10 Times WWE Didn't Deserve To Be Unpopular
8. 1996
Yeah let's forget abut 1995.
In the shadow of the nWo, the WWF struggled to compete.
WCW dominated the battle for Neilsen ratings and perception. The Fed responded with furtive steps that went unrecognised by the North American public. Those steps are framed in documentaries as crucial to the boom that followed, but often, those steps were more entertaining and rich than the Attitude Era itself.
Shawn Michaels Vs. Mankind, from In Your House: Mind Games, was the sensational, unhinged template for the Attitude Era, only wrestled with significantly more character, imagination, and blurred psychology that invoked something different, and more violent, from the Boy Toy. Michaels' commercially disastrous run yielded more masterpieces than that, including a near-deadlift carry-job on behalf of Sid, who starred in his greatest run as a super-intense badass. Steve Austin's year was incredible - industry-defining, eventually - and outrageously entertaining. His promo work in the build to Survivor Series was a revelation - it provoked a relentless series of the guiltiest, most terrified pops in which your old hero was buried so hilariously that he became the villain.
The Undertaker became a super-worker; new match genres were created, almost by the month, as the backs-against-the-wall experimentation intensified; the broader characters were fleshed out to become profoundly more interesting: 1996 kickstarted 83 weeks, but changing the channel was more difficult than Attitude Era mythology tells you.