Random Thoughts III.

[Wrasslin]

4 hours ago, Your Fight Site said:

I’m almost embarrassed to ask this. What was the deal with wrestling on World of Sport? I know it carried footage from Joint Promotions and All-Star Wrestling, but what was the actual commercial deal? Did those promotions have deals with ITV to record shows for broadcast? Or did ITV just turn up at shows and record them for a magazine-style show?

Basically, were ITV completely independent and recorded the shows they wanted to? Or did Joint/All-Star have obligations to provide content?

You should be embarrassed. Imagine not knowing the break down of a terrestrial tv contract negotiated (presumably) before you were born.

Hang your head in shame sir!

[Pinc]

I'm watching through the few weeks of TV immediately following Mania X7 and on a re-watch it looks an awful lot like Austin's heel turn was effectively ruined by the WCW buy-out more than anything else. Or rather, the decision to cast one side of the invasion as heels and the others as faces.

Austin and Vince play an absolute blinder getting the crowds to boo Austin in the weeks following Mania. There's none of the cheering that we all remember from the actual night of the turn, even the following evening when they're still in Texas. Also - Austin's performances are superb. He's absolutely despisable every time he's on screen, and the motivation for the turn is clear - he wanted the boss in his pocket as an insurance policy lest he could no longer dominate the Fed after his surgery. It rings true and it makes sense. Its also clear that the original plan is to build Austin as untouchable for a few months before The Rock comes back for his revenge, which would've been absolutely stellar as the main event for SummerSlam '01.

Instead they have the WCW sale fall into their lap a few weeks earlier and Austin's story ceases to be the central thrust of the shows after a couple of months. Becoming part of this larger narrative that derails his character development and crowds the main event scene with new guys like Booker T, meaning the route back to the Austin/Rock re-match is completely lost.

If they hadn't bought WCW the proper narrative of Austin's heel turn could've played out, the shows wouldn't have become a bloated mess with everyone's face/heel alignment a product of the faction they're aligned to rather the character development they'd gotten really good at in the preceding year, and I think we might have seen the Attitude boom period extended for at least another year. The WWF could do no wrong going into Mania X7 and left to their own devices I think they'd have continued that roll for a good while longer.

Edited August 5, 2020 by Pinc

[Your Fight Site]

2 hours ago, Wrasslin said:

You should be embarrassed. Imagine not knowing the break down of a terrestrial tv contract negotiated (presumably) before you were born.

Hang your head in shame sir!

Yeah, not expecting someone to drop the exact commercial details of the deal(s), but just wanted to know if ITV went to shows and recorded them for the World of Sport programme, or if All-Star and Joint Promotions were responsible for recording shows for the programme.

[air_raid]

3 hours ago, Pinc said:

Its also clear that the original plan is to build Austin as untouchable for a few months before The Rock comes back for his revenge, which would've been absolutely stellar as the main event for SummerSlam '01.

The original plan, knowing Rocky was going to be off for months for his film, was for Austin and HHH to fuck around as a tandem for a couple of months relatively unopposed with both blaming each other for losing the tag belts, somehow with HHH turning babyface so they could resume their feud with the roles they usually assumed in reverse. Hunter doing his quad changed the plan more than having access to WCW by itself did.

[Liam O'Rourke]

3 hours ago, Pinc said:

The WWF could do no wrong going into Mania X7 and left to their own devices I think they'd have continued that roll for a good while longer.

Business tanked within the first two months. The biggest problem at all was switching Austin heel but keeping him as top star without having a babyface of equal measure to oppose him. Taker was a shit option and bombed in the role. HHH should have gone face the day after Mania, the Power Trip was an awful idea.

[simonworden]

8 hours ago, air_raid said:

The original plan, knowing Rocky was going to be off for months for his film, was for Austin and HHH to fuck around as a tandem for a couple of months relatively unopposed with both blaming each other for losing the tag belts, somehow with HHH turning babyface so they could resume their feud with the roles they usually assumed in reverse. Hunter doing his quad changed the plan more than having access to WCW by itself did.

 

8 hours ago, Liam O'Rourke said:

Business tanked within the first two months. The biggest problem at all was switching Austin heel but keeping him as top star without having a babyface of equal measure to oppose him. Taker was a shit option and bombed in the role. HHH should have gone face the day after Mania, the Power Trip was an awful idea.

I'm not convinced either option would have been successful to be honest. We had already had 2 big PPV matches between Austin and Triple H recently, the second of which I found a chore to sit through, it might have gotten a pop initially but I think it would have petered out. A slower turn of HHH might have been the better of the two but there was no way he was going to go down that route with the Rock 's return looming. His absence felt like forever in 2001 to a 14 year old me but in hindsight it was a brief break. 

Agreed that the invasion derailed the Austin heel turn massively though but the lack of strong face opponents was maybe even a bigger issue. The Undertaker and Kane story line was ok but fizzled out very heatless in the end. I don't think Jericho and Benoit were an answer either as while they were over, Jericho had already lost his IC title to HHH in recent memory while Benoit's previous feud with Angle was mid-card at best. A few different booking decisions could have made it become more but the injuries alongside the Invasion buggered that up. 

 

[SaitoRyo]

Not enough wrestling cowboys these days, you ask me. 

[Pogue]

Vince should never have been a heel again after Fully loaded 99

All you really miss out on are his match with Hogan and him spitting holy water like Triple H in the church with Shane

You gain the fans not treating the entire company as heels for the best part of 20 years 

[Duke]

On 8/5/2020 at 11:47 PM, Liam O'Rourke said:

Business tanked within the first two months. The biggest problem at all was switching Austin heel but keeping him as top star without having a babyface of equal measure to oppose him. Taker was a shit option and bombed in the role. HHH should have gone face the day after Mania, the Power Trip was an awful idea.

I don't think the power trip was a bad option, they just needed to be bolder with it. I remember massively getting behind Jericho and Benoit when they finally started winning on them, they just did it too late. Had they started with a shorter run with taker and Kane and then transitioned to Jericho and Benoit sooner, going all in to elevate them, I think it would've worked. The taker and Kane run was too long and they murdered the Hardy's, which will not have encouraged fans to keep watching. 

 

It was a great elevation opportunity because Austin left this massive top baby-face hole, but they never let anyone fill it, presumably because they were waiting for rock to come back, which was a mistake. 

[LaGoosh]

Who could have filled it though? The only option I can think of is Jericho, and I don't think that would have worked.

[Wrasslin]

I wonder what would have happened if they’d broken the bank to bring in one of then WCW big names as a face at the time (would have messed up the invasion but if you’d broken the bank to get Goldberg or Sting?

[BomberPat]

1 hour ago, Pogue said:

Vince should never have been a heel again after Fully loaded 99

All you really miss out on are his match with Hogan and him spitting holy water like Triple H in the church with Shane

You gain the fans not treating the entire company as heels for the best part of 20 years 

There's probably some other great stuff you'd miss, but mostly I agree. Vince was such a great cowardly heel, but I'd hate it how from around 2002 onwards he never played that part any more, he'd always square up to people instead of backing down, and act like a big tough guy. Just a complete misread on what his character was best served for - yeah, he'd usually (if not always) lose the match at the end of the feud, but what did it matter when he was back on TV the next night still acting like the big man?

It also didn't help that he basically just became a cartoonish supervillain for years. One of the most refreshing things about watching 1998 WWF is that, up until stuff like the Higher Power, Vince really feels like a logical character, he's not just being a prick for the sake of it. One of my favourite WWF matches, almost definitely my favourite Attitude Era match, and my favourite example of the "odds stacked against the babyface" trope is Dude Love vs. Steve Austin at Over The Edge, and the build to that is the best version of the Vince McMahon character:

Vince doesn't want Steve Austin as champion - even in his days as a babyface announcer, Vince was clearly unhappy with how Austin carried himself, and the language that he used, and he doesn't feel he should represent the company. At first he doesn't want rid of him - he sells merch, and he doesn't want him going to WCW - he just wants to hammer a round peg into a square hole, and turn him into the sort of champion he'd prefer. When that doesn't work, he needs to conspire to get the belt off him - we know he's perfectly capable of it, because he did exactly that to Bret Hart, so there's a sense of realism as well as a sense of danger involved. Steve Austin isn't as trusting as Bret, though, and he's not going to fall for it, so they really have to stack the odds against him. Meanwhile, Mick Foley is a broken man desperate for attention and acceptance, and Dude Love is the version of him that thinks he's a babyface Madison Square Garden headliner - so Vince manipulates him into thinking that he's going to let him live out that dream, but really it's just a means to an end to get the belt off Austin, and then he couldn't give a fuck about Foley.

Everyone's character and motivations make sense. But within a few years, Vince is just a muscular supervillain doing evil for evil's sake, with no real questions as to why he's allowed to get away with it, why he's intent on fucking over the stars of his own company, or anything like that. He's a bad guy because he's a bad guy, and that's all.

43 minutes ago, Wrasslin said:

I wonder what would have happened if they’d broken the bank to bring in one of then WCW big names as a face at the time (would have messed up the invasion but if you’d broken the bank to get Goldberg or Sting?

This is a really interesting one - remember that, at the start of the angle, WCW were intended to be the babyfaces in the feud, too. Even without a Goldberg or a Sting, would WWF audiences have bought a babyface Booker T or DDP up against a heel Steve Austin? 

[LaGoosh]

I don't think the fans ever really bought into Vince as a heel after 2000 anyway, at least definitely not anywhere near the level they had previously. Thing with being a top level heel is eventually the fans cotton on to how great a performer they are and start to love them and they can never reach that level again.

After 2000 Vince's heel runs were increasingly ridiculous and the character made less and less sense jumping from cold hearted logical businessman to completely deranged megalonaniac, flipping back and forth from heel to babyface continuously. 

Also Austin's character was the perfect foil for Vince's character. Everyone else just seemed shit in comparison.

Edited August 13, 2020 by LaGoosh

[Pinc]

12 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Also Austin's character was the perfect foil for Vince's character. Everyone else just seemed shit in comparison.

Punk was briefly fantastic opposite Vince ahead of MITB 2011, in that he had believable gripes with Vince that were grounded in the genuine frustrations of a section of the fanbase, but they switched to Triple H for some reason and then allowed the angle to completely fall apart.

[LaGoosh]

The blow off to CM Punk vs WWE being Triple H vs Kevin Nash in a sledgehammer match is definitely the weirdest and some of the worst booking they've ever done. 

Edited August 13, 2020 by LaGoosh