Was the mid-card really that pathetic in the Attitude Era?

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Sept 20, 2013 17:21:09 GMT -5 BlackoutCreature said:

It's kinda a matter of perspective. Back in the Attitude Era there were only about six main eventers in the WWF. The main eventers mainly worked programs with the main eventers, and the mid-carders basically worked programs amongst themselves. While this made the main eventers look like larger then life superstars, it made the mid-carders look like they were a tier below and couldn't hang with the guys on top.

Nowadays you have like 25 guys being cycled in and out of the main event picture on a monthly basis. It makes the mid-card look good because it makes it look like they could literally win the top prize at any moment, but it also has the habit of diminishing the specialness of the main eventers.

It diminishes the midcard as well. Presentation-wise, those guys being cycled in and out of the main event picture aren't "midcarders". WWE wants the casual fan to think that guys like Del Rio, Ziggler, Ryback and Miz are "top tier" talents, on the same level as Daniel Bryan, CM Punk or John Cena. When they do get sent down into the midcard, they stick out like a sore thumb, and just come off as "main eventers who aren't currently in the world title picture". And the REAL midcarders usually end up getting jobbed out to these guys in order to maintain a facade of credibility, so you still have the issue of midcarders looking like they can't hang with top guys.

[deancubed]

It's much harder to sustain popularity with fewer people watching the shows. Scotty 2 Hotty might have been 'more over' than some of today's midcards but as a percentage of total viewers, he might only have slightly more fans than what an 'average' midcarder would have in any era.

With a more popular product in general, and enough people cheering for a midcard guy, it helps those guys sustain credibility. They just plain had more fans, because there were more fans to go around.

Santino is just as 'over' as Scotty was, IMO, and they fill the same role on the show. But Scotty probably sold more merch, and of course more people have heard of him in the general public just because of WHEN he was wrestling.

Any midcarder from the Attitude Era will seem like a bigger deal than today's equivalent when we know that mathematically they had more fans. And more of the casual fans from the Attitude Era were new enough to wrestling that they could cheer for ANYONE. Half of today's crowds are much 'smarter' than the fans from the late 90s, thanks to the Internet. And also because they are the only people that kept watching even when wrestling stopped being the trendy thing to watch. So of course they are more dedicated to the show, but also they nitpick more, and treat today's midcarders like crap simply because they are compared constantly to the Attitude Era glory days (when many of these 20 and 30 something aged 'smart' fans like us were kids and just loved ALL of it because we weren't as nitpicky).

The number of casual fans from the Attitude Era outnumbered almost all of today's fans total! You didn't see many people chant 'BORING' during a show back in the Attitude Era. They didn't chant random crap during even a dull match. A paint-by-numbers Miz/Fandango timewaster would still have a hot crowd that is involved in the match simply because the casual fans hadn't been taught not to care yet. Today's crowds are smart enough to know what matches are filler/pee break matches and which aren't. We even understand how matches are placed on a card, with a cooldown match from the divas or midcarders placed between huge main event angles to let the audience take a breath. Attitude Era casual fans (and there were way more of these than today's casual fans) didn't know that kind of thing, and so a Diva match or a midcard timewaster would be cared about just as much, because casual fans assume ALL of it is important until taught otherwise, either by experience watching hundreds of shows, or being told by 'smart' fans "not to worry about this Kofi guy, he's been floundering for years".

Miz would have been a huge star in the Attitude Era, just like Kofi, Axel, and the rest of the midcard. That doesn't mean that the old midcard was necessarily booked better or 'treated with importance'. It just means a higher percentage of fans nowadays know enough about how the show works to know who is worth paying attention to.