts. To have WWF going up against mid-card WCW was just never going to be any sort of competition ... and it wasn't.

 

b) ECW being run by Steph ... ugh, blatantly a personal dig and rib at Heyman, but made it look shite, in fact having ECW align with WCW at all was hokey and would never have happened. A splinter cell band of talent would have been better, but Steph walking through that curtain was woeful, and as already mentioned turned the three big companies fighting into McMahon Vs McMahon and narrowed it's appeal in my eyes.

 

c) I have a few.

 

The ECW turn was a fucking epic bit of telly.

Heyman's 'shoot' was the promo of the angle, just wonderful, barring the 'Choke' bit at the end, which felt rushed, Taz turning there would have been even better in my eyes.

The much uncredited work of Kanyon, the whole MVP gimmick of The Alliance was wonderful, out of everyone that was on WCW's side, you felt he could have been the one to break through the WWF ceiling and maybe go on to do something after the angle burned out. Sadly his injury fucked all that up.

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a) I was hoping we'd get WCW run as a separate company with an annual event where the two companies would collide. Seemed like if it could have been done that way there'd be years of big shows. It was probably unrealistic in hindsight.

 

b) The moment Stephanie McMahon walked out as the "owner" of ECW. An hour earlier, I thought they'd just rescued the whole thing. Then that happened and you knew that everything else would be secondary to the McMahon family drama.

 

c) High point was definitely the formation of the alliance. One of those white hot angles. The pop was spine tingling.

 

I'd query whether it "failed" really.

Indisputable I'd say. They couldn't make it last beyond 5 months despite acquiring tons of fresh talent. Invasion drew a monster buyrate but otherwise apart from Survivor Series (50k buys up), the rest of the PPV's were down on 2000. SummerSlam slightly but No Mercy and Unforgiven massively.

 

By late October/early November, fewer people were watching Raw than had when Nitro was still picking up a rating between 2.1 and 2.6. Although it rebounded for Rumble to WrestleMania season, within six months they'd drop below a 4.0 average and they've only ever drawn above 4.0 a few times a year since.

 

House show attendances were also down roughly a third on 2000 in the second half of 2001.

 

 

How much of that is down to the fact that WCW went out of business though?  If WWF had run no Invasion angle, would those numbers have been better?

 

As a brand, WCW was toxic with advertisers, tv companies and so on.  I know as fans we don't care about all that, but I'm not convinced the WWE ballsed up something that should have been a sure-fire money maker.  I think they got some monster PPV buys, 6 months of programming and a couple of new stars out of it.

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WWF didn't even own the rights to the ECW name when they were using it at the start of the InVasion. WWE were getting sued all over the place for it by the liquidators. I remember them being pissed off that they used the ECW logo and the theme song. Ended up buying the name, but not until near the angle's end.

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As a brand, WCW was toxic with advertisers, tv companies and so on.  I know as fans we don't care about all that, but I'm not convinced the WWE ballsed up something that should have been a sure-fire money maker.  I think they got some monster PPV buys, 6 months of programming and a couple of new stars out of it.

They didn't get some monster buys. They got A monster buy. And even that didn't make up for the massive drop in interest in No Mercy and Unforgiven.

 

That buyrate for Invasion shows clearly that there obviously was the potential to draw money from the angle. In the end though, not only could they not draw big from the it, they couldn't even arrest the slide in their own business.

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It's a complicated question. There's a tendency to say that they should have brought in the big stars which is far too simplistic. Not only would that have pissed off long time employees but changed the way contracts went in the WWF long term. People who say that they'd have made a lot of money that year or even for a couple of years might be right but there'd have been long term ramifications to handing out golden contracts. Creatively it seems like a great opportunity, but if you're running a business it's easy to see why you wouldn't take that gamble. Plus if Goldberg and co are being paid a fortune to sit at phone exactly how much are you going to have to pay them to step back into an industry where you're damaging your body? If I'm the guys on those contracts there isn't enough money for me to consider it.

 

Why would a network want a WCW show rather than a WWF show? How much was the brand worth without tv?

 

Undoubtedly they got things wrong. They could have booked who they did have better. They seemed to balk on that. Ultimately they decided that the McMahons were bigger stars than Booker T and DDP. Although by the time they made that decision they were right. Whether that resulted in them not winning over the WCW audience is a question that's difficult to answer. It wasn't the same brand no matter who they brought in (although they tuned in for Invasion and cthey could have been given a far better hook than a WWF guy turning heel). That and the drop in buyrates and attendances suggest that they were losing their own WWF fans while the angle is going on. You'd have to speculate why those fans left.

 

Ultimately the buyout was a complete success. They made their money back pretty quickly and had huge success with the WCW DVDs. They made a ton of money out of ECW too. The angle ultimately didn't damage those brands for them. It didn't damage Sting, Goldberg or the nWo either. Admittedly they didn't handle the last two well in the end anyway but introducing those expensive products the way they did makes some semblance of sense.

 

Edit: As a further note to the first point, everyone knew by Invasion that the WWF weren't willing or couldn't give them the WCW that people actually cared about. They weren't going to get Steiner or Goldberg. By that point they knew they were getting a second rate brand.

 

Of course ultimately the WWF didn't bring in Disco Inferno or La Parka so they really fucked it up and could have done a heck of a lot better.

 

Edit: I should say that's provided all the stuff above is true. I've heard it both ways when it comes to the contracts and television networks.

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It's a complicated question. There's a tendency to say that they should have brought in the big stars which is far too simplistic. Not only would that have pissed off long time employees but changed the way contracts went in the WWF long term. People who say that they'd have made a lot of money that year or even for a couple of years might be right but there'd have been long term ramifications to handing out golden contracts. Creatively it seems like a great opportunity, but if you're running a business it's easy to see why you wouldn't take that gamble. Plus if Goldberg and co are being paid a fortune to sit at phone exactly how much are you going to have to pay them to step back into an industry where you're damaging your body? If I'm the guys on those contracts there isn't enough money for me to consider it.

 

Yeah, there was no chance of the guys with those contracts coming in. That sort of golden deal had just run one company into the ground. And even if they had come in, they were still the top guys from the losing team, and the top guys from the winning team would've treated them as such. Austin wasn't going to play job boy for Goldberg in 2001 -- look at how he treated the nWo in 2002. Look at how Undertaker treated DDP, and how Rock and Austin treated Booker T. Chuck Palumbo had no chance of being taken seriously.

 

So the invasion was basically the mid and bottom guys from the losing team facing the star names from the winning team. Like Man Utd playing the Wimbledon reserves that year. It was only going one way. Loki's right -- for what they had to work with, there wasn't much more that could be expected. I'm of the opinion that the InVasion buyrate was so high only because people were expecting someone from the Goldberg/Sting level to put in an appearance.

 

That said, apparently they had access to Flair the entire time. I'm not sure he'd have been much of a difference-maker, mind. Ultimately, when "improving" the angle is dependent on saying to Undertaker "let this annoying P.M.A. fucker script a match move-for-move where he beats you" and Undertaker having to agree to it, then yeah, it's doomed all along.

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1. What I was hoping for was for WCW to keep going, I loved WCW and watched until the end and I hated seeing it being bought by Vince and even though it had become an awful product compared to what it was just a few years before, I still didn't want WCW to finish. What I was expecting was for Shane to carry on WCW as a separate brand and I was expecting it because of mainly internet rumours saying that it was going to happen. 

 

2. I'm not sure at which point exactly but I think when they started not pushing WCW originals as much and turning WWF stars into Alliance guys so by the end most of the Alliance's top stars e.g. Austin, Angle, Christian, Dudleyz, Test were WWF wrestlers before anyway and then you had the WCW title being fought over by two WWF guys in Jericho and The Rock. 

 

3. The personal high spot fort me was how over Rob Van Dam became. I loved RVD in ECW and didn't really think he would become so popular so quickly in the WWF.

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