10 Incredible Links Between Wrestlers You'd Never Expect

4. Super Dragon And Vince McMahon Both Love HEAT, Brother

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WWE

Super Dragon promotes an irreverent brand of pro wrestling in front of a niche, über-hardcore set of fans. He wants to promote state-of-the-art wrestling.

He wants to get in front of it, too; AEW does not exist without PWG, and even now, with PWG no longer as relevant, its cachet subsumed by the mainstream, the recent trend of a lucha-fied AEW was started by Super Dragon. He has, in the Globe Theatre era, taken to importing the new generation of lucha libre talents to set his company apart.

Vince McMahon promotes a stylistically homogenised brand of sports entertainment and aspires to the largest set of fans imaginable, which involves the most basic and generic of story beats.

Nonetheless, they have something wild in common: kicking the ever-living sh*t out of babyfaces in a bid to get them over!

Super Dragon resisted the idea of turning the Young Bucks heel, even though the Reseda faithful loathed them by 2009. They'd turn heel and transform wrestling in the 2010s, but at DDT4, Dragon insisted that Bryan Danielson and Roderick Strong maul the Bucks in such gruesome fashion that the fans would have to sympathise with them. When this didn't happen, Danielson and Strong went further and further with the instruction, to an extent that the teams legitimately fell out for a few years afterwards.

This was all eerily similar to the method employed by Vince McMahon to get Roman Reigns over at WrestleManias 31 and 34 - and it didn't work for the WWE fans, either.

Contributor
Contributor

Michael Sidgwick is an editor, writer and podcaster for WhatCulture Wrestling. With over seven years of experience in wrestling analysis, Michael was published in the influential institution that was Power Slam magazine, and specialises in providing insights into All Elite Wrestling - so much so that he wrote a book about the subject. You can order Becoming All Elite: The Rise Of AEW on Amazon. Possessing a deep knowledge also of WWE, WCW, ECW and New Japan Pro Wrestling, Michael’s work has been publicly praised by former AEW World Champions Kenny Omega and MJF, and current Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes. When he isn’t putting your finger on why things are the way they are in the endlessly fascinating world of professional wrestling, Michael wraps his own around a hand grinder to explore the world of specialty coffee. Follow Michael on X (formerly known as Twitter) @MSidgwick for more!