The Secret History Of WWE’s Ruthless Aggression Era | Wrestling Timelines

January 23, 2006 - It’s Not Just Attitude

The conceit of this article is that the Ruthless Aggression era is a mere continuation of Attitude - but that’s not all. In 2006, WWE almost reboots the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s at the same time.

Throughout the mid 2000s, Vince McMahon grows obsessed with characters again - wacky caricatures who could not possibly exist in a realistic fictional world. Now, you could argue that there’s no such thing in pro wrestling, but the various acts that pop up are very much a return to the heightened days of the 1990s.

The tone is set through the January 23 debut of the Spirit Squad: a group of wildly obnoxious male cheerleaders. In the summer, the former Akio becomes a cowboy performing under the name ‘Jimmy Wang Yang’.

In January 2007, Deuce and Domino debut on SmackDown. They are greasers who talk as if they travelled forward in time from the 1950s. They aren’t merely styled after the fashion trends of the day: they are meant to be from the day. A year passed between those debuts; this is longer than Paul Heyman’s stint with the book on SmackDown. The wackiness actually stretches further than that. This all followed the 2005 debut of the Boogeyman: a face-painted worm-eating monster character who patterned his movements from depictions of voodoo in popular culture and somehow did not wrestle the Undertaker in 1993. The Dicks, very briefly, are chippendales in that same year.

This is a sexualised occupational gimmick - a New Generation/Attitude Era hybrid that underscores how WWE shifts between two identities, rather than creating a new vision.