10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About WCW
9. Decades Of Stolen Ideas
Wrestling promotions "borrowing" ideas from one another isn't anything new, and certainly not unique to WWE during the Monday Night Wars.
Indeed, Vince McMahon's group fell victim to creative theft multiple times while battling with WCW. Ted Turner's group saw Chyna's success and tried to recreate it with Asya, aped the Royal Rumble with World War 3 (adding two extra rings in the process), and installed its own hardcore division while the scene was servicing WWE's underserved midcard well. Pilfering was ubiquitous, is the point. Everybody was doing it.
But with Vince McMahon so often put over as a genius for genuinely revolutionising professional wrestling in the '80s and '90s, you can bet your house on the WWE Chairman wanting you to conveniently forget that his company routinely raided WCW's ideas bank.
WrestleMania changed the game, but Starrcade innovated the supercard concept over a year before McMahon's first blockbuster event. Demolition were WWE's attempt at recreating the Road Warriors' success for the opposition. The shift towards grimier, edgier content that sparked WWE's Attitude Era success happened on Nitro first, primarily through the New World Order, which heavily influenced Vince's own rogue stable, D-Generation X.
The list goes on.