Parental Guidance And The Death Of Professional Wrestling

We cover manly movies and TV here.  Not wrestling, but I’m going to take an occasion to go off on a tangent and muse on something that has afflicted wrestling in a bad way, something we’re all familiar with.  Especially in light of recent events with The Expendables 3 or Terminator: Genisys.

Wrestling is dead as we know it.  But I refrain from going so far as to blame it squarely on parental guidance.  The actual date of the death of professional wrestling can be traced back to March 26th, 2001 – the closure of WCW and its submission to WWF ownership.  See if you can recognise a pattern here.  The closure of WCW led to hegemony.  Hegemony led to complacency.  Complacency led to greed (a sure formula for career failure…).  And when greed set in, the lucrative family market came calling.

In the late 1990s, the WWF and WCW appealed to a demographic approximately 18-45.  For this they put on edgier panto.  Tits, ass, violence, alcohol, firearms, swearing… it was all there.  And the target audience ate it up.  TV ratings were through the roof.  Raw Is War, which the programme is no longer called because the ‘War’ part was deemed politically incorrect, regularly drew 10.0 ratings combined with Nitro.  That’s 10.0 percent, not millions, 10.0 percent of the viewership of 300 million.  The venues were the same, they could hardly fit the people in, each arena was sold out as the riotous crowds were jammed up to the rafters, like sardines in a can.  Sometimes Nitro, deemed to be the lesser of the two by the end, would draw an arena audience of 60,000.

When the chips were down, the WWF got desperate and tried its best to put on quality programming, giving fans what they wanted and then some.  They were hungry.  Kinda like how Stallone made Rambo IV a completely gratuitous, uninhibited fan indulgence when he said he had “nothing to lose”.  And like how Stallone has now gotten ahead of himself with his relationship with parental guidance, the WWF also went the same route.  Cementing a comeback wasn’t good enough, neither did fans really matter.

Compare that outlined further above with today’s pathetic farce.  Gone is the “Attitude”, there are no more Steve Austins. Instead there are Seasame Street characters.  And where the 1998 crowds front and centre would yell obscenities and spill their beer over bleeding wrestlers, today’s front row crowd is full of soccer moms trying to keep their seven year olds awake long enough to see John Cena in the main event.  A man who never jobs and has never turned heel, solely to keep the merchandise rolling in, because kids won’t buy toys of a man who cheats to win.  The whole thing is so innocuous, so cookie cutter, that I can barely stomach five minutes of it.  The balls have been cut off ‘RAW’, simply because certain people got greedy.

And it’s not just because of school lunch boxes and other paraphernalia being shipped.  It’s the advertising that comes during the breaks.  Oh yes, there’s more money if you want it!  During the ‘Attitude Era’, while all of us loved Stone Cold Steven Austin threatening rivals with a loaded revolver (Austin brought a gun to RAW on at two three occasions), the advertisers hated him.  Get rid of him, or at least tone it down, they said.  But the ever present threat of WCW meant that the WWF had to keep Austin off the leash – quality and satisfying the fans took precedence.  This meant a drought in sponsorship deals, yes they earned money during commercials, but the big bucks wanted a return to ‘eat your vitamins’ wrestling.

Vince McMahon, WWF owner, finally got his chance to take them up on their tasty offers when WCW imploded.  He bought the company for pennies.  And with the competition removed, put an immediate end to the ‘Attitude Era’.  Then the big bucks started rolling in as the product became kid-friendly.  They said the Attitude Era ran its course, but in reality they ended it because it was safe to cut fans off at the knees now that they could pander to safer sponsors.

But now over ten years later, the long term price has become evident.  RAW used to get ratings as high as 8.0 (by itself!), with Nitro getting 3.0-4.0 on the same night, Nitro would peak at 6.0.  Now, with no competition, RAW struggles to break 3.0.  Nobody is watching, not half the audience it used to have care anymore.  A recent Smackdown! taping had a pathetic 2,500 people show up.  WWE had to offer free tickets outside the venue.  And what for, to ship a few extra truckloads of toy figurines?  To keep soccer moms quiet on social media?  And it’s only going to get worse.  McMahon may be a greedy fucker, but he’s an intelligent greedy fucker.  He’s stepping down, leaving a wrestler and his daughter to take over the show.

They will kill that company once and for all.  Fuck you, WWE. Fuck your creche-like mood lighting.  Fuck your Scooby-Doo themed episodes.  Fuck your shitty Disney-like commentary, superhero champions and most of all, fuck you for killing wrestling.