10 Times WWE Was Literally As Stupid As WCW
Who would be stupid enough to hire Vince Russo twice...?
Is WWE as bad as WCW?
It has become one of wrestling's most unsolvable riddles.
It's important to mention here that WCW was awesome at its best, and was awesome even when it was mostly bad. 1991 was one of the most risible years in the history of a risible promotion, and Ricky Steamboat returned at Clash of the Champions XVII to temporarily form an all-time great tag team alongside Dustin Rhodes. 1992 wasn't much better, but Vader caved Sting's skull in to extract from him an all-timer of a babyface performance. Shawn Michaels would have squealed. Sting ate those bear claws and launched an attack directly into his face.
The halcyon days of 1996-1998 were as transformative and stellar as 1999-2001 was the worst and most damaging period of any company ever. The fictional universe was mutated by meta carny bullsh*t. Nothing was meant to be real. Everything was subverted so often that something, literally one thing, might have registered as a shock if it actually made a lick of sense. Investment was impossible. Vince Russo couldn't even remember the events of his own scripts three pages ago. He lost the plot in his grand plan to work the internet, which he now blames all of wrestling for catering towards (!).
So is WWE as bad as WCW?
Might be worse, actually...
10. The Gunther Incident
One of two things happened to arrive at Gunthergate:
1) WWE actively tried to associate the former WALTER with a nazi U-boat commander under the belief that, since he was fairly obscure, nobody would notice.
2) WWE didn't know that they had filed a trademark related to the nazis because nobody in a huge billion dollar corporation had the forethought to type 12 letters into Google. Insensitivity via complete reckless idiocy.
In a way, it's incredibly telling (and grimly amusing) that the lack of clarity created a mutated discourse of its own. Is WWE evil, or just as stupid as sh*t?
At the very least, then, WWE is as systemically incompetent as WCW at its absolute dumbest.
The Final Solution is a more infamous part of global history than Günther Stark, who, realistically, you hadn't heard of this time last week.
Before realising that they had named Hulk Hogan's latest Monster of the Week after the nazi plan to exterminate the global Jewish population - or Monster of the Minute, since the narcissistic bastard worked seven of them in one match - WCW named Jeep Swenson 'The Final Solution' before a hasty name change in which one word was changed. Sound familiar?
It's rather difficult to feign ignorance on that, but then again, it was WCW.
Consider it a tie: WCW was stupider, but Jeep was a one-shot monster. WWE was lazier, but WALTER is one of the greatest wrestlers of his generation.
It's not as if WCW changed Sting's name to Steve after three years, which somehow would be as dumb.