10 Reasons WWE's Best Era Is Secretly Its WORST Era
1. It Ruined Everything That Followed
The Attitude Era was a firecracker. It was artistically bankrupt and too exhilarating all at once.
It wasn't wall-to-wall effluence, obviously. The Rock was in it. Steve Austin was in it. The Hardcore title run was super-inspired midcard fare that injected much-needed irreverence (mostly) into the programming. It was deafening a lot of the time. The crowd brawls were literally magnetic. The stars were megastars and, in pursuit of the ratings d*ck-measuring contest, the television was a relentless series of incidents.
As a result, WWE was bad or dull or both for years and years.
The shadow of the Attitude Era loomed over everything. Long title reigns, after the profound level of inflation, felt tedious. Sh*tty non-finishes became the norm because WWE could never accept that they were no longer in the good old days and tried to manufacture them for nigh-on eternity. The stars were never as big, beyond John Cena and to a lesser extent Batista, and so the old ones returned as Dolph Ziggler and the Miz had to play Brock Lesnar Guy and Frank the Clown as they fawned over the real stars on various Attitude Era Network retrospectives.
Then the real stars came back, for a while, and made the other acts - who weirdly weren't permitted to express themselves and do what their predecessors did to get over - look like inessential geeks.
In the years before the part-timer era, the dragon of Attitude was chased. WWE in effect mounted a dartboard on a wall and in place of the numbers wrote things like 'R*pe', 'Mock Necrophilia', and 'Terrorism', threw the darts in a bid to land on the latest failed ratings grab, and called it the 'Ruthless Aggression Era'.
Cody Rhodes spent his career trying to exorcise that ghost, and look at what almost happened to him at WrestleMania 40. It can never completely go away.