10 Ridiculous Wrestling Gimmick Match Types We WANT To Return
WWE are racing towards a New Normal at WrestleMania. Here's what they could revisit on the way.
The 2021 Royal Rumble became the latest (and hopefully last) 'Big Four' WWE pay-per-view to fall afoul of restrictions brought on by the global pandemic that has, understandably, dominated every single discussion for the past year.
It's an infinite loop, all of this. There's so little to talk about, other than talking about how we always end up talking about the pandemic. An infinite loop broken only by the minuscule beams of light breaking through tunnels every time a vaccine needle breaks through the skin. Yet, for 24 hours at least, the Royal Rumble changed the conversation.
The company's most enduring gimmick anchored an excellent pay-per-view that got much of the fanbase buzzed about a product that had started to feel cursed before it. Such is the power of the Rumble match and indeed the organisation's typically strong marketing around "The Road To WrestleMania" and the like. Even in These Trying Times™, there's an excellence of execution at play that Bret Hart himself would nod sagely in support of.
Concept isn't everything, of course. It took the gimmick to generate all this buzz, not just any random one. That said, while we're still in a rather experimental period for wrestling at large, WWE could always try...
10. World War 3
Turner Broadcasting offices, 1995. Eric Bischoff is sitting down to eat with some of Ted Turner's top aides.
"Royal Rumbles, Battle Royals, BattleBowls, WarGames. What does that say to you about multi-man matches and loads of rings?"
One of the aides frowns a little, and replies, "there's too many of them?"
Bischoff, flustered, retorts "That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be, people like them, let's make more of them."
And in the end, the aides escape without having cheese thrust in their face, Bischoff gets a second series (but it's Thunder, and it f*cks him), and we all get the festival of impossible-to-follow f*ckery that was World War 3.
It was far from a success. WCW had neither the creative nor production nous to make it work for the viewers at home nor those in the building. So little actually happened as 60 men battled across three rings, but you'd be forgiven for not realising that as the attempted coverage of it was scatterbrained too.
Could it work in 2021? Three rings would still be tough to control a story in, but the prospect of a lengthy 60 man Rumble feels right in the middle of that stupid/amazing Saudi Arabia main event Venn Diagram. It already resembles some of the alleged scenes from the 2019 trip, and that was just the roster trying to fly home. Televise it!