Fandango catches on with fans - well, sort of

At Wrestlemania 29, Fandango finally made his debut and was victorious against former 6-time WWE/World Champion Chris Jericho. The fans at “The Granddaddy of ‘Em All” were less than impressed, despite several months of hype for the pseudo newcomer.

The next night on RAW, however, was a completely different story.

In front of one of the hottest, most hostile crowds in WWE, Fandango came to the ring, and nearly 20,000 fans were on their feet, chanting and humming along with Fandango’s admittedly catchy entrance music. It was really something to see, as you would never expect a crowd to be so into something like that, especially a New York/New Jersey crowd, traditionally one of the hardest to please wrestling crowds in the world.

While the fans still don’t seem to care too much about the man behind the Fandango gimmick, the song is another story. Not long after RAW went off the air, social networking exploded with love for Fandango’s music. Reportedly started by the Facebook page called “Wrestling Memes”, the hashtag #FandangoRevolution began spreading over both FB and microblogging site Twitter, and a grassroots campaign began to get Fandango’s entrance theme to the top position for the most downloaded song on iTunes. As of yesterday, it was in the top 20 in the UK version of the music downloading site, and in the US, it appears to have cracked the top 100.

Although there was a blurb about it on WWE.com, they seem to be mostly ignoring the trend, but if it keeps up at this rate, it will be interesting to see if they can continue to ignore it. Something similar happened last year when the fans began chanting “Yes!” at Daniel Bryan at Wrestlemania 28, and it not only caught on with the rest of the crowds, but WWE basically turned it into Bryan’s gimmick.

However, that doesn’t always happen. Zack Ryder tried something similar with his YouTube show, and while WWE acknowledged it at first, their support soon petered out as Vince McMahon has a hard time swallowing his pride and getting behind anything he doesn’t himself create.

Although Fandango is a pet project of Vince and reportedly Triple H (both were trained by Killer Kowalski), and there seems to be big plans for him, I don’t know know how much support they will throw behind the fans’ love for his entrance music, especially when, unlike Bryan and Ryder, the fans still aren’t buying Fandango as a competitor, which is the most important aspect of any successful gimmick.

The next few weeks should prove very interesting.