WCW vs WWF: 1992

[Steenalized]

Well in his introduction Sleaze mentions drawing power being brought up. When your top heel can't draw and that man is going to be world champion next year for the entire year, you have a problem.

 

I can't understand how any "WWF vs. WCW" comparison can't involve business numbers. They are businesses. It's like saying Wendy's is doing better than McDonalds because you like their burgers better. I bet if you asked any WCW executive if they would switch work rate vs. ratings, attendance, merch sales, etc they'd agree in a heartbeat.

 

It matters because I do believe to an extent that a great worker should be able to generate fan interest and get people to come to see his matches. Vader could not do that in the US, in either WWF or WCW. Yeah there's plenty of extenuating circumstances but I believe in what Jack Brisco once said about how if you have the talent it will rise eventually.

 

Vader was a very good worker and taking into account his Japan stuff an all time great. But just in the US, no he wasn't, sorry.

 

I also feel like funkdoc makes a great point. WCW had some real highs in the early part of the year and is clearly a more entertaining promotion at times. But it did not sustain itself well at all. WWE seemed to turn a corner from a really boring post Mania at Summerslam and had a good Fall season.

You can say Wendy's is better than McDonald's when it comes to burgers and food, just like you can say WCW in 1992 was better than WWF in 1992 when it comes to wrestling. Promotion, advertising, previously built up consumer bases, those are important if you're looking at a business perspective. Business and product discussions are not one in the same. The discussion of WWF vs. WCW can involve business numbers, but if you do you're changing the conversation.

[thebrainfollower]

Right but the thread was just "WWF vs. WCW in 92" so it doesn't seem unreasonable to look at more than in ring match quality. If the thread had been "which promotion had better in ring quality in 92" then the answer is clearly WCW. But it's not that simple to me.

[shoe]

WCW as a company is known for incredible 1/2 years in the 90's. Ist 1/2 of 1990, 1st 1/2 of 92, 1st 1/2 of 94, last 1/2 of 96.

[thebrainfollower]

So WCW is the Star Trek of wrestling companies?

[shoe]

So WCW is the Star Trek of wrestling companies?

Well the 1st 1/2 of 91 is solid and 93 is pretty up and down for most of the year.

[thebrainfollower]

So it doesn't quite work but almost

 

Original Series = 1990 - good for the first half, gets worse as it keeps going and they lose faith

 

1991 - equals Star Trek 1 - Nice seeing old faces at the beginning but then nothing really happens

 

1992 - equals Khan - great action, everyone loves it but ends on a downer

 

1993 - Up and down stuff but with a great nasty vicious heel running the show. This might be the only Christopher Lloyd = Vader reference in net history.

 

1994 = Voyage Home - Doesn't quite work here since that one ends well and WCW 1994 not so much

 

1995 = V - Total garbage all around nobody watches unless they have to

 

1996 = VI - beloved all around. Features a balding bad guy who gives strange quotes and refuses to accept the future as the main heel. Points the way towards the future as well.

 

Pretty sure if you keep going then Voyager = Russo.

[flyonthewall2983]

It matters because I do believe to an extent that a great worker should be able to generate fan interest and get people to come to see his matches. Vader could not do that in the US, in either WWF or WCW. Yeah there's plenty of extenuating circumstances but I believe in what Jack Brisco once said about how if you have the talent it will rise eventually.

 

Vader was a very good worker and taking into account his Japan stuff an all time great. But just in the US, no he wasn't, sorry.

 

The extenuating circumstances are paramount in this case, though. He was top dog in WCW, at a time when wrestling had a huge black-eye and when it was considered by people not in the wrestling bubble to be bush-league and way too regional. That stigma would really not go away until the NWO, by which time he was in the WWF.

 

He did a lot better up north than people give him credit for. The ground was shifting and they were about to happen upon two of the biggest stars that the company has ever produced. But he still managed to stay somewhat in the upper card until the fall '97, with his gimmick intact. Maybe it was because I was more of a WCW guy at the time, but I knew WWF bringing him in felt like a mis-match but he made the most of it. That run could have failed a lot worse than it did.

[Matt D]

Vader attributes the poor selling of Summerslam 96 to them having Shawn beat him clean around the country at house shows beforehand.

[PeteF3]

He did jobs to the Warrior, too. Pretty dumb (and incidentally doesn't *that* match sound like a total train wreck).

[thebrainfollower]

Yeah he was not booked as a dominant monster at all. Hell Gorilla nearly got the better of him. His first feud was with Yokozuna, which sort of a returning Giant Gonzalez is pretty much the worst opponent for him. He got beat around the horn by Warrior, Shawn and Taker consistently. And the later two didn't want to work with him. Ahmed got the better of him before Owen's help in the KOTR qualifier and he wasn't smart enough to pin Jake. Shawn Michaels whining is hardly news but Taker too complained about how stiff Vader worked and forced a change. And they were on the road a hell out of a lot more than WCW and wrestling is a work, so I agree with Taker wholeheartedly there.

 

Yeah he was upper midcard after Summerslam through most of 97 but that's about it. Really at the end of the day, Ron Simmons ended up having a much better WWF career than he did. His weight was out of control as well then and injuries caught up with him.

 

But at the end of the day Vader didn't turn things around at all in WCW. He took a ship that was sinking and sunk it worse. 93 was just an awful year for attendance, WCW 1993 was as bad as it got for a major promotion in this era.

 

Yoko was top dog in WWF and he actually brought up WWF ticket sales in his run. For whatever reasons he was a monster heel people were willing to pay to see during a down time. Vader was definitely not.

[funkdoc]

thebrainfollower, i don't entirely agree with your position either though i definitely understand it

 

if you treat wrestling as entertainment, as basically everyone on this board seems to, then why can't we have work that's brilliant even if it flops financially? i think wrestling fans too often take promoters & wrestlers at their word on what constitutes a good worker, the purpose of pro wrestling, etc...and that's a lot of what fuels this. people are stuck at "the whole point of wrestling is to draw money" because that's what the insiders say; aside from this board, wrestling fandom has yet to experience its Death Of The Author moment where people say "screw the insiders, there's more shit that matters". that's one of the main things i love about this place, actually!

 

"not drawing" really means "couldn't interest a particular audience at a particular point in time", and i don't think that in itself should be a negative. it can be a useful *indicator* of other issues at times, mainly if something didn't draw during a hot period for business (see the mr. perfect example from before), but i think it's drastically overused as a metric when dealing with overall down periods. this is why i think there is value in performances that remain entertaining & compelling 20 years after the fact, even if they didn't draw a dime at the time!

 

and this could be a thread in itself, but i think the impact of specific top stars on drawing power is huuuuuuuugely overrated. it reflects the same thought process as the whole Great Man conception of history, which has countless holes if you examine it in depth. you do need a main-eventer who can reach a certain baseline in various traits (look, personality, etc.), but i think wider cultural trends and the presentation of the overall product are bigger factors in a promotion's mainstream success. basically i don't think sting & vader, or even ron simmons, were the problem for WCW - the problem was a culture hostile to pro wrestling and (key difference from the WWF) a show with a very low-rent/"southern" feel to it. during a time when power rangers & mortal kombat ruled the world, most kids wouldn't be caught dead watching "that redneck shit" or the 80s cartoon style of the WWF.

 

man, i really *should* make a separate thread for that topic...

[Loss]

I'm with funkdoc. Surely, if the only goal behind promoting pro wrestling was to make money, promoters could have just forgone the wrestling thing altogether and invested in the stock market instead.

[thebrainfollower]

I'd love to have watched a reality program in the late 70's/early 80's featuring Ole Anderson, Fritz von Erich, Verne Gagne, etc trying to make it in the stock market.

 

I don't think wrestling is all about drawing money but neither do I see it as art. It's entertainment and comes somewhere in between. As a performance artist (actor) myself I struggle with this. A couple of reviewers recently saw a play I did in a small town in central MA (for which I had wasted a bunch of time listening to Parv's voice to master a subtle Welsh accent, director switched the role to Irish). By coincidence Matthew Broderick played the role on Broadway and these reviewers, being huge fans of this play, saw it. Both came to me on separate days in the dressing room after and told me I blew him away and gave the best interpretation of the role they'd ever seen. But ultimately probably 500 people saw it. So does that make me, even in this one role, a better performer than him? I struggle with that.

 

Understand in my group of fan friends, I'm the LEAST WWF friendly person of us and the biggest Vader fan. I just think to be one of the all time greats you have to have drawn money. You guys used that very argument to tear apart Sting as a hall of famer and I truly think your Vader love blinds you to the double standard you've created. When it's someone loved, a different set of rules apply.

 

Flair before Vader drew better. Ron Simmons drew a little better. Yokozuna drew better. Bret Hart drew better. So even in a downtime, other than the Hogan feud and of course Japan Vader didn't draw. That to me makes him "not an all time great" like say Flair, Lawler, Funk, Dusty, Hogan, Austin, Rock. I'd put him a notch or two below Bret for work down for US promotions overall but he also had a shorter time on top in the US by far.

[DMJ]

I agree wholeheartedly with what funkdoc said about overall presentation/production values being way more of a factor in WCW's drawing power compared to the WWE's than who was actually on top of either company.

 

This also helps explains why, in 95'/96', WCW starts closing the gap. Once their production values, especially late 96', start to catch up with WWE's thanks to Turner finally trying to topple McMahon, and the slicker, industrial-themed Nitro set takes shape as compared to the pyro-unfriendly and (by then) dated look of the RAW set in 96' (the big 3-letter entrance way is the one I'm thinking of), WCW starts winning the Monday Night Wars and being seen as an equal to WWE. Prior to that, they were the cheaper 'rasslin' show that ran smaller arenas and taped shows on a tiny studio lot.

[thebrainfollower]

Agree wholeheartedly. There's a ton of minor botches that WCW's idiot camera crew can't cover up for and WWF does all the time. That was a huge difference in how I saw the product and thought WWF wrestlers were better. I really think the camera crew is one of the biggest differences between the two you rarely hear about.

[Ricky Jackson]

I would love to hear you "do Parv", because even the man of a thousand voices hasn't been able to master that one.

[Dylan Waco]

I'm at work, but someone start a separate thread about this "does drawing matter" and/or "is drawing overrated as a metric" argument. I think it is a very interesting argument, but I think it pulls this thread too far away from the original intent. There are things I really want to respond to that have already been mentioned, but I don't want to kill this threads purpose.

[thebrainfollower]

Back to the topic - who had better PPV's in 92? WCW had probably the greatest PPV of the decade but it also had GAB 92, Halloween Havoc 92 (heaven help them) and Starrcade 92.

 

I feel like every WWF PPV that year was great except Survivor Series which was still the best Series in 4 years.

 

So to me this is a tossup. I'd need to assign scores out of 10 and divide by the number of PPVs. Anyone wanna try that?

[Johnny Sorrow]

So it doesn't quite work but almost

 

Original Series = 1990 - good for the first half, gets worse as it keeps going and they lose faith

 

1991 - equals Star Trek 1 - Nice seeing old faces at the beginning but then nothing really happens

 

1992 - equals Khan - great action, everyone loves it but ends on a downer

 

1993 - Up and down stuff but with a great nasty vicious heel running the show. This might be the only Christopher Lloyd = Vader reference in net history.

 

1994 = Voyage Home - Doesn't quite work here since that one ends well and WCW 1994 not so much

 

1995 = V - Total garbage all around nobody watches unless they have to

 

1996 = VI - beloved all around. Features a balding bad guy who gives strange quotes and refuses to accept the future as the main heel. Points the way towards the future as well.

 

Pretty sure if you keep going then Voyager = Russo.

How dare you insult Voyager like that.

[funkdoc]

yeah, sorry for the derail everyone and thanks to Loss for making that new thread!

 

as far as PPVs go...WWF had a much higher batting average in 92. survivor series was the only downer in my view, and even that at least had some nice moments (big pop for the savage-flair tag, the main event being a preview of the future). the rumble match is still my #1, and WM8 is a top 10 mania for me (though i haven't seen a lot of the post-attitude era ones). 92 WWF was what got me into wrestling, so this could be a good bit of nostalgia talking even though i've seen all this stuff not too long ago.

 

no WWF show that year touches superbrawl II...but on the other end, no WWF show that year touches GAB92. seriously, i have to dock WCW a bunch of points for that whole doc/gordy run in 92 - i genuinely hate it almost as much as 2014 RVD. aimless matwork being shilled as "greatness" is at least as obnoxious to me as spot monkeys who haven't learned any new spots in 15 years.

 

the PPVs mirror the promotions overall for this year, i think. to use bill james's terminology, WCW wins on "peak value" while WWF wins on "career value".

[BigBadMick]

I would love to hear you "do Parv", because even the man of a thousand voices hasn't been able to master that one.

Has Parv a subtle Welsh accent? Apart from an odd pronouncation of 'heard', he's London/south of England all the way with me

[BigBadMick]

yeah, sorry for the derail everyone and thanks to Loss for making that new thread!

 

as far as PPVs go...WWF had a much higher batting average in 92. survivor series was the only downer in my view, and even that at least had some nice moments (big pop for the savage-flair tag, the main event being a preview of the future). the rumble match is still my #1, and WM8 is a top 10 mania for me (though i haven't seen a lot of the post-attitude era ones). 92 WWF was what got me into wrestling, so this could be a good bit of nostalgia talking even though i've seen all this stuff not too long ago.

 

no WWF show that year touches superbrawl II...but on the other end, no WWF show that year touches GAB92. seriously, i have to dock WCW a bunch of points for that whole doc/gordy run in 92 - i genuinely hate it almost as much as 2014 RVD. aimless matwork being shilled as "greatness" is at least as obnoxious to me as spot monkeys who haven't learned any new spots in 15 years.

 

the PPVs mirror the promotions overall for this year, i think. to use bill james's terminology, WCW wins on "peak value" while WWF wins on "career value".

Watched some WWF and WCW 92 last year. Rumble 92 - Watching it now, it's pretty slow and dull in large parts imo. Don't know if I've seen a massively pimped, beloved match fall further in my estimations. The IC matches at Wrestlemania and SummerSlam held up very well though, as did Savage-Flair at 'Mania.

My opinion of WCW PPV output remained unchanged. SuperBrawl, WrestleWar and Beach Blast all strong shows (Steiners-Doc Gordy was still solid, not great imo). Things get dodgy with GAB and Havoc (although Pillman-Steamboat and the tag title match on Havoc are enjoyable), and as stated earlier, I enjoyed parts of Starrcade - even the battlebowl matches and battle royal weren't terrible.

 

Anyway. that's my two cents.

[BigBadMick]

Oh, forgot that I watched the Flair-RazorvSavage-Perfect and World title match at Survivors too. The tag match was ok, nothing earth shattering. Pleasantly surprised by Hart-HBK. I'd remembered it as technically sound but long and a little dull. Found it much more exciting and fast paced this time round.

 

For what it's worth, I'd guess that prior to last year I hadn't watched any of these since the mid-90s.

[ButchReedMark]

 

I would love to hear you "do Parv", because even the man of a thousand voices hasn't been able to master that one.

 

Has Parv a subtle Welsh accent? Apart from an odd pronouncation of 'heard', he's London/south of England all the way with me

Ha, I was gonna say that! I don't hear no Welsh in Parv, and I know my Welsh accents.

[Bigelow34]

Great discussion and topic. 1992 WWF was weird too because everything between Mania and SummerSlam felt pretty stale due to the lack of "live" or first run TV. SNME was pretty much gone and PTW was basically a full on studio show for the most part, so outside of SuperStars, there really wasn't much to hang on or get excited for until SummerSlam came around.

 

By 1993, WWF had a (mostly) live weekly show and a brand new PPV to bust up that summer doldrums that was starting to really drag the summer out with SNME gone. So many feuds would play out on TV and die on the house show circuit. All of a sudden SummerSlam rolled around and the whole card barely touched anything that had happened all summer. I was a mega WWF fan in 1992 and that summer even bored me.