10 Staples From Wrestling's Past WWE Must Bring Back
Tear open the cage door and rip up the script.
Did wrestling used to be better back in the fabled "day"?
The shrinking audience would suggest so. Even before the WWF and WCW waged the Monday Night War, territories like Texas' World Class Championship Wrestling could draw upwards of 30,000 paying customers for stadium shows in the mid-1980s. Nowadays, even the most vaunted Independent promotions routinely struggle for a tenth of that number.
Has the sports entertainment model, which readily rinses fixtures from wrestling's days of yore, failed?
Obviously, the lack of competition, too unrealistic to list here, is a major factor. But if the sports entertainment model has failed, would a magpie approach, in which slick 21st century production techniques are married with unfashionable - but still effective - heat-generating devices, go some way towards recovering wrestling's lost audience?
Much of this audience will return to the bosom of Vince McMahon during WrestleMania season, in which the stars of yesterday are celebrated, but perhaps the nostalgic appeal extends beyond prolonged Rock promos and surprise Steve Austin beatdowns...
10. Unscripted Promos
Steve Austin has long petitioned for talents to rip up the insanely-detailed scripts they're handed on Mondays and Tuesdays, which are mostly regurgitated verbatim.
Austin is something of an authority on this issue: the launchpad from which he reached stratospheric levels of main event stardom was the legendary Austin 3:16 promo, which he devised without assistance from ex-mainstream television writers.
The counterargument for this was made evident, on countless excruciating occasions, during the original incarnation of NXT - in which several talents, when made to speak off the cuff, bombed in legendary fashion. I'm still wondering whether or not Eli Cottonwood has a moustache.
That said, the high school-level zingers which today's WWE talents are scripted to hurl at one another in interminably long-winded segments are patently rehearsed and indistinct. It's no surprise that Cesaro's best-ever WWE promo, which clocked in at under two minutes, was cut on an unregulated post-draft WWE.com interview segment.
The last two babyface stars to truly forge a lasting connection with the wider audience, CM Punk and Daniel Bryan, took the initiative to hone their acts with their own ingenuity, giving rise to the Reality Era and the Yes! Movement in the process.
There's a lesson in there for WWE - and those who are too content to colour within the lines.