10 Worst WWE Set Designs
The Blandest Stage.
The sister piece to this is either online at this link here, or (if those words aren't hyperlinked) will eventually appear in due course. It's the positive accompaniment - a celebration of something WWE does really, really well regardless of the creative era, or generation of wrestler, or age of the ever-idiosyncratic owner.
Wrestling wasn't all "smoky bingo halls" when Vince McMahon bought his father's territory in the early 1980s - no matter how often that line is trotted out - but few made it look as grandiose on a regular basis after his purchase. Investment in aesthetics was huge across the board - he rightly believed that if he was to convince networks to carry his show instead of the local one, they needed to be given a million instant reasons why.
Bigger sets make bigger wrestlers look even bigger. It was if the entire world was taking McMahon's famous airport test when they watched his show.
The visuals - way more than the wrestling itself - were there to stop you dead in your tracks for at least a few seconds, from 1987's truly remarkable WrestleMania III to 2020's divisive ThunderDome. Hitting so many artistic home runs hooked fans forever. But nobody bats a thousand...
10. WrestleMania 2000
WrestleMania 2000 existed in another galaxy away from the rest of WWE's output at the time. How was it so sh*t? How did the roster page result in a card like this one? How did a main event with so much to offer deliver so little? How did a set meant to reflect an organisation at its critical and commercial peak look so unfinished?
All of these questions plagued the first 'Show Of Shows' of the new millennium then, and still do now. The company was receiving mainstream attention at a level not experienced since Vince McMahon's 1980s pomp, but failed profoundly at capitalising on it at during their showcase event.
In aesthetics alone, the show was a soul-destroying misrepresentation of a white hot product. A ring decked almost entirely in black didn't remotely represent the vibrancy on television every week, nor did the listless stage made up of smaller trons than the ones blasting out the images of the Saturday Night Live-level household names on Raw and SmackDown.