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[Doctor Whos Next]

Heels are marketed in the same way as babyfaces. Roman Reins was the marketed as a fan friendly babyface going into Wrestlemania and has 53 items that’s fans are encouraged to buy on the website.

Kevin Owens is a midcard heel, yet he’s got 31 items for sale. In some senses, it’s like Hulk Hogan having 2 pages in the old WWF Merchandise mag and Mr Perfect having just over one and a half. Granted the Hulk Hogan Hasbro needed a Ted Dibase Hasbro to gorilla press, but I don’t think there was ever Nailz dress up, foam Iranian flags or Slick Teddy bears

Plus it’s the way the wrestlers are presented too. The Vaudvillains are a good example. I’ve only been watching NXT since it came on the Network, but they were presented as comedy heels, fans started chanting along with the “gather round” bit, they embraced that by turning them both into faces and tweaked the music to a jauntier tune. They’ve now turned them heel again, but have kept the intro and the gather round bit.

A better way would be to have the intro start, and the team to rip the crowd and their opponents to shreds on the mic.

[stevieg1980]

This is the problem with the indies as well. One of the major complaints I've heard / read about ROH is the lack of heels or faces. Everyone seems to want to put on a great match which isn't a bad thing per say. But the likes of Adam Cole and Jay Lethal don't really do anything dastardly to make people truly hate them. Lethal even wrestles like a face.

 

The only one down there who is truly hated is BJ Whitmer and that's a more "get the fuck out of the ring and retire" heat.

 

PWG do that to an extent as at least Roderick Strong when as champ has been booed a lot but when he's in ROH that hatred isn't there as a heel.

 

Last time I remember legitimately hating someone was Rollins turning on the Shield. Honestly had me scaring people on the train calling Rollins a fucking bastard.

[Grecian]

Jericho can do it. That promo he cut at Roadblock was textbook old-school heel work, and it was great - turned a crowd against him, whilst making Swagger more of a threat than 5 years of WWE booking did...

[IANdrewDiceClay]

Its the era we are currently in. Nobody has it in them it seems. Nobody wants to be a heel. Look at the Bullet Club. It was a bunch of wrestlers desperate to get themselves over and sell their ProWrestlingTees shirts. They werent heels. One thing I like about Chris Jericho was, when he turned in 2008, he requested all his shit be taken down off WWE.com. You didnt see a shirt of his on sale during that heel run. He went fully heel. When the money isnt in PPV bonuses and its selling garden gnomes with your face on them, you arent going to get heels who want to be hated.

Funnily enough, speaking of Jarrett earlier, I saw a clip on twitter earlier where Jarrett got a slap off a female fan at the WrestleCon show last week. He went fucking ballistic. "Get her out, dont touch me" etc. I'm surprised Karen didnt jump the railings. She's a bit of a wild one.

[King Pitcos]

Jericho can do it. That promo he cut at Roadblock was textbook old-school heel work, and it was great - turned a crowd against him, whilst making Swagger more of a threat than 5 years of WWE booking did...

Terrible example. People were cheering him over Swagger again about three minutes in.

 

In response to the thread creator, I don't think it really is possible now. Not consistently at the top of the big leagues, anyway. You can do it in NXT, because you can get away there with booking your heels and faces solely on whether they're on the Internet nice or naughty list. You can't get away with that in WWE where you have to make money, so there's always dissent somewhere.

 

Fans are desensitised to the sort of stuff that'd get great heat in the eighties and nineties. Even in the attitude era, what did people do to get heat in a big way? It was all "lol, he got run over, next segment" stuff. I may be forgetting things but I don't recall anything the characters did then hitting me like the Nailz debut or the snake biting Macho.

 

Miz is by far the best wrestling heel they've got, but is he going to drive business to new heights? Who else even is there on the books?

[Bellenda Carlisle]

Surely Rusev was a real heel, the guy showed pictures of Putin on the Titantron. He got pretty far with it as well.

[LaGoosh]

Last person I remember getting really strong heel heat was oddly enough Daniel Bryan during his phase where he was Heavyweight Champ and was treating AJ like shit. At the Smackdown taping at the o2 during that run people were booing him so loudly you couldn't even hear him talk on the mic.

[Benno]

You can't go back now. Everyone knows what wrestling is and we all watch it with a different eye.

 

You should be able to watch and enjoy your favourite drama and still get pulled in by the work the villain is doing. Wrestling obviously has the live panto aspect, but the best you can do is put on a strong enough product that people will want to play along and give the heel the desired reaction he's after.

 

People pretend they want everything to be full Memphis but when a Karen Jarrett spits at you, or CM Punk takes a shit on Paul Bearer's casket aiming for that proper "real worker" heat, we all see it for the low rent garbage it is. That, or we call it X-Pac heat.

 

Unless you're running a live show in Wigan. It's still real in Wigan. Butlins too it would appear.

[Dirty Eddie]

Last person I remember getting really strong heel heat was oddly enough Daniel Bryan during his phase where he was Heavyweight Champ and was treating AJ like shit. At the Smackdown taping at the o2 during that run people were booing him so loudly you couldn't even hear him talk on the mic.

 

Both Bryan and Mark Henry had amazing heel runs on Smackdown, in part because they didn't have to face off with Cena and immediately split the crowd. Pretty much all the top heels get a huge amount of cheers whenever they face Cena. The Nexus is about the only time the heels got the right response against Big Match John, and that was after them killing Steamboat, Vince etc...

 

Cena's a merch machine, a top quality in-ring talent, a great promo and an all around great guy - but he's fucked the heel/face balance in the main event for years. You need to be as shit as Tensai, a non-wrestling asshole like Johnny Ace or an evil invading force that murders old Legends to get any real heat against Cena. 

[Carbomb]

You need a beloved Babyface to get real heat from.

 

I would argue that that cuts both ways; if anything, I've often argued that it's more the other way around, that you need a good baddie to raise a goodie, mainly because blue-eyes are usually reactive and villains pro-active. It's based on the old "I didn't start this, but by golly I'll finish it!"

 

Obviously, a feud requires both sides to be doing their job, but ultimately, I think the heinousness of the villain would influence just how much people come to like the blue-eye.

 

That said, there's a lot to be said for the idea that it's all symbiotic. I don't agree with the "belt is just there to get the wrestler over" principle, insofar as, in order for that belt to benefit the wrestler in question, it needs to be imbued with value, which you get by putting it on a wrestler with the profile and ability to make it seem like it's worth fighting for.

 

Same with the heel/face divide. Depending on whom you're trying to elevate, one dynamic takes precedence over the other, but in the final analysis, it's a constant cycle: the heels get the crowd to love the faces who get the crowd to hate the heels who get the crowd to love the faces who watch the boys who watch the girls go by...

[CavemanLynn]

Heels need to do less. Owens came in against the top face, and within one match he was doing moonsaults and swantons, for fuxake.

 

Heels should be one-move wonders. A gimmick, punches, kicks, stomps and shortcuts, with only a distinguishing finisher. And no clean pins. Sick of seeing faces outsmarted and pinned clean every week.

[Carbomb]

Heels need to do less. Owens came in against the top face, and within one match he was doing moonsaults and swantons, for fuxake.

 

Heels should be one-move wonders. A gimmick, punches, kicks, stomps and shortcuts, with only a distinguishing finisher. And no clean pins. Sick of seeing faces outsmarted and pinned clean every week.

Exception: they can do flashy or fancy stuff provided they mug for it afterwards, like Mr. Perfect after his dropkick.

[Egg Shen]

Surely Paul Heyman deserves some love here, especially during the CM Punk feud. Top prick.

[digitalversicolor]

Yeah, this is one of the aspects of wrestling that is quite disappointing nowadays, that and there isn't really any room for characters like Pillman's Loose Cannon to really exist now that we are in the 'reality' era, in my opinion. Like, even today I look back at Pillman and by now we all know it was a work but you know he basically believed in what he was doing 100% of the time and there's still that small part of me that has that doubt, 'maybe it was real', which I think is really cool in that the character was done so well. That whole sort of 'on the fringes' left-field side of wrestling/gimmicks died off with the 90's it seems, I include Don Callis/The Jackyl in there too, who I always believed could have been huge and so much interesting stuff could have been done with that gimmick, it's disappointing looking back. I guess he hit on some of it within ECW but that was very brief, and in ended up going in a bit of a different direction with the 'Network' gimmick. I read some posts and such on here recently that brought more of these left-field types to my attention, such as the excellent Dr. D David Schultz and Jos LeDuc (I knew the names but not much about them, before my time), both of whom I've been going back and looking up their stuff since hearing more about them on here and it's all superb.

 

I suppose you got your Ambrose (though Moxley on the indies was superb) and your Wyatt etc, but those characters are such watered down and diluted versions of the above, they aren't really in the same league. But then that's WWE/wrestling in 2016 I guess, not much can be done about that.

[Arch Stanton]

Heels need to do less. Owens came in against the top face, and within one match he was doing moonsaults and swantons, for fuxake.

 

Heels should be one-move wonders. A gimmick, punches, kicks, stomps and shortcuts, with only a distinguishing finisher. And no clean pins. Sick of seeing faces outsmarted and pinned clean every week.

 

This hits the nail on the head, it's what I just came into the thread to say. I actually think it would still be easy for a heel to get real heat in WWE these days just by adhering to these tried and tested principles. To me it seems that the problem is that the product that the company produces nowadays is light entertainment, which prioritises 'smiles on faces' ahead of genuine emotional investment. They don't seem to care if fans don't really hate the bad guys if they're buying tickets and t-shirts anyway. It's clearly a business model that is working for them, so they aren't likely to change it but I think the mindset that it's the WWE brand that sells, more so than personalities and issues between, is really damaging to the overall quality of what you actually get when you sit down to watch. It explains the thinking behind the WrestleMania main event this year. Fuck you, we got your money.

 

Fans will always pop for flashy moves and cheer for funny lines. They will be into guys with cool entrances and catchphrases. Reserve those things for the babyfaces and I believe that the product would improve instantly. The fundamentals of wrestling psychology are the same as they have always been, no matter how much Vince might tell us that times have changed. It's still about fire and sympathy and right now they just can't do sympathy.