Ranking Every Incarnation Of The Mr McMahon Character From Worst To Best
The Artist Formerly Known As Vince
The Big Mac is back.
Returning on Tuesday night instead of his usual centrepiece spot on his flagship broadcast, Vince McMahon will invade SmackDown Live! for the first time ever, ostensibly to give his son quite the ticking off for his physical involvement in storylines following last week's Kevin Owens kick-off.
In reality, as McMahon himself would say, it's all about the monnnaayyy. Specifically in this case, the television rights fees. Ratings for both Raw and SmackDown have plummeted and plateaued respectively in 2017, with WWE appearing keen to arrest the slide with a selection of blockbuster encounters on the broadcasts in recent months used to break up the monotony of the segment-squash-segment-tag main event formula the company have clung to for the better part of two decades.
And to his credit, Vince still delivers numbers. Smartly reducing his television time in the last decade, McMahon has become an enjoyable rarity again, resisting what was at various times an urge to make himself an almost ungainly presence on his own show. Drawing curious eyes whenever he appears, his placement on the show has become symbolic of something groundbreaking, or has at least maintained a veneer of importance.
Landing everywhere between incredible and insufferable during his 20 years as the Mr McMahon character, Vince has ran the gamut whilst running the show. But like the little girl with the little curl, when he was good, he was very very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid.
10. Overlord
If being subjected to the sight of Vince McMahon's bare a*se wasn't bad enough for weeks on end at the...back end of 2001 wasn't bad enough, it was having to witness the full extent of his a*seholery for much of the calendar year.
As ECW and WCW collapsed within weeks of each other early in the year, Vince was in the process of perhaps his most evil heel run ever. Far from the enjoyable super-villain he'd portray against Stone Cold Steve Austin in 1998 (more on that later), McMahon was at this point engulfed by his megalomaniacal tendencies.
The first proponent of the philosophy that the best characters are made from real-life personalities with the volume turned up, McMahon was buzzing after his greatest creative and commercial year ever, with an impending football league and WWE's stock market floatation making him an on-paper billionaire just four years on from the water coolers being taken from Titan Tower as a cost-cutting measure.
Bookending the year with detestable fiendishness, McMahon exerted his unmatched power to neck on with (then frighteningly abuse) Trish Stratus ahead of WrestleMania, then order various subordinates to join his new 'Kiss-My-Ass' club on national television all under the guise of his 'creative genius'.