Since I'm a billionaire, I can say when I want to do things and when I won't. No timetable. – Vince McMahon
Vince McMahon will screw it up. Mr. McMahon has lost touch. Vince has been sent from the future to ruin pro wrestling forever. Vinnie Mac is the DEVIL.
These are just some of the exclamations I hear everyday from friends and enemies, expressing concern for the product they love so much.
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I get it. Gotta aim that vitriol toward something besides your inability to understand business as a basic concept. Snarkiness aside, I’m an adult man so I feel like I can handle complicated, progressive storylines that often push the boundaries of good taste and sometimes showcase blood splattered faces and mats.
Where are the baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire? What happened to almost naked ladies that can barely keep themselves clothed? Why are they pretending Paige DIDN’T say horrific things about Charlotte’s brother? Whatever happened to anarchy?
Where are these things that WWE has given me in the past, why not now? Why do my enjoyment and expectations take a backseat to whatever this billion dollar Beelzebub wants?
Pretty simple, actually: Vincent Kennedy McMahon got a billion dollars. What would YOU do with a billion dollars? Yeah, that’s what I thought...anything you want.
VKM isn’t out to ruin your life through carefully calculated moves based on your latest Facebook tweet and he’s not an out-of-touch, old man prone to psychotic fits of malarkey. He has a team of accountants and lawyers feeding him information.
He knows where the money is coming from. He has a target demographic, and it’s not you. Yeah you, in the Rainmaker t-shirt, you don’t matter.
Unless...You don’t have kids, do you?
How old were you when you started watching wrestling? And what federation hooked you? If you said “young” and “WWF/E” then you’re a pretty normal, if not stereotypical fan. Even if you said “WCW” it’s still the same, WCW was created in response to WWE’s growing pop culture relevance.
And, you know, Vince owns it now.
That first answer, though, that’s the key, you were a KID. Pro Wrestling is an inherently childish concept.
It’s a bunch of chiseled strongmen wearing colorful superhero costumes or sometimes just underwear, doing over-the-top strength moves and fake punching villainous monsters who kidnap people and devise plans to overtake companies and sometimes sacrifice their daughters.
Many of them have super powers, too. Invisibility (U Can’t C Me), Teleportation (The Wyatt Family), Time Travel (The New Day), Worm Control (The Boogeyman), Immortality (The Undertaker), Fire Manipulation (Kane), Lightning Bolts (Taker, again), Flight (Neville), Shape Shifting (Finn Bálor), Super Intellligence (Enzo), and my personal favorite, Cypher From The New Mutants If He Looked Like Jason Statham (Cesaro).
It’s ridiculous but it’s fun.
As adults, it taps into that part of our brain that won’t let go of our juvenile tendencies and innocent wonder. I think it’s called the Nostalgium Oblongata. It’s why we still tune in, complain, then get excited by Monday afternoon to do it all over again.
See those goofballs pushing 40 and chasing invisible creatures with their phones down the street and into oncoming traffic? Business oriented minds don’t see that; they see money being printed.
Guess who didn’t play Pokemon when they were little? The killjoys of the world. The rich, rich CEO killjoys.
For about 10 years, a certain tobacco company had a cartoon “camel” named Joe shilling cigarettes to the public. The “public” was code for “children that like cartoon animals,” not self respecting grown-ups who would scoff at any talking entity with a phallic shape sticking out of their face. That’s just silly.
Anyway, the idea was to get kids thinking Joe was a hip, cool dude that played billiards and wore a leather jacket, I guess because in the 80’s kids loved the idea of 50s greasers and bumpy horses from the middle east.
So yes, get the kids interested in the product so that when they get older, that’s what they’ll spend their money on. And you, the parent whose favorite time of the year is the PWG December DVD Sale?
Just buy your offspring WWE licensed stuff now, quick, before you die.
I’m not even gonna get into the whole “publicly traded company” stuff too much, because I barely understand it myself. But the gist of it is now that OTHER people have money invested in the business that dramatically pits men in underpants against one another.
The President of The Kiss My Ass Club wants that money, so he has to listen to the investors.
If they see ratings go up when John Cena is on the screen, they see more money, so they want to see more John Cena on the screen.
If they hear about sponsors dropping out because some parents think barbed wire fire matches and an old creepy guy screaming about puppies is inappropriate for children under the age of 13, then the investors are gonna want to see change.
It’s why we ended up in the PG Era after a very successful Attitude Era. WWE was growing fast, but so were the eyes of the helicopter parents. So, to become the behemoth company they were striving for, they had to ditch everything that made them so popular.
And it WORKED. The WWE became a global empire and a lot of fans felt betrayed.
Before storylines were started because someone was giving a backstage interview about how rad they are at wrestling when another wrestler wandered into the shot looking for Craft Services and attacked the interviewee for not being a tuna salad sandwich, resulting in a blood feud, creative wasn’t that much better at telling stories.
Rubber hand births and coffin-riding antics were rampant. There has never been a “Perfect Era.” Too many people have awful hindsight, and not enough people see the good that’s currently in front of them.
The WWE fan complaints may have gone up but so has Vince’s bank account, and that’s the bottom line. I know I’m gonna keep giving them 10$ a month and I’m gonna keep buying Enzo Amore and Kevin Owens merch, and they know that, too.
The difference is they don’t care about me, and they care about me even less if I don’t have kids. They do know that if they dangle a cigarette, I mean carrot, in front of me with the promise of the possibilty of good wrestling and well thought out narratives, I’ll stick around.
I don’t need crimson masks and g-strings to keep me interested, I can find that stuff pretty easily at the corner bodega, or the internet. I want incredibly well-done video packages and top notch wrestling and the promise, or at least hope, for something new and exciting.
WWE still has the tools to do that, whether you want to admit that or not.
So If you’re waiting for The Return Of Hardcore, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Unless you’re willing to give Vinnie Mac TWO billion dollars, nothin’s changin’, bub.
Plus, those new Owens sunglasses are dope as hell.
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