10 Times WWE Forced It Down Our Throats

WWE doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to subtlety.

Actually, scratch that, WWE doesn’t have a track record when it comes to the lost art of delicacy, preferring instead to smash its audience over the head with a hammer until the minutiae of its storylines are as apparent as the sky, the moon, the sun and the stars. Leave nothing to chance, that’s the company motto when it comes to layered storytelling.

Sifting through the history books for the most egregious examples of this is an exercise in wasting ink and paper; the examples are just too numerous. Not a year goes by without Vince McMahon and co. (largely just Vince McMahon, really) picking something that must be rammed home, a buzzword, or a character, but more often than not an unstoppable babyface. In 2020, it has become a self-parody.

The largest wrestling promotion on the planet seems to have forgotten that people don’t like being told what to like. Maybe they never knew? Either way, WWE has a tendency to shove things down the collective throat of its audience, stubbornly sticking to its ideas whether you like it or not.

There is a parallel universe out there, a world where Lex Luger is the biggest, most popular professional wrestler of all time. Luger’s career was one of false starts and erroneous dawns, of championship wins cut off at the legs by the rotten shadow of pro wrestling politics. Luger could have been the NWA’s new hope in the late ‘80s, and a decade later he gave WCW one of its all-time biggest pops in beating ‘Hollywood’ Hulk Hogan. It just never worked out.

Luger was brought into WWE in 1993 as ‘The Narcissist’, a heel who was more interested in his own physique than his matches. Judging by the quality of WWE’s in-ring product in 1993, he may have had a point.

But Luger’s mega-push came once the heel experiment ended, when Vince McMahon needed another bodybuilder to take over from the red and yellow-shaped hole left by Hulk Hogan. ‘The Narcissist’ became an All-American Hero, draped in the stars and stripes and given an actual bus in which to tour the country. No, not a Mike Awesome type of bus; this was the Lex Express.

What’s more, Luger was given the honour of being the first to bodyslam Yokozuna, doing so on an actual American warship no less. On July 4. Possibly while eating a hot dog and chugging beer, although that can neither be confirmed nor denied. It was all a little too much, which is code for "it was way, way, way too much," and the fans predictably rejected Lex Luger as their new American saviour.