thesquaredcircle

I would say that the late 90s blood and violence  came as a result of the ECW infleunce.  I would say that the WWE got damn lucky that there were good workers that let them get away with the skits and other junk.  I miss when there was an actual main event wrestling match that ends shows on a weekly basis instead of a main event interview or some segment that advances the angles.

It's sad that skits/interviews have basiclally become accepted norms in the weekly wrestling shows.  Unfortunately, WWE does just enough (some decent PPV matches that feature actual wrestling) to keep me still watching although I haven't seen a Raw from start to finish in years.

I've never understood how and why it was allowed to evolve into that, or why wrestling fans embraced it in the first place. Its the equivalent of living in the 80s and saying, "Gee, I wish they would stop wrestling so much. I want Hogan, Savage, Hillbilly Jim, Junkyard Dog, and Tito Santana to talk for 90 minutes in the ring instead."

Had they tried this bullshit in the 80s, the wrestlers would have been chased out of arenas and people would have stopped watching it in droves. It just boggles my mind that people watch this, embrace it, and have the nerve to call it wrestling.

Look at the wrestling discussions here(specifically that Raw thread). People talk about guest hosts and skits, and when a match is discussed, its usually followed by a comment of how short it was. Might as well just watch SNL, a soap opera, or  the Benny Hill show. No offense to anyone watching this, but I find that quite sad.

Years from now your memories of wrestling are going to be skits.


As I have mentioned before, the only period where I watched wrestling non stop was early 80s-early 90s. Since then, it was sporadic to varying degrees, with the longest spurt being close to a year. So basically I am unable to see the step by step process of it evolving into this. I know this was fully embraced in the Attitude era, but it must have started a bit sooner. During that mid 90s era, I watched WCW through part of 96, watched a bit of WWF in 97, watched some WCW in 98 during Goldberg's reign when that "finger poke of doom" insulted my intelligence, and also started watching RAW around this same time when The Rock, Austin,etc. dominated the show. Got tired of that bullshit pretty quick, and went about three years without watching any wrestling.

As a wrestling fan, if I want to watch wrestling, I expect it to be wrestling. I'd like to know why wrestling fans in this era want it to be anything but wrestling.

In the "golden age", the ratio was about 80-90% wrestling/10-20% interviews. In this era its 80-90% skits/10-20% wrestling.

How is that acceptable to wrestling fans?