10 Most Transformative WWE Events

WWE has been around longer than many of us have been alive and, having exploded in popularity during the 1980s and '90s - at a time when the media landscape itself was in a state of flux - it has seen a great deal of change.

Sometimes sweeping change has simply been pivotal to the company's continued survival: getting a regular weekly slot on network television, for example, or embracing the online world (which it took them quite a surprisingly long time to do, really).

Other times, change is sudden and unexpected, precipitated by an event outside the company's control - or perhaps one over which they had control but for which they couldn't have foreseen the wide-ranging effects of.

Whatever the case, WWE continues to evolve year on year to keep pace with the demands of advertisers, legislature, its employees, and sometimes even its audience too, and it's impossible to predict how the company will look in, say, a decade's time.

Perhaps the election of Kane to the White House in 2020 will see the product assume a distinctly more political flavour, for example. That's for another list though - here are the 10 most transformative events so far.

It's a toss-up as to which was more significant: the very first WrestleMania, or the meeting a few month earlier in which Howard Finkel was said to have coined the name "WrestleMania", thereby saving us from thirty-plus years of "The Colossal Tussle".

This just about edges though, because it's hard to imagine WWE without its annual showpiece extravaganza, which has in the time since become the focal point of the wrestling calendar to such an extent that fans often start predicting how the card will shape up a full year in advance.

The phenomenon of WrestleMania was what initially helped lift WWE out of the entertainment fringes in the 1980s, and it has remained peerless in its ability to command the attention of the mainstream national press like nothing else in the industry.