10 Totally Bizarre WWE Moments You'd Never Remember Without This Article!

5. WWE Gets Hilariously "With It"

Sometimes creative laziness is just numbing, soul-destroying bullsh*t.

On other occasions, it owns so. F*cking. Hard.

Case in point: in a desperate, pathetic, half-arsed bid to connect with "the youth", to put SmackDown into more of a hip-hop context, to get bizz-ay consistently and thoroughly, WWE decided for about, like, a week, to experiment with Instagram filter-adjacent graphics on the TV show.

The Usos cut a promo on the January 31 SmackDown in which they claimed that they had the entire tag team division "locked down" in their Uso Penitentiary. In addition to being a quite ill-advised catchphrase to begin with, it was also, on that given week anyway, not clear enough to the audience. And so, as they called out the various teams - "Breezango? Locked down!" - as an incredibly cheap-looking overlay graphic of some prison bars appeared on the screen complete with a rusty hinge and slam-shut sound effect.

Why?

They presumably thought this was cool and fresh and consistent with the social media technology paradigm.

In addition, during a few promos, WordArt graphics echoed various words. We didn't see "local medical facility" in comic sans, but it was equally awful.

SmackDown was in a desperate weird phase in general around that time...