10 Times WWE Forced It Down Our Throats

2. Hulkamania

Bray Wyatt Fiend Seth Rollins
WWE.com

Nostalgia is a powerful beast. Aside from coating the past in a comforting glow, it renders the present rotten. Everything was better in the good old days, especially in professional wrestling. As John Cena and Roman Reigns enjoyed monster pushes, fans clamoured for the days of yore, simpler times, better times.

If you think the pushes handed to Cena and Reigns were excessive, you should finish work on that time machine and head back to the 1980s, but you better build a resistance to all things red and yellow before you do. Hulkamania was everywhere as Hulk Hogan took the then-WWF on his back and ran it into the stratosphere, taking wrestling into the mainstream. For many, Hulk Hogan is and was professional wrestling.

Announcers spoke of Hogan with awe usually reserved for the immortal as opposed to The Immortal™, while the heels made dastardly plans to end Hulkamania, once and for all. WWF was full of larger than life characters but there was only one top guy, a balding moustachioed man who was the image of all that is good with the world. He was also the image of every single bit of merchandise the company could devise.

Hogan main-evented seven of the first nine WrestleManias but was left standing tall at the climax of all nine. Even as colleagues such as Randy Savage and Bret Hart were given a little more attention, it was Hogan that remained the be-all and end-all of good guys in McMahon-World.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.