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Wrestling unpopular opinions


Jacko

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Much of WWE TV in the 2010s was better than the attitude era. I've recently started watching Raw circa 1997-1999 and fuck there's a alot of shit on those shows. DOA, NoD, Headbangers, Oddities, Head Cheese, Marvellous Marc Mero, Val Venis, the complete mishandling of the cruiserweights, Kennel from Hell... Ah we have rose tinted glasses from that era but it sucked.. Only the main event scene was any good but the match quality was the shits. 2 minute matches and a billion DQ or count out finishes on every show. It is astounding to watch back and most is pretty unwatchable. 

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8 hours ago, Michael_3165 said:

Much of WWE TV in the 2010s was better than the attitude era. I've recently started watching Raw circa 1997-1999 and fuck there's a alot of shit on those shows. DOA, NoD, Headbangers, Oddities, Head Cheese, Marvellous Marc Mero, Val Venis, the complete mishandling of the cruiserweights, Kennel from Hell... Ah we have rose tinted glasses from that era but it sucked..

DOA, Headbangers and the Oddities were barely on Raw. The Nation were good and the launchpad of The Rock. Head Cheese lasted about a month and were great. Val Venis had some fun angles. Mero was a side show to Sable and played his role perfectly. Kennel From Hell was one match. And who gives a flying fuck about the cruiserweights? If it's between watching a New Age Outlaws segment or Aguila vs Brian Christopher only a nonce would pick the latter. And even if you hated all the lower and mid card gimmick acts, most the shows were focused on some of the best stories and angles in wrestling history. That's why it's remembered so fondly. 

Most of the 2010s has already been forgotten. In that entire decade WWE pretty much failed to create any major new stars and the creative rot of that decade is why the shows are so boring and lacking in any star power these days. 

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That kind of revisionist thinking has been going on for years now with the Attitude Era. You'll have people passing it off as if it was this lurid time span that got over thanks to all the teenage boys at the time popping for stuff like Marlene's miscarriage and that the whole thing was just this of its time embarrassment, really. I'm not denying a lot of those low brow elements did contribute to the overall package they were presenting at the time, but that stuff was curtain jerk to the best characters they've ever done in the best storylines they've ever done. There was no decent wrestling but somehow that doesn't stop me from returning to that era's PPVs more than any other on the network. By the time you get to 2000 they also become really funny and downright charming. They somehow created this interlinked, fond ecosystem to their shows where you enjoyed the Crash Holly bits as much as Rock's ones. 

It's not everyone's bag, but there's a huge reason it's one of the handful of best eras ever. It's got a lot to do with the fact that they suddenly pulled their head out of their arses and decided to try and get as much of America watching as possible, regardless of how much they liked the wrestling bits. Curiously it resulted in some of the best times ever for wrestling fans.

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1 hour ago, Gay as FOOK said:

 It's not everyone's bag, but there's a huge reason it's one of the handful of best eras ever. It's got a lot to do with the fact that they suddenly pulled their head out of their arses and decided to try and get as much of America watching as possible, regardless of how much they liked the wrestling bits. Curiously it resulted in some of the best times ever for wrestling fans.

Addressing an earlier point on match quality being shit, one of the reasons why most Raw episodes of the time are so easy to watch is because many of the TV matches were two mins long.

The Pay Per View and select big matches stick out because they were different to what was being presented on TV every week.

Yes they had stopped using jobbers due to the ratings war, but most matches were a vehicle to move a storyline on. There wasn't a mindset that every match has to be a technical 20 min wrestling clinic for no real reason at all.

I won't deny that certain stuff has aged terribly. But at a time when people's attention spans are shorter than they even were back then, I firmly believe that wrestling has no interest at all in becoming popular to the masses ever again if it thinks that longer matches and appealing to a certain hardcore demographic (who admittedly will spend more of their income than casuals) is the way forward.

We're living in a time where media is being consumed in condensed formats and short video clips like never before. They could easily have every wrestler involved in some kind of angle or storyline if they wanted, instead of a string of meaningless but technically sound matches.

While the more bawdy elements wouldn't work in 2020, the basic formula would.

Edited by garynysmon
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3 hours ago, garynysmon said:

We're living in a time where media is being consumed in condensed formats and short video clips like never before.

This gets repeated a lot, and there's an element of truth to it, but we also live in a time when people are prepared to binge-watch an entire TV series in one sitting rather than watching one half hour episode a week, where more and more "prestige" TV is an hour+ long rather than a half hour episode, and where the average runtime of a blockbuster movie is 20-30 minutes longer than it was 20 years ago. 

I'm not sure you can sum up the media landscape with "everyone is watching short clips" while that same everyone is watching multiple Marvel movies that are almost two and a half hours long.  

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13 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

This gets repeated a lot, and there's an element of truth to it, but we also live in a time when people are prepared to binge-watch an entire TV series in one sitting rather than watching one half hour episode a week, where more and more "prestige" TV is an hour+ long rather than a half hour episode, and where the average runtime of a blockbuster movie is 20-30 minutes longer than it was 20 years ago. 

I'm not sure you can sum up the media landscape with "everyone is watching short clips" while that same everyone is watching multiple Marvel movies that are almost two and a half hours long.  

Also, look at podcasts and youtube. How many popular channels are posting longer and longer videos? People will sit and watch livestreams or long-form analysis for 30, 60 minutes at least, as well as the 10-20 minute stuff. And podcasts - there are more and more 30-90 minute podcasts out there.

What people share and what people watch can be very different. People are more likely to share a small clip on social media, because it suits that medium. Short updates for news, etc, make sense too - but then there's always been the headlines and the short summaries.

Wrestling, however, is particularly susceptible to it, and WWE even more so. Catch-phrases, finishes, short segments... for something that's often so long and features so little, it encourages sharing highlights not least because it doesn't often reward more sustained viewing.

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