10 Ways AEW Is Dangerously Close To Following In WCW's Footsteps

10. AEW Rampage = WCW Thunder

Right now, AEW Rampage feels like completely unessential viewing.

Sure, the company's Friday night show will usually offer up solid matches and the occasional classic - see: Andrade vs. Rey Fenix, Eddie Kingston vs. Konosuke Takeshita, or Wheeler Yuta vs. Jon Moxley as prime examples - but in a wrestling world brimming with so much content, Rampage often seems easy to skip.

Even when there's a match with significant stakes - such as Sammy Guevara vs. Darby Allin in the ongoing tournament to crown a new AEW World Champion - the natural thought process of some is just to catch up with Rampage at some point down the line. More often than not, by sheer habit of missing those other nonconsequential Rampages, that "some point" never comes.

Given the age we're in, it doesn't help matters that most episodes of Rampage are taped on the Wednesday night directly after Dynamite, and thus spoilers often loiter out in the online ether.

For WCW, when it launched Thunder in 1998, there was an initial buzz about this second major weekly show. Unfortunately, that buzz soon dwindled down, ratings tanked, and Thunder was largely a mere afterthought as WCW filled it with matches and angles that would soon be reversed or have little impact on the larger storytelling for the company's biggest acts.

Still, the one thing Rampage has going for it that Thunder never did, is that the AEW show is only one hour as opposed to the two painful hours of WCW Thunder.