10 Things You Need To Know About The Dawn Of WWE's Attitude Era
4. The Death Of Brian Pillman
Brian Pillman's untimely death - like many of wrestling's wild men, he lived the gimmick to his cost - moved Vince McMahon to make explicit his strategy of moving the WWF away from old pro wrestling to a mature product focussed on OTT soap opera angles.
Pillman died on the eve of In Your House: Badd Blood on October 5, 1997. The backstage atmosphere both on the night and the ensuing Monday Night RAW was sombre. Perhaps that is what allowed McMahon, in a rare display of solemnity, to admit his failings in a backstage meeting. He acknowledged that his old ideas, the old way of doing things, were out. That was an unrecoverable age (little did he know...). It was on this night that his experimental, glacial strategy was accelerated.
The very next week, Shawn Michaels and Triple H formalised their degenerate act with the name D-Generation X - a crucial victory in their years-long quest to grab the elusive zeitgeist. They had been christened; so too, on December 15, was the Attitude Era itself by McMahon.
DX ramped up their already puerile antics by transgressing codes both moral and professional. When they fought one another in a European Title bout on the December 22, 1997, they p*ssed off many by going through the exaggerated motions of a wrestling match and celebrating and commiserating with histrionic overreaction. This followed an angle which Steve Austin threw the Intercontinental Title in a river the week prior.
The WWF literally disposed of tradition in order to cement itself as a dissident organisation.