10 Things WWE Could Learn From ITSELF 20 Years Ago
Attitude Problems
This absolutely not another article romanticising the Attitude Era.
The archive footage lodged within the far reaches of the WWE Network has covered the period in more than enough detail, long before the company took to splicing and re-editing the clips for countless DVDs and documentaries featuring misty-eyed retrospectives on septuagenarians being spread eagle and former pig farmers running around in nothing but a bumbag.
It was no fluke that the tenure took the company back from the brink of oblivion and back into the fabric of global popular culture. Pulse-pounding, envelope-pushing and oddly presentable towards the very end, the seeds planted in 1997 and 1998 sprouted into the beta version of the ultra-polished WWE that exists today.
In that sense, it's almost as though the spell should in fact be resented. Vince McMahon did so well overturning the threat of WCW and virtually monopolising the North American pro wrestling scene that he set himself up for a lifetime of creatively-stifling comfort. Pushes were replaced by processes, stars by scripts and buy rates by rights fees.
Virtually everything has changed about the internal operating policy of WWE despite often feeling like absolutely sod all aesthetically separates last week's Raw from the formula they locked in two decades ago. Its the ever-adjusting mechanisms that continue to fail the talent, whilst the profiteering executives fail to care. The company would be wise to revisit the past to see why the future once looked so bright.
10. Middle Aged & Crazy
It's almost jarring when watching mid-to-late-1990s WWE how little reference to the past there actually is on the show compared to the bi-monthly nostalgia hard-on the company now harbours. This is of course due to the fact that half of the performers once under the umbrella were now drawing eyes to WCW, but the company's dedication (for better and worse) to its youth movement was admirable even when flawed.
Furthering this narrative, the 'older' wrestlers (in either actual age or perception) were all maintained on individual islands compared to the youthful contemporaries. Terry Funk was 'middle aged and crazy' in a role vital to the further success of Cactus Jack and the New Age Outlaws, whilst The Legion Of Doom were put out to pasture along with Barry Windham, The Rock and Roll Express for the good of just about anybody they shared the ring with.
In 2018, The Undertaker goes less than five minutes with John Cena at WrestleMania because it's all he can do, whilst 48-year-old Executive Vice President of Talent, Live Events and Creative Triple H arranges five programmes for himself in a Survivor Series match in which he goes over. The two will main event the company's 100,000-seater Australia supershow later this year. Despite hard evidence of their obvious extinction, WWE has become the land of the dinosaurs.