6 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE WrestleMania Backlash

2. A Tale Of Two Brands

WWE Zombies
WWE.com

If you ever wanted to see the stark difference between Raw and SmackDown, look no further than WestleMania Backlash.

The main PPV offered up six matches, three from each brand. The SmackDown bouts featured three fresh matchups (in that we haven’t seen them on PPV before. The Raw bouts featured two title matches that were rematches with a third person thrown into each, and a singles bout featured two wrestlers from a tag tam match the previous month… and zombies.

The two SmackDown singles titles matches had storylines behind them, with one elevating a challenger, and the other designed to elevate the new champion. The Raw singles titles matches existed to fill time before the feuds are spun out into singles matches for the next PPV. The other SmackDown contest gave us a first: father-son tag champions in WWE. The other Raw bout gave us zombies.

It’s just not even funny right now how embarrassingly bad Raw is these days, and PPVs like this help illustrate how badly things are put together. Even good wrestling can’t absolve this poor setup and background.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.