Monday Night Wars era: Did it do more harm than good?

[MrElijah]

A question I've been having lately is that how much the 90s has influenced wrestling as a whole. From Lucha Libre, heel authority figures, worked shoots, strong style, Hardcore, the need for star power..

Did it have an overall negative effect? What's your opinion?

[BlackoutCreature]

Two national companies dead, God knows how many wrestlers whose careers were dramatically shortened or ruined, hundreds of hours of footage that's honestly embarrassing to go back and watch nowadays. This is the reason I've never subscribed to the whole "competition is good for business" belief.

[Nickybojelais]

I don't think changing the format and philosophy of WWF programming during the Attitude era did any harm. What has harmed them is not changing that format for the next 20 years.

[Deleted]

It had a terrible long term affect we are still feeling the effects of....it intrdouced things like guaranteed contracts and inevitably changed it from a star driven business to one about the brand.

Which is what I am worried is going to happen with AEW around now...scorched earth where AEW and WWE are gonna toss so much money around at talents that any and all smaller companies are gonna get wiped out and then we will be back with a singular company reigning above the others and then things like XPW popping up to feed on the scraps of what is left.

[sarkerpolseng]

It did good. It created competition, which made the companies work harder.

It is unrealistic to think that all three companies would be around today.

[cabbageboy]

It might have international consequences as well. NJPW's cards since The Elite left have felt lethargic and I wonder if they can keep the momentum long term. In the case of AEW now it might be even worse if they don't get any sort of viable TV deal but have high priced talent signed, just sitting around collecting dust. If AEW fails to be a serious promotion they might end up like Lucha Underground, with bunch of people signed to contracts and unable to go to WWE. I guess in some cases it's more like the WCW main stars who were riding out the Time Warner deals though.

[nisidhe]

I honestly don't think AEW will be a negative force on the business. They're an option, right now like many other options for pro wrestling talent to showcase their skills and make a decent living at it. They're not out to destroy WWE specifically the way WCW became, so there's little actual pressure for WWE to change...yet.

The proof of the pudding that is AEW will be its booking. If it can create compelling and interesting stories in the ring (and outside as well), then WWE will have to step up or else risk everything from any expansion plans to some of its best and most bankable talent to its TV deals. WWE will not have to work hard to "win", but it will have to take some steps.

[The Dark Order Inferno]

It killed WCW, it saw the surviving company do things that made them radioactive to advertisers for the longest time. Stunt matches and weapon shots shaved decades from the healthy adult lives of countless talents, leaving them with drug addictions and the damage from concussions... Wrestling turned into Jerry Springer then set itself on fire for short term gain and overall, it may never recover.

So no, it was not worth it, not going to the extremes they did.

My big worry about AEW is that it may raise the costs of running a decent sized promotion. Companies may end up paying more money for lesser talent to compete with them and NXT. Doing that killed ECW and brought others to their knees, I hope AEW won't just hire people because they can, but if they're throwing a million at a worn out Jericho, I worry about their spending.

[bcdx97]

Feb 24, 2019 22:00:04 GMT -5 BlackoutCreature said:

Two national companies dead, God knows how many wrestlers whose careers were dramatically shortened or ruined, hundreds of hours of footage that's honestly embarrassing to go back and watch nowadays. This is the reason I've never subscribed to the whole "competition is good for business" belief.

But how could there be 3 national companies without competition? You want to go back to the territory system?

I don’t get how wrestling’s most popular era equals embarrassing footage but it was a hell of a lot of fun while it was going on.

["Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay]

The money that era made is long gone, and it broke wrestling forever really. So... Yeah I would say more harm than good.

[OVO 40 hunched over like he 80]

More harm unfortunately. Wrestling was at its hottest but it also made it impossible to ever match it and I don’t think it will ever be matched.

It also killed the ppv because every Monday something changed the result.

Then when the war ended, about two million wcw fans just quit watching wrestling altogether, never to return.

[RowdyRobbyPiper]

It was great for the bottom line, but the entire business paid a heavy price to attain that success.

[segaz]

Feb 25, 2019 3:46:27 GMT -5 OVO 40 hunched over like he 80 said:

More harm unfortunately. Wrestling was at its hottest but it also made it impossible to ever match it and I don’t think it will ever be matched.

It also killed the ppv because every Monday something changed the result.

Then when the war ended, about two million wcw fans just quit watching wrestling altogether, never to return.

No I wouldn't say ppv was dead, at least for the WWE at that time

[Feargus McReddit]

It put this weird expectation on popularity that honestly most media doesn’t really have as much anymore.

We have talks about casual fans (who in essence are flakey as all hell and only come when stuff’s cool and trendy and leave when it isn’t) and getting in new audiences when the business doesn’t need to do that. They just need to get new people invested.

Pokémon as a series isn’t being talked about on the Today Show on a weekly basis as it was the late 90s but the series is still a mega success because each game is being aimed where it needs to and to the audience it wants to have. Each of the mainline games is selling more than the last because it aims its promotion campaigns at the right places and keeps things interesting enough for its diverse audience.

The problem isn’t just that the issues with the Attitude Era happened, it’s that nobody up top knows what to do next and is coasting off TV deals and blames the fans instatly for not caring.

[HMARK Center]

I'd argue yes, at least with regards to how mainstream wrestling has approached things ever since.

The key thing to remember about that era is that glory days of the whole thing really only lasted from around 1997, during Nitro's heyday, through early 2001. That's...not a very long time. For comparison's sake the WWF did monster business during the Hulkamania era that carried them essentially from around 1984 through 1992.

This stems from multiple issues, but the key is something that was mentioned above: the rush to get ratings on Mondays meant that pay per views weren't really emphasized as much, thus flipping the traditional wrestling formula of "use TV to talk them into the building for big cards" on its head, but worse than that it meant that big moments and even main event caliber matches were burned through on free TV at a dizzying rate, thus automatically reducing the amount of time the show would still feel fresh and leading to quick audience and creative burnout. It was amazing to turn on Nitro in 1998 and hear that the main event was Hogan/Savage vs. Sting/Luger, or that Raw was doing rematches from whatever the main event was from their last pay per view, but that really lost its luster after a not-so-long amount of time.

Now granted, yeah, a lot of the worst legacy of that era is how WWE has spent 20 years trying to recapture it by doing all of the wrong things and never focusing on what actually made that era click and work; the 20 minute show-opening promos and pretending you don't have a main event scheduled didn't make it a popular show, it was actually having characters with motivations that made sense and whom the audience could easily identify with in a negative or positive way. But yeah, even during its time there was an expiration date on what the companies were doing, and the fact that it killed off two promotions and left the indies pretty badly scorched was not a good thing.

[Starshine]

No, Vince just took the wrong lessons from it. Instead of identifying that a combination of engaging weekly TV, global appeal talent on top, and the edgy crash TV booking helped in making it a cultural phenomenon; they instead doubled down on the latter when the former two respectively became too laborious, and unrealistic to replicate from around 2002 through to ‘07-ish.

You can make the same point on the Daniel Bryan Mania 30 story. Their takeaway from that was that underdog stories make stars. Vince just cannot seem to accept a lot of his successes come in spite of his grand vision.

[Deleted]

I don't think so, just on the basis WCW and ECW mostly died due to their own issues and would have fizzled out eventually anyway because both were incompetently run, and if anything it saved WWE.

A lot of bad has certainly come out of it, but would the industry really be any better off if WCW and ECW died anyway and WWE either being dead as well or still operating like it was in 1995?

[OVO 40 hunched over like he 80]

Feb 25, 2019 4:55:16 GMT -5 Feargus McReddit said:

It put this weird expectation on popularity that honestly most media doesn’t really have as much anymore.

We have talks about casual fans (who in essence are flakey as all hell and only come when stuff’s cool and trendy and leave when it isn’t) and getting in new audiences when the business doesn’t need to do that. They just need to get new people invested.

Pokémon as a series isn’t being talked about on the Today Show on a weekly basis as it was the late 90s but the series is still a mega success because each game is being aimed where it needs to and to the audience it wants to have. Each of the mainline games is selling more than the last because it aims its promotion campaigns at the right places and keeps things interesting enough for its diverse audience.

The problem isn’t just that the issues with the Attitude Era happened, it’s that nobody up top knows what to do next and is coasting off TV deals and blames the fans instatly for not caring.

But other than the Pokémon go craze I don’t remember them growing their audience just like the first and second generation of games.

Don’t they have the same problem that wrestling has? Basically that their audience don’t grow but that they spend more money?

[Feargus McReddit]

Feb 25, 2019 7:55:36 GMT -5 OVO 40 hunched over like he 80 said:

Feb 25, 2019 4:55:16 GMT -5 Feargus McReddit said:

It put this weird expectation on popularity that honestly most media doesn’t really have as much anymore.

We have talks about casual fans (who in essence are flakey as all hell and only come when stuff’s cool and trendy and leave when it isn’t) and getting in new audiences when the business doesn’t need to do that. They just need to get new people invested.

Pokémon as a series isn’t being talked about on the Today Show on a weekly basis as it was the late 90s but the series is still a mega success because each game is being aimed where it needs to and to the audience it wants to have. Each of the mainline games is selling more than the last because it aims its promotion campaigns at the right places and keeps things interesting enough for its diverse audience.

The problem isn’t just that the issues with the Attitude Era happened, it’s that nobody up top knows what to do next and is coasting off TV deals and blames the fans instatly for not caring.

But other than the Pokémon go craze I don’t remember them growing their audience just like the first and second generation of games.

Don’t they have the same problem that wrestling has? Basically that their audience don’t grow but that they spend more money?

Again, the highest selling Pokemon game to date is Sun and Moon. The highest before then was X and Y. They grow their audience every time for every game and in terms of age ratios, younger kids are playing more because their parents are playing with them.

If you go to any Pokemon related event, you see as many families going as you do anyone else. A couple of years ago, I worked at a Primary school and the topics they couldn’t stop talking about at the time were Minecraft and Pokemon. Fortnite might have changed things but, again, the reason that’s not talked about as much is because it’s not stamped into everyone’s minds as it was the late 90s.

In comparison, kids are going to indie shows (there was a bunch at the last OTT show I went to even though it was 18+ but Irish people are weird) and parents are taking them to wrestling but WWE’s core audience is way older because they aren’t getting to them.

[Deleted]

Feb 25, 2019 8:27:05 GMT -5 Feargus McReddit said:

Feb 25, 2019 7:55:36 GMT -5 OVO 40 hunched over like he 80 said:

But other than the Pokémon go craze I don’t remember them growing their audience just like the first and second generation of games.

Don’t they have the same problem that wrestling has? Basically that their audience don’t grow but that they spend more money?

Again, the highest selling Pokemon game to date is Sun and Moon. The highest before then was X and Y. They grow their audience every time for every game and in terms of age ratios, younger kids are playing more because their parents are playing with them.

If you go to any Pokemon related event, you see as many families going as you do anyone else. A couple of years ago, I worked at a Primary school and the topics they couldn’t stop talking about at the time were Minecraft and Pokemon. Fortnite might have changed things but, again, the reason that’s not talked about as much is because it’s not stamped into everyone’s minds as it was the late 90s.

In comparison, kids are going to indie shows (there was a bunch at the last OTT show I went to even though it was 18+ but Irish people are weird) and parents are taking them to wrestling but WWE’s core audience is way older because they aren’t getting to them.

Looking into it I don't think that's actually accurate - best I could find Sun & Moon are actually the worst-selling, albeit that's from a year ago and they just barely lose to X & Y and Ruby & Sapphire so that's probably changed by now - but still, Pokemon is a good point of comparison because the brand constantly finds ways to reinvent itself and extend its appeal and is still absolutely gigantic on a wide array of fronts. The series is still a complete behemoth and is probably going to take off even more if Detective Pikachu ends up doing well like by all signs it's going to.

And even with what was becoming the red mark on the series, the rapidly diminishing returns and poor critical reception of the (animated) movies, they managed to completely turn around once they actually decided to address it. I just plain can't see WWE managing to have that same level of adaptability