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

October 21, 2002 - Katie Vick

Let’s use an analogy to describe the creative process of and by 2002.

Picture an office meeting room populated by Vince and the writing staff. Since late 1997, there's been a dartboard on one of the walls; on it, a list of touchy, controversial subjects taped over the numbers. Incest; racism; miscarriage; sexual assault; penis severance; transphobia; addiction exploitaton; homophobia…

WWE, knowing it would grab people’s attention in the midcard to keep Nitro at bay while they were waiting for Steve Austin, seemed to book its product around this stuff.

What haven’t we shocked people with yet?

Throw the dart.

It lands on the “dog murder” ring.

The Al Snow Vs. The Big Boss Man programme is then mapped out from there.

Four years after the Attitude Era began in earnest, this dartboard is covered in holes. WWE has thrown an arrow at every ring on it. Well, almost.

There’s something almost darkly amusing about WWE running a necrophilia angle in the autumn of 2002, which obviously has nothing to do with the content itself. It’s more the sheer, despicable need to do something, anything, that resembles the popular TV product of 1998 and 1999. Steve Austin is close to retirement, and the Rock is bound for Hollywood - but if Triple H dresses up as Kane and simulates sex with a corpse, we’ll be a household name again. (If you are somehow unaware of this, Triple H accused Kane of defiling the corpse of the high school crush he had accidentally killed before reenacting the scene for heat).

In WWE’s own Ruthless Aggression documentary, Bruce Prichard claimed that this angle and others like it were a holdover from Attitude that they soon realised didn’t work after the Invasion. Force-feeding “this crap”, said Prichard, led to a decline in the audience. The implication is that WWE subsequently opted for a more sophisticated tone.

This is a strange thing for Prichard to say, considering that, between 2002 and 2008, WWE explored themes of rape, terrorism, blasphemy, and more. Stephanie McMahon gave birth to her first daughter in 2006; when she was pregnant, Vince suggested that his character was to be revealed as the father.

Attitude Era and Ruthless Aggression: it’s not quite as different as Hulkamania and Austin 3:16.