10 Worst Anticlimaxes In WWE History

After the manic one-upmanship that characterised the Monday Night Wars, Vince McMahon’s announcement on March 26th 2001 that he’d purchased the ailing World Championship Wrestling – his blood rivals – was a stunning masterstroke. He’d purchased the rights to and contracts of a select few of the performers that he’d been competing with, too… which led to wrestling fans the world over going into a quiet meltdown as their fantasy Capcom-style booking of WCW and WWF megastars suddenly looked like becoming a reality.

McMahon’s plan was to run WCW himself, but the promotion’s reputation as a money pit preceded it: he simply couldn’t find anyone who’d put them back on television again. The next big idea was to bring the WCW crew in as a separate brand within the WWF, but the coming months persuaded him that WWF fans wouldn’t watch a WCW show, and eventually it was decided that the WWF would run the additional roster as an invading force: as part of an angle within WWF programming.

Pretty much every other storyline came to an abrupt halt: the WWF, broadly speaking, were now the babyfaces, and WCW were the heels. Extreme Championship Wrestling (the Deadpool to WWF’s X-Men and WCW’s Avengers) had also recently gone under: a selection of their roster was incorporated into the angle, renaming WCW and ECW the Alliance.

Fans first raised an eyebrow when it became apparent that the WCW big guns, Nash, Hall, Goldberg, Hogan, Flair and Sting, were not joining the party. The other eyebrow joined it when it became apparent that, with Shane McMahon running the WCW army, Stephanie the owner of ECW and Vince McMahon in charge of the WWF, the whole storyline was once again all about the McMahons’ ridiculous family feud.

In the end, the angle collapsed under the weight of the conflict between the audience’s expectations versus the reality of what Vince was prepared to allow to occur. Simply put, the fans wanted proper angles and storylines between WCW and WWF talent, to live out their daydreams of cross-promotional battles. All McMahon wanted to do was enact his fairy tale version of WWF’s real life defeat of WCW on the grand stage of WWF programming and pay-per-view, ‘proving’ that WCW talent was demonstrably inferior to the WWF’s roster.

The Invasion narrative is widely considered one of the biggest disappointments in professional wrestling history, a horribly wasted opportunity to make serious money and new stars for Vince McMahon’s WWF, and an over-booked clusterf*ck of a storyline that completely derailed WWF programming for most of 2001.