10 Times WWE Totally Changed Its In-Ring Style

6. Shotgun Saturday Night

The WWF knew change was necessary; they just didn't know how to effect it. With Shotgun Saturday Night, they stumbled in the dark down the correct path.

It was all very, very 1997: a melting pot of new ideas sat uneasily alongside the fading New Generation with a southern-fried rock theme in the age of Korn. In one episode, broadcast from the All-Star Cafe in Times Square, the wholesome dork that was Todd Pettengill ostensibly called Sunny a slut as the fake Diesel worked 'Wildman' Marc Mero before white hip-hop cosplayers PG-13 introduced the Black Panthers-inspired Nation of Domination.

There was much to take in, and with a new environment unlocked, the encouraged creativity manifested with new slants on the old way of wrestling. This was a show shaped by its environment and "late nite" pass.

Steve Austin and Terry Funk waged war in a bar room; Mankind and Bret Hart worked something that more resembled an ECW match with a referee more lenient than he would have been, were he surrounded by thousands in the traditional arena; and the Undertaker, of course, infamously dropped Triple H with a Tombstone piledriver down an escalator.

Shotgun Saturday Night was almost DDT before DDT was created.