10 Best Wrestling Documentaries Ever
Note to self: don't ask if wrestling is fake.
Like all devoted fans, die-hard wrestling viewers derive as much pleasure watching people talk and reminisce about wrestling as they do watching wrestling itself.
The behind-the-scenes wrestling documentary has been around for a couple of decades now - at least since the mid-1990s, anyway, when the WWE's very public steroid scandal turned over a few rocks under which weren't supposed to see.
It wasn't long until Vince McMahon, awake to new the possibility of new revenue streams, started to get in on the act himself, and his company began releasing a string of highly-acclaimed documentary DVDs in the early-to-mid 2000s.
These days, with the WWE Network fully up and running, WWE produces so many documentaries that today's generation of fans is positively spoiled for choice.
And what's more, these documentaries are - in most cases - a lot more candid and revealing than you might expect, only occasionally rewriting wrestling history in a way that sweeps all their sins underneath the rug. But hey: history is written by the victors after all.
10. The Rise And Fall Of WCW
In 2004, a few short years removed from its conclusion, WWE brought out a DVD of which the focus was the Monday Night Wars. It sounded like a must buy on paper, but it was greeted instead by accusations of white-washing (and they weren't exactly without merit).
The company tried to make right those wrongs half a decade later with the release of The Rise and Fall of WCW (which borrows its title from the more successful ECW edition a few years earlier). And while it is not exactly flawless - condensing a couple decades of wrestling history into two hours was never going to be easy (or, frankly, possible) - it was a decent effort all the same.
It's honest, at least, charting both the relatively long period during which Eric Bischoff's product was, in many ways, superior to the one being served up by Vince McMahon, and - naturally - the desperately bad mismanagement and financial imprudence that saw it drop off the face of the wrestling world in 2001.
Don't make the mistake of thinking it's a complete and comprehensive history of WCW (even though that's exactly what it claims to be) and you will probably enjoy it.