The WCW Conspiracy Iceberg EXPLAINED!

28. Vince McMahon Reintroduced A WCW PPV Just To Remind You That It Sucked

Vince McMahon hated WCW. He hated the location of its offices. He hated that it was well-financed and thus able to sign the biggest stars in the United States. He hated that its backer Ted Turner was a more successful, prominent, and legitimate businessman. He hated that WCW, for a couple of years, beat him at the exact same game he played in the 1980s. He hated the promotion so much that he could never even bring himself to say its name without twisting his face in disgust and adopting a yokel drawl; it wasn’t called WCW, but rather Dubya See Dubya. 

At various points since November 2001 - at which Dubya See Dubya was beaten to death by the mighty WWF Superstars at Survivor Series - calls were made to bring it back. The Invasion was a mistake, yes, but it’s not as if the brand split was a monumental commercial success or anything. It didn’t matter that SmackDown promoted a great in-ring midcard for a shorter period of time than you remember: WWE’s business was in a quite alarming decline in the early 2000s. Every single metric was down. Why not just admit that a mistake was made, pretend none of this silly business-killing business had ever happened, and reboot WCW - only properly this time? 

Fans of the day pipe-dreamed about this on message boards constantly. Some very brave officials within WWE might have even floated this idea to Vince. If an ECW reboot was pitched, it stands to reason that, even just once, someone close to him might have wondered aloud about bringing back WCW when Vince was in one of his less intensely angry moods. Some Redditors have suggested that the WCW Great American Bash was revived as a WWE pay-per-view by Vince for the express purpose of petulant sabotage. 

You want WCW to come back? Well, here’s one of their pay-per-views - and it stinks, pal.

The Great American Bash 2004 was one of the worst major wrestling shows ever - a bleak presentation of terrible wrestling, debutants who were nowhere near ready for the big time, and a Handicap match for a main event, which, notably, had never happened before nor since. WWE was terrible in 2004 - but the Bash was exceptionally bad, and was never going to draw money. Did Vince actively sabotage it, just to make a three year-old corpse look bad? 

It’s actually not the dumbest conspiracy theory ever conceived - but Judgement Day 2004 was hardly WrestleMania 17. Perhaps WWE was simply very bad that year.