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Post by Redbeard's Ghost on Sept 2, 2021 19:38:40 GMT -5
Lol, you know what I meant. Like him or laugh at him, he knew how to tap in to the cultural zeitgeist of that specific moment in time and knew that for people to care, they have to care about the whole show, not just the top guy - and with the others around him, as a team they had all the ingredients they needed. Now, they have no massive cultural zeitgeist to tap in to, no big societal shift to exploit and they have writers who are ignored and a 76 year old man who has bought so much of his own hype he believes only he can do anything - and has a team around him of yes men and those who probably know better, but also know how to deal with Vince and wont be risking their jobs to tell him no as most of them have already been fired once or twice before! I still think what really sticks out is that Vince knew how to appeal to young Gen X'ers/older Millenials: Rock n' Wrestling and Hulkamania were right in the wheelhouse of where tons of people were at when it came to 80s pop culture, and Austin and the "Attitude" style fit the late 90s to a tee, but they each tracked with the aging up of the cohort that was born circa the late 70s through the late 80s. Once that group got to adulthood I don't think Vince knew how to hold onto them, and like you say I think in the years since we've entered the era of fragmented media and pop culture and it's hard to find some kind of central focus point to sell people on. I honestly think pro wrestling transcends all of that nonsense. If you can't market professional wrestling to its rabid audience at this point, you should retire or find another line of work.
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Post by HMARK Center on Sept 2, 2021 21:18:57 GMT -5
I still think what really sticks out is that Vince knew how to appeal to young Gen X'ers/older Millenials: Rock n' Wrestling and Hulkamania were right in the wheelhouse of where tons of people were at when it came to 80s pop culture, and Austin and the "Attitude" style fit the late 90s to a tee, but they each tracked with the aging up of the cohort that was born circa the late 70s through the late 80s. Once that group got to adulthood I don't think Vince knew how to hold onto them, and like you say I think in the years since we've entered the era of fragmented media and pop culture and it's hard to find some kind of central focus point to sell people on. I honestly think pro wrestling transcends all of that nonsense. If you can't market professional wrestling to its rabid audience at this point, you should retire or find another line of work. It's a matter of degree, I suppose: Vince and his braintrust were in the right place and time and had the access to the right resources to make the 80s work for them, and when they got desperate in the late 90s they pivoted to the "EXTREEEEME!" TV trends of the era to bring back a lot of the same fans who started to lapse as they aged out of "kiddy wrestling" in the mid 90s Hell, Hogan turning heel and forming the nWo really got that ball rolling, if we're being honest; using myself as an example, I began watching wrestling regularly in early 1991 as a 5-to-nearly-6 year old, I fell off regular viewing circa late '94 through 1997, and then came back as a 12-near-13 year old in 1998, so it was like the products were aging up to keep up with my generation. I agree that well-booked pro wrestling can appeal to anybody, cultural zeitgeist be damned, but in terms of trying to have mass pop cultural appeal it's definitely harder nowadays given that there isn't singular aesthetic style or what have you today like we had in the more homogenous 80s and 90s. It also helped Vince that the market he tapped in those eras, again the late X'ers and early Millenials, now make up the largest cohort in America, so we plain and simply had the numbers to make big business for the WWF, something that's not as simple when birthrates have gotten lower in the decades since. My overall point: Vince had an approach that worked for a particular age group that came up at a particular demographic size and in particular social and economic and cultural circumstances, and he hasn't been able to replicate that since.
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