It doesn’t matter if it’s sports, movies, or television shows, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to yesteryear. Someone is always compared to another; we all do it. Often, we make fun of people that clamor on with “Back in my day, things were better…” because we always hear it. Our grandparents said it, our parents said it, we say it, and the newest generation will say it. It always brings up various questions about the current crop of athletes. In this case, it’s more than just fans asking are the Young Bucks better workers?
Fan reaction
The current trend in professional wrestling is to use high-flying, high-impact moves that remind fans of video games and super hero movies. The sequence of events within a match to tell a story seems to be a lost art for many. Instead, they rely on big moves to get us invested in the match.
Does it work?
Depends on who we ask or what we watch.
We hear fans cheering, but rarely see more than a couple around the ring making any movement that would demonstrate it’s coming from them. In fact, most of the time most look bored.
The WWE, for instance, is renown for editing their videos. We all heard Beck Lynch being booed in the UK a few months back, but on WWE footage it’s been changed to cheers. We all heard the boos and chant “You both suck!” when Roman Reigns confronted Bill Goldberg following Goldberg beat Bray Wyatt for the Universal Championship. But once again, we only hear cheers in WWE videos.
Pumping crowd noise into an arena isn’t anything new in sports or entertainments shows as the Minnesota Vikings have been accused of doing that for years, and various musical acts have admitted or been caught doing so to get the crowd more fired up.
Whether the WWE and AEW does this or not isn’t telling on what the product is doing, but watching the fans is.
In the ‘90s during the Monday Night Wars and earlier in the Golden Era, wrestlers would draw us into their matches. We’d believe in what they were selling and would become emotionally invested like we do when watching movies. Fans would be standing for most of the matches and holding up signs or other items they purchased.
Now, and this is something Disco Inferno pointed out in his and Konnan’s podcast, fans don’t seem to be into the current wrestlers. We clap and cheer at the proper times, but we’re rarely jumping out of our seats.
The Young Bucks
The problem with the Young Bucks, according to various reports online, is they and others don’t listen to the older guys that have been there, done that. They’re matches are highlight reel matches where they’re each trying to outdo the other while doing so in synchronicity. Not an easy feat, but still doable if practiced enough.
We’re often told they’re the greatest tag team in the world. That they and others like Seth Rollins from the WWE are the best in the business. Yet, if we watch any Young Bucks match, and then a classic like the Rockers versus Hart Foundation, we see the glaring differences and weaknesses in what’s being offered today.
It seems the current trend is embracing the idea wrestlers are strictly entertainment and we want the oos and ahhs. This is solely my opinion and I could be wrong, but there’s a reason Jon Moxley, Chris Jericho, Cody Rhodes, Darby Alin, Dustin Rhodes, and MJF are so popular. They focus on the basics of what makes a match great and that translates for us and we buy into it. It’s not all about the ooks and aahs, but the emotions their performances bring out of us.
The names I listed get us out of our seats and keep us standing, hoping to see a comeback and eventual win. I love the Young Bucks, but I feel there is so much more we could be getting from them and other talent across the various promotions if they’d focus more on the tried and true basics that make matches and wrestlers great.
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