Loki Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 It's absolutely true that the requirements for a heel have changed over the years. In the 80s WWE, if you were foreign and cheated, that was enough to generate serious heel heat and earn a go-round with Hogan. If you were freakishly large that also helped. In the NWO, if you were from out of town or didn't listen to country music, that could be enough! It was usually all about fearing the "other". Things got quite confused in the era of DX/NWO. Those guys broke the rules, cheated and were huge fan favourites. It's often said that "the company" in various guises became the only genuine heel, whether Vince for Austin or the Corporate Minstry, or Bischoff in WCW or whatever. Nonconformity was cool, rule-abiding was boring. For a long time now, to be a heel in modern WWE means to complain a lot, and be "sick of the fans", and that's about it. Heels don't really cheat much any more, outside possibly of group interference. You're a heel because you don't "have fun", you are nasty to faces, and you're booed (which is obviously a circular argument). If you get TOO anti-establishment or too flamboyantly naughty, that tends to turn you face again. Look at MJF recently. Hands down the best heel in the business at the moment is Christian, because he's committed to being 100% loathsome. He's arrogant, he's selfish, he gaslights, he takes credit for others' hard work, he cheats, he even dresses like a Hollywood bad guy. He's very careful to not allow in any cool element, or rebellious element. I think it's a great template for modern wrestling. I'm not sure how many other heel templates really work any more. Look at Drew at the moment - he's utterly convinced he's in the right, which makes for a great character but I can see it also getting popular. Particularly if he ends up against Punk who is instinctively unlikeable. Actually that's the other way to be a heel in the modern era - be genuinely unlikeable. Not a great career prospect though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 2 minutes ago, Loki said: Heels don't really cheat much any more, outside possibly of group interference. I bang this drum a lot, but this is a huge thing for me with modern wrestling in general, and modern WWE in particular. It was apparently a Vince edict years ago that heels shouldn't cheat, because it undermines the credibility of the referee. So if there's ever any cheating at all, it's outside interference, or it's the finish - a foreign object, a pull of the tights, or a foot on the ropes - and even then, that's as likely to come from a babyface because "turnabout is fair play" as it is from a heel actually trying to garner heat. You get none of the great little incidental bits of cheating - positioning yourself between the referee and your opponent to get in a little cheap shot, exploiting the referee in tag matches to get some extra shots in, raking the eyes, choking, that kind of thing. So cheating either doesn't happen at all, or isn't treated as cheating when it does. I'm all for protecting the referee's credibility, but not at the expense of heat. A great heel works with the referee to make sure the heat is on the heel for cheating, not on the ref for not catching them, and that's a dying art, because in WWE the wrestlers aren't allowed to do it, and elsewhere a lot of the wrestlers and referees just don't have the experience and know-how to do it effectively. I did a referee seminar recently with Scott Armstrong, where he said that when he used to ref Los Guerreros matches on house shows, Eddie and Chavo would always say to him, "I don't care what the finish is, if you catch us cheating, disqualify us", and though they always cheated, he never caught them. Though they confused matters by cheating as babyfaces too! I think that lack of cheating, or the lack of consequences for cheating, probably makes it way harder to work heel than anything else that's been talked about here. It's all tied to making wins and losses matter; if whether the babyface wins matters, then the heel putting obstacles in their way matters too. If the rules are enforced well and consistently, then cheating and getting away with it will always get you heat - and it's that last point, getting away with it, that I think is crucial; people don't really care about cheating in and of itself, but they hate the idea that somebody is getting away with something that they shouldn't, or that somebody else was punished for (it's why as a referee, cutting off a babyface tag because you "didn't see it", while letting the heels get away with blind tags, will always drive the crowd nuts). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Version1.0 Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 No-one liked JBL in 2004. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 16 minutes ago, Version1.0 said: No-one liked JBL in 2004. No one likes JBL in 2024. Bloke is the fucking worst. Even at that ONS, where its clearly all a work, the berk still looks like an absolute loser standing there doing his "I'm not triggered! I'm not triggered! Honestly I'm fine!" routine while Heyman kills his career with one line, and you know full well JBL hated every second of it. Good. I fucking hate him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 2 hours ago, BomberPat said: I'm all for protecting the referee's credibility, but not at the expense of heat. "Don't bury the ref" seems to be a weird sticking point with the higher ups at WWE. Even recently that prick Bruce Pritchard on his podcast in reference to the 3D (one of the most popular and coolest wrestling moves ever) said he never really liked tag team finishes because they broke the rules and "buried the ref". It's absolutely ridiculous. Who gives a fuck about the ref? Really, the rules of any match are just another story telling device and should be bent and used according to whatever story you want to tell. That's what the fans will remember, no one will come out upset the ref doesn't appear to have the required authority. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 Also, I was under the impression that tag finishes work on the basis that the tagged-out partner has a certain amount of time before they have to leave the ring. Nothing wrong with them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members air_raid Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 It’s bullshit when you consider that for at least 15 years or longer of the time I watched the company do tag matches on TV and PPV the refs regularly forced babyfaces out of the ring if they missed the tag (which happened) behind their back but permitted a switch they didn’t see (where no tag happened) by the heels. So the refs constantly looked like morons anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 Isn't that what "burning the tag" is? I'd like to see more foreign objects in trunks. And I don't mean that, don't be so filthy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 1 minute ago, LaGoosh said: "Don't bury the ref" seems to be a weird sticking point with the higher ups at WWE. Even recently that prick Bruce Pritchard on his podcast in reference to the 3D (one of the most popular and coolest wrestling moves ever) said he never really liked tag team finishes because they broke the rules and "buried the ref". It's absolutely ridiculous. Who gives a fuck about the ref? Really, the rules of any match are just another story telling device and should be bent and used according to whatever story you want to tell. That's what the fans will remember, no one will come out upset the ref doesn't appear to have the required authority. Keeping the referee's credibility is important, but only because it ensures that heels get more heat when they cheat! It's a fine art as a referee to not have the crowd booing and heckling you for your call, but instead hating the bad guy for getting one past you. If the bad guy never gets anything past you, you're just a means to an end, as far as creative and active input into the match goes. The rules are a storytelling device, you're absolutely right, and it's the referee's credibility that allows them to be one. But when you value that credibility at the expense of the possible stories you can tell, it all starts to feel like you've got it backwards. It's especially odd that WWE seem to have really pushed this approach at the same time as making their referees more and more anonymous and interchangeable (though they seem to have been dialing that back recently, and actually at least refer to them by name again). I did commentary for a show a few months back, and the referee screwed up the finish a bit - it was a confidence thing, where something could or could not have been a rope break, and he called it as one, but then went back on his decision and counted the pin. I didn't even consciously process "I need protect the referee's credibility", I just did it, because my job then and there was to make sense of what was happening in front of me, so I said something about referee's discretion, and then when I realised he was going to go through with counting the pin after all, switched on the fly to completely make up a ruling that the referee had judged that the contact with the ropes was only incidental, and not enough to break the count. That sort of thing is what we should mean when we talk about protecting the referee's credibility - the whole show is staged and stage managed, so use everything you have available to you to make it make sense, and try and come out with everyone's credibility intact. Because why wouldn't you? It's your show, and everyone should look good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Statto Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 7 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: "Don't bury the ref" seems to be a weird sticking point with the higher ups at WWE. It's extra odd given the same man/company also passed an edict that refs were so unimportant/should blend into the background so much that they weren't allowed names. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 Looking at a number of VKM's "edicts" over the years, a lot of it just seems to be what the mad old cunt has come to "reckon" over the years, rather than what he's observed, especially as a lot of these commandments have come after decades of operation. When was the Championship-Not-Belt/Title put into practice? Didn't seem to hurt the company during its rise or when it beat wCw. Also, the insistence on not numbering WrestleManias - after thirty-plus fucking years of doing them numbered, it's suddenly a problem? Didn't seem to bother the NFL with their SuperBowls. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members air_raid Posted February 20 Paid Members Share Posted February 20 15 minutes ago, Carbomb said: Looking at a number of VKM's "edicts" over the years, a lot of it just seems to be what the mad old cunt has come to "reckon" over the years, rather than what he's observed, Let's not try and make sense of the thinkings of a mad old cunt who (allegedly) confuses shitting on someone with sexy. 37 minutes ago, BomberPat said: The rules are a storytelling device, you're absolutely right, and it's the referee's credibility that allows them to be one. But when you value that credibility at the expense of the possible stories you can tell, it all starts to feel like you've got it backwards. Conversely, I thought "the ref fucked up there, didn't they?" was a really weird direction to take AS the story for Rousey vs Lynch vs Flair at Mania 35 - not doing a decent finish for the first (and to date only) proper womens Mania main event was a huge misfire for me, up there with Elsworth grabbing the briefcase in the first female MITB match. Stupider still when you think they did it so they could do Lynch vs Ronda at 36... which Rousey was not available for in the end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vamp Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 I can't remember what match I was watching but I was watching something from the 70s the other day where someone was taking a foreign object out of their tights, clenching it in their fist and then using it as a weapon, only I'm 99% sure that they didn't even have anything. Crowd still bought it. I don't watch a lot of contemporary wrestling now but whenever I do tune in it seems to me that a cheating bastard would stand out and get over because no one really seems to be doing it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IronSheik Posted February 21 Share Posted February 21 Billy Mitchell from the King of Kong film is an incredible natural heel. Conversely Steve Weibe is an amazing natural white meat babyface. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted February 21 Paid Members Share Posted February 21 10 hours ago, Vamp said: I can't remember what match I was watching but I was watching something from the 70s the other day where someone was taking a foreign object out of their tights, clenching it in their fist and then using it as a weapon, only I'm 99% sure that they didn't even have anything. Crowd still bought it. Whenever Jerry Lawler had "brass knuckles" or something like that concealed in his tights, unless the point was someone else getting their hands on it, there was usually nothing there The best thing like that I've seen recently was the ref searching the heel before the match, finding some brass knuckles and confiscating them while the heel protests. Later in the match, he sneaks up on the ref and pickpockets them to get his weapon back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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