There’s a big difference between today’s WWE and the one many of us remember fondly from the Attitude or even the Golden Era.
It’s easy to see but not so much to explain just like in any sport. We either see football is played differently now, or we don’t. There’s little gray area in that, and today’s WWE, and wrestling in general, has grown according to their fans or perceived fans’ view.
For the last twenty years or so, super hero movies, comics, and video games have dominated the entertainment industry, and an entire generation grew up with them and have taken part of those and added it to their styles.
It’s part of the reason there are so many spot fests in the different companies and less ring psychology than there used to be.
An organic growth
It’s an evolution of sports, but it’s also divided the fans as there are very few marriages between the physical and the character/story side of things.
This can be put on the wrestlers in many cases if they come in as a blank slate and don’t have any ideas, but mainly it’s on the people running the companies.
Some, like AEW and Impact Wrestling, work with their talent to be the best they can be. Others, tend to come off more as a dictatorship when one person has their vision and refuses to let it go.
It’s not much better when some companies refuse to give away their grip on a black and white, good and evil struggle such has been Vince McMahon’s viewpoint with the WWE for years.
Vince has always touted the good triumphing over evil, so logically speaking, he’d be more open and endearing to the super hero aspect.
But there’s a downside.
Need more grit
The Undertaker was on The True Geordie Podcast and he spoke about the current WWE product.
“I feel like there is a level of grit that is missing from today’s product. I don’t know that it is anybody’s fault. We all aged out, so that new group has come up. When you watch Brock wrestle, you’re interested, because you know. He’s got this background, not only as an amateur wrestler, professional wrestler, mixed martial artist. Brock doesn’t do a bunch of crazy moves, Brock manhandles your ass. You get in there and you get thrown around, and you get smashed. Roman has a little bit of that to him; when he wants to. Randy has that to him; when he wants to. But a lot of the younger talent, it’s the evolution of that comic book era, the superhero era. I think that’s what’s their motivation, and that’s what their inspiration is. And they didn’t have to come up and bust heads in bars and figure out how they’re going to eat and things like that.”
The Undertaker made a good point as a lot of the wrestlers in the 1990s, 1980s, and earlier came up the hard way by bouncing bars, struggling to survive, and so on and it gave them a certain toughness and grit we could see in their eyes.
We believed Randy Savage was super intense and competitive because he was. We believed the Road Warriors, Scott Norton, and others would beat up their opponents because they were fighters.
It’s not a bad thing that many seem to have had a smoother road per se, but it ahs robbed them of that special something.
And then when we take in Vince McMahon’s running the show and telling everyone what to do it’s hard not to point at him when so many other wrestling companies have those types of characters.
It may be a sign that things are changing since the rebranded NXT 2.0 is reportedly looking for characters over other attributes, so we’ll see where it takes us.
What do you think? Is the Undertaker right and it’s basically people coming up differently or is it simply the evolution of the business? Let us know in the comments below.
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