THIS Was WWE's Most Creative Year Ever
The WWF, not knowing the direction to the future - only that it needed to sprint beyond its past - ran the full gamut, from inspiration to desperation, from seminal to embarrassing. In the very same month the WWF promoted one of the greatest and most atypical matches in its history, the company debuted the fake Razor Ramon and Diesel in an embarrassing, spiteful self-own. In the same year that Steve Austin challenged our very perception of aspiration, he shared the same 'Free For All' SummerSlam pre-show with TL Hopper, the wrestling plumber, who in a skit removed what was either a bar of chocolate or a piece of sh*t from the bottom of a swimming pool. It was 1996, and thus pretty hard to tell.
The shifting complexion of the roster symbolised the strange, competing forces at work. The Ultimate Warrior represented McMahon's ingrained desire to yield to a successful past, where the development of Austin showed him the future. Austin reality-infused approach clashed wildly too with the pig farmers, cowboys, and 1970s heartthrobs (!) was "fixin'" to get through. The Bushwhackers were still a thing in 1996, for f*ck's sake, as was the perfect intensity of Sid - both sweating, towering form of karma for Shawn Michaels and forward-thinking update on the mould of WWF Champion.
Ironically, it was Vince Russo - remembered in retrospect for his undisciplined, scatterbrained approach - who gathered together these wild, experimental, contradictory impulses under a singular aesthetic vision of lurid, sexed-up car crash TV.
The WWF of 1996 was so fitfully creative and philosophically incoherent that Vince Russo had to make sense of it.