Ageism in pro wrestling

[JerryvonKramer]

When the people chanted "We Want Flair" in 1990, was that one because of Gabe, Heyman & Russo too ?

I think you mean in 91. I'm not sure if that's remotely comparable. Specific circumstances. Baltimore was probably second only to Philly for snarky crowds, maybe Chicago third?

 

And look at the booking: they didn't pander to it, they didn't play to it, and fans weren't chanting We Want Flair during the Dangerous Alliance angle in late 91 or in 92. There were obvious dick elements in the WCW hardcore crowd. They booed The Fantastics and the Rock n Roll Express. They booed Johnny Ace and Shane Douglas. They booed Marcus Alexander Bagwell, and obviously shit all over Erik Watts. The booking never let them get a foothold or take over the product.

[El-P]

Yes. But still. It was a crowd not happy but a business decision who shat on an entire show and did a "smart" chant akin to people chanting CM Punk in WWE just after he left.

[overbooked]

 

What is primarily to blame for All That Is Wrong About Pro Wrestling Today - bookers or the wider cultural shift?

I'm going to try to keep this short so it can't be misunderstood:

 

- I blame the bookers entirely because they failed to control the crowds and pandered to their worst instincts.

 

 

I'm not sure I buy this. However, first a disclaimer - I agree there has been some terrible booking over the years.

 

However, terrible booking is not something that appeared in 1995. It has always been there.

 

And I'm not convinced any booker can completely control a crowd, let alone control a crowd in a way that completely over-rides any wider cultural shift taking place, such as a move towards irony and self-referential post- meta- stuff pervading the mainstream.

 

Go and watch virtually any classic 1980s angle. Now look at the crowd. At least someone in there will be goofing off. Now matter what drama preceeded it, watch as the camera pans the audience prior to a Memphis ad break. Someone in there will be pulling faces, or laughing, or generally mucking about. Now, the booking didn't pander to that, but it didn't stop that behaviour either.

 

Second disclaimer - I don't think that wrestling moving away from playing it straight is A Good Thing. It is hugely problematic on all manner of levels.

 

However, I don't see how any faux-sincere entertainment form survives from the 1990s onwards by playing things straight. Magic shows didn't. Even consciously fictional entertainments adapted. Wrestling was already looking dated anyway. It had to change, even if that change wasn't desirable from a critical perspective. Plenty of promotions played it straight in the 80s and early 90s and still went out of business.

 

So, while booking is a factor, it seems strange to ignore wider cultural factors. It also seems strange to ignore the socio-economic stuff too. Audiences were changing. The working classes were changing. Methods of consumption were changing, as was what was being consumed too. The general public is very different in, say 1998, to what it was in 1975. It is different again now.

 

I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all approach that works for wrestling. More that there was a particular combination of factors around cultural tastes and socio-economic trends alongside particular trends in booking and working that created a perfect storm from, I dunno, 1978 to 1988 that created a form of wrestling that many of us enjoy aesthetically. To blame booking for its decline is to ignore all the things that made it happen and make it work in the first place.

[JerryvonKramer]

Overbooked, just a quick question, how do you account for the enormous success of things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones in this "self-referential post- meta-" world?

 

I think the idea that kids these days are just far too sophisticated to get fully invested and immersed in anything is completely overblown. I mean, it helps that Game of Thrones is "fantastically booked", but people buy into that because it believes in its own world. It has a vision and pursues it with conviction, something wrestling has failed to do for many years.

 

I believe that in a world where Game of Thrones can get over, wrestling served totally straight can also get over.

 

(I'm also a little disconcerted that people seem to think irony was invented in the 90s.)

[El-P]

However, I don't see how any faux-sincere entertainment form survives from the 1990s onwards by playing things straight. Magic shows didn't. Even consciously fictional entertainments adapted. Wrestling was already looking dated anyway. It had to change, even if that change wasn't desirable from a critical perspective. Plenty of promotions played it straight in the 80s and early 90s and still went out of business.

 

So, while booking is a factor, it seems strange to ignore wider cultural factors. It also seems strange to ignore the socio-economic stuff too. Audiences were changing. The working classes were changing. Methods of consumption were changing, as was what was being consumed too. The general public is very different in, say 1998, to what it was in 1975. It is different again now.

 

This.

 

Today, what I want from pro-wrestling is basically Lucha Underground. This is the most fun I had watching current pro-wrestling since I was following ARSION (through buying tapes) in the late 90's/early 00's.

[El-P]

(Game of Thrones sucks)

[El-P]

Overbooked, just a quick question, how do you account for the enormous success of things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones in this "self-referential post- meta-" world?

 

This has nothing to do with pro-westling. TV series/cinema analogy just don't work.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

Overbooked, just a quick question, how do you account for the enormous success of things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones in this "self-referential post- meta-" world?

This has nothing to do with pro-westling. TV series/cinema analogy just don't work.

 

You can't have it both ways. You can't say "this is something that comes out of a change in culture", and then say when someone points back to that culture say "oh that has nothing to do with wrestling, that analogy doesn't work".

[JerryvonKramer]

I mean, if we want to get all funkdoc, you could make a real argument that the trend over the past 10 years or so in popular culture has been towards the creation of fully immersive virtual worlds. Hence, RPG games that take 800+ hours to complete. Film franchises all set in the same universe. Box sets that take a full week to watch in real time.

 

So rather than irony and "meta meta", you could make a real case that the trend is towards TOTAL INVESTMENT.

 

WWE has a "universe", but can anyone really argue that they've booked towards total investment? Which promotions have? For that you need a certain strength of vision and conviction, and I'm not sure I see that.

[El-P]

Cinema & TV series are not pro-wrestling. They don't work the same. So, culture shift on a whole don't affect something as major and diverse as cinema and something as low-brow and minor and specific as pro-wrestling the same way.

[El-P]

WWE has a "universe", but can anyone really argue that they've booked towards total investment?

 

That's exactly what they are doing with the Network. WWE fans are submerged with hours of programming.

[El-P]

 

It's kind of a shame that when Bryan and co were taking their cues from Misawa and co, the crowds who worshipped them didn't also take their cues from the AJPW crowds who worshipped the pillars.

 

That's a pretty interesting point. For the influence of 90's All Japan on 21st century US wrestling, the crowds could not have been more different.

 

A Tokyo salaryman in 1994 and a US student from Orlando in 2016 are indeed two very different people. There's no reason why they would react the same way. The indy workers of the 00's aped AJ (often for a lot of wrong reasons) as the indy crowds evolved from the ECW mold. They were at the same place at the same time, maybe having watched the same matches, but ones were workers, others were just fans. As the workers didn't really work like Misawa & Co, they also didn't work in front of the same kind of audience Misawa & Co did (at all, on every degree). As the indy mentality and tropes slowly sneaked their ways into the mainstream, there's no reason why a big WWE crowd would act like an All Japan crowd from the 90's when they see Nakamura for instance, or when Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn are having their "indiffied" matches. There's absolutely no link between the two kind of crowds.

[overbooked]

Overbooked, just a quick question, how do you account for the enormous success of things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones in this "self-referential post- meta-" world?

 

I think the idea that kids these days are just far too sophisticated to get fully invested and immersed in anything is completely overblown. I mean, it helps that Game of Thrones is "fantastically booked", but people buy into that because it believes in its own world. It has a vision and pursues it with conviction, something wrestling has failed to do for many years.

 

I believe that in a world where Game of Thrones can get over, wrestling served totally straight can also get over.

 

(I'm also a little disconcerted that people seem to think irony was invented in the 90s.)

 

I don't think irony was invented in the 90s. However, I do think that from the mid to late 80s onwards irony became far more mainstream and accessible, and there was also a move to irony for irony's sake, rather than as a counter-cultural tool.

 

I think GoT and Breaking Bad are perhaps moves away from that - there was the New Sincerity as a reaction against irony overload, and as you say, there is a growing trend for fully immersive, consistent worlds. We're not in a permanent state of Irony.

 

However, wrestling made its shift in that ironic era/phase, and has struggled to move past it, to what works in the current culture, and what would work for pro wrestling. As I said before, everything is pro wrestling, except pro wrestling. But wrestling has always been way behind the times.

[JerryvonKramer]

I think GoT and Breaking Bad are perhaps moves away from that - there was the New Sincerity as a reaction against irony overload, and as you say, there is a growing trend for fully immersive, consistent worlds. We're not in a permanent state of Irony.

This is really interesting to me. I'm 33, and definitely a product of the 90s. I mostly teach 18-21 year olds and, yes, they are FAR FAR more sincere and earnest than I am. Now, partly, that is because 18-21 years olds, just finding their feet in the world and figuring out their basic stances, are generally are more earnest and serious than older people. But it's also quite interesting.

 

As well as a New Sincerity, I also think there's a New Moralism, which has quite a hardline stance on matters of political correctness especially as regards gender, race and sexuality -- here, there is little scope for irony or even humour.

 

I have often thought to myself that it is my generation -- 30-somethings now -- who lived in the *most* post-ironic, post-modern moment. We are primed for it -- more cine-literature and pop-literate than both our parents' generations and indeed the internet kids (whose frames from reference are actually narrower than they should be).

 

I find this stuff pretty fascinating.

 

-----

 

On wrestling, you're right that it is always behind the times, but I still see its systematic problems largely as the result of booking direction rather than culture forcing it one way or the other.

 

Pretend for a second that since he had the monopoly, Vince had stuck to his old-school booking guns a whole lot more. That rather than being a workrate promotion, ROH from the get-go had been a Cornette-back-to-traditional-values promotion. That all the bookers had followed the Bill Watts line of rejecting the smart culture rather than embracing and trying to appeal to it. And that ECW rather than being romanticised was essentially buried. Don't you think the wrestling landscape would be a bit different?

 

Is there any particular reason why a generation of "more ironic" people should necessarily lead to bookers abandoning fundamanetal principles?

 

The problem, I think, is that too many of them weren't proper wrestling people. They were guys like Russo. One huge difference, also, between the old territories, and the indies is that they tend to be run by guys whose wrestling backgrounds didn't go deep. We're talking about the difference between Eddie Graham and Gabe, or even the difference between The Sheik and Dixie Carter.

 

Why did this happen?

 

1. WCW execs, Biscoff, the corporitasation of wrestling in general, the idea of "writers" which led to less "true" wrestling guys as bookers in general.

2. Death of the territories in general. We went from literally Verne Gagne and Bill Watts to fringe figures like Dennis Coralluzzo and Herb Abrams, the huge gulf between those two types of men partly explains how the whole trajectory started.

 

Agree? Disagree?

[GOTNW]

 

I've said modern NJPW seems computer game-y and oddly sterile.

You cherry picked three matches feauturing Okada and Tanahashi so I'm not gonna disagree with that much. There are plenty of matches worked differently with more grit and violence. My point remains-even if the working style doesn't suit you (which is fine as a criticism of its own) it's a different issue from the setting in which it takes place, which isn't post-modern at all.

 

I haven't seeked out any modern wrestling

the vast majority of stuff I've watched has been pimped stuff for GWE purposes. And some PPV's of WWE and NXT

 

 

I need the total package, and how many hours of my life do you want me to waste looking for it in 2016 when I've got God knows how many DVDs here of stuff from when it was presented in a way that I actually enjoy?

Well no one forced you to spend hours watching indy wrestling and polluted WWE shows in the first place. Just because you're disillusioned with it doesn't mean we should pretend all modern wrestling has shit self conscious crowds.

[overbooked]

 

On wrestling, you're right that it is always behind the times, but I still see its systematic problems largely as the result of booking direction rather than culture forcing it one way or the other.

 

Pretend for a second that since he had the monopoly, Vince had stuck to his old-school booking guns a whole lot more. That rather than being a workrate promotion, ROH from the get-go had been a Cornette-back-to-traditional-values promotion. That all the bookers had followed the Bill Watts line of rejecting the smart culture rather than embracing and trying to appeal to it. And that ECW rather than being romanticised was essentially buried. Don't you think the wrestling landscape would be a bit different?

 

Is there any particular reason why a generation of "more ironic" people should necessarily lead to bookers abandoning fundamanetal principles?

 

The problem, I think, is that too many of them weren't proper wrestling people. They were guys like Russo. One huge difference, also, between the old territories, and the indies is that they tend to be run by guys whose wrestling backgrounds didn't go deep. We're talking about the difference between Eddie Graham and Gabe, or even the difference between The Sheik and Dixie Carter.

 

Why did this happen?

 

1. WCW execs, Biscoff, the corporitasation of wrestling in general, the idea of "writers" which led to less "true" wrestling guys as bookers in general.

2. Death of the territories in general. We went from literally Verne Gagne and Bill Watts to a fringe figures like Dennis Coralluzzo and Herb Abrams, the huge gulf between those two types of men partly explains how the whole trajectory started.

 

Agree? Disagree?

 

 

If everything stays old-school, then of course the wrestling landscape would be different. Critically/artistically, it would almost certainly be more to my tastes. Economically, I'm not sure how much of it would be left. Plenty of old-school promotions went out of business. While financial mismanagement, oil crises or whatever else could be blamed, that model certainly wasn't bullet-proof.

 

Also, you could make a case that WWF made a huge leap financially for embracing the mood of the era with the Attitude stuff. It chimed with the mood of the time. Old-school wrestling, by its very definition, wasn't going to appeal to younger audiences, and you can't rely on the older crowd forever. Bookers that abandoned their principles could reach new people.

 

I think it is also worth noting that the WWF changed the whole business model for making money from wrestling. There was more to be made from TV deals, PPV, merchandise. And those revenue streams needed to appeal to an ironic, cynical, young crowd with disposable income and years of spending and brand loyalty ahead of them. Old-school booking works for a house show model, less when you make wrestling a "product" and a brand. And with people more likely to stay at home than go out for their entertainment anyway, that model became pretty limited.

 

I don't think outside bookers and execs helped matters. Certainly from a critical perspective. But I don't think "wrestling people" were doing a grand job either, as being dogmatic and within the wrestling bubble isn't the best way to do business, especially if you want to reach more people. While Vince may have killed the territories, so did changes in how television worked, and many failed to adapt. Take Vince/WWF out of the equation and I'm pretty sure many territories would have still gone out of business.

[ohtani's jacket]

Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad aren't filmed in front of a live audience and don't feature actors trying to elicit reactions from the crowd. The turning point in wrestling was when wrestlers began addressing the crowds directly in every single promo. That led to 25 minute opening monologues and filtered through to pretty much every angle that took place in the ring. Wrestlers battling over the mic and calling on the audience to participate along with the proliferation of call and response catchphrases were the roots of "this is awesome chants." If you wanna have a go at the crowds you should also have a go at Austin's "What" shit, Road Dog, The Rock, and so on. And at the TV writers and the writing committees. But remember that when it first began it as novel. The WWF in 1997 was fresh and exciting (at least at the main event level.) The problem with wrestling today is that they haven't done anything that fresh since. Wrestling today is not that different from 1997. Certainly not as different as wrestling in 1997 was from 1977.

[JerryvonKramer]

If you look at things like X-Factor though, the crowds there are hardly ironic, especially as the competition moves into the final stages. If anything, the level of a earnest sentimentality is gauche to a point that it should make the ironic-minded man vomit into his own mouth.

 

I just think the thesis that "we are ironic now" is vastly overstated.

 

I mean Simon Cowell is basically a heel, and seems to have no problem getting genuine heat.

[ohtani's jacket]

Also why are we pretending that wrestling men like Watts and Cornette didn't fail in the 90s? I don't believe there is a single booker from the old-school era that could have succeeded from the 90s onward.

[overbooked]

If you look at things like X-Factor though, the crowds there are hardly ironic, especially as the competition moves into the final stages. If anything, the level of a earnest sentimentality is gauche to a point that it should make the ironic-minded man vomit into his own mouth.

 

I just think the thesis that "we are ironic now" is vastly overstated.

 

I mean Simon Cowell is basically a heel, and seems to have no problem getting genuine heat.

 

I think the thesis is more "we were all ironic then", and that wrestling failed to move on or offer something new.

 

X-Factor is a funny one. Sometimes it feels like genuine heat, sometimes pantomime booing/cheering.

 

And X-Factor has its own band of smarks, analysing and critiquing it all - just check out the Sofabet site. Or any number of conversations among normal people querying the tragic backstories or wondering about the motives behind sending people home.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

If you look at things like X-Factor though, the crowds there are hardly ironic, especially as the competition moves into the final stages. If anything, the level of a earnest sentimentality is gauche to a point that it should make the ironic-minded man vomit into his own mouth.

 

I just think the thesis that "we are ironic now" is vastly overstated.

 

I mean Simon Cowell is basically a heel, and seems to have no problem getting genuine heat.

I think the thesis is more "we were all ironic then", and that wrestling failed to move on or offer something new.

 

X-Factor is a funny one. Sometimes it feels like genuine heat, sometimes pantomime booing/cheering.

 

And X-Factor has its own band of smarks, analysing and critiquing it all - just check out the Sofabet site. Or any number of conversations among normal people querying the tragic backstories or wondering about the motives behind sending people home.

 

Right, but Cowell and co never let those smarks take over the show. I mean X-Factor has always been able to get over despite it being obvious to virtually everyone that it is a work.

 

No one can seriously suggest that there's no cross over between the X-Factor audience and the WWE crowd.

[overbooked]

No, smarks haven't taken over X-Factor, and I wouldn't recommend it!

 

X-Factor has also lost viewers in recent years, so I'm not sure it is a great business model either.

 

I think my view is that I don't know how wrestling could exist in a form palatable to you (and I) in 2016, at least in the US and UK. Old-school booking didn't work as a financial model in the 90s, and would need a serious rethink and different presentation to work now. That ship has sailed, and now wrestling=WWE, and WWE are making a load of money so really don't need to change.

[El-P]

The turning point in wrestling was when wrestlers began addressing the crowds directly in every single promo. That led to 25 minute opening monologues and filtered through to pretty much every angle that took place in the ring. Wrestlers battling over the mic and calling on the audience to participate along with the proliferation of call and response catchphrases were the roots of "this is awesome chants." If you wanna have a go at the crowds you should also have a go at Austin's "What" shit, Road Dog, The Rock, and so on.

 

The sing-along catchphrases was one of the worst thing that happened to pro-wrestling. "What" being the absolute worst. It killed promos for years.

[soup23]

I don't like things like X-Factor, American Idol, Big Brother in front of a studio crowd as an example of contrast. Those are really sterile environments where much like the Orlando WCW studio crowd, participants are encouraged to "act" a certain way and generate certain reactions.

 

I think some promotions are able to create legit investment in the product in a full sense like you are talking about Parv. PROGRESS would be the prime example. PWG is another. Even Chikara still has a dedicated following with all of their scavenger hunts and nonsense. These are promotions on a small scale but if you treat WWE as an entity like television as a whole, they are comparable in size to the Mr. Robot and Breaking Bad of the world. WWE as a whole may not have a universe that suits your taste but there is certainly a META world they have created with the network where tons of individuals say this can occupy their total pro wrestling investment. You are on the PTBN live chats and should be able to see that first hand. While they are individuals that give NJ, Indys, etc some looks, the predominant amount are WWE exclusive.

 

Booking can go a long way to elicit the correct response when it is presented the right way. I will again use SCI as an example because that on the surface feels like Gunner MIller won the tournament just because he was the hometown guy and the chosen one. I certainly don't see him on the same caliber as a pro wrestler as Chris Hero, Anthony Henry, Jimmy Rave, Matt Riddle currently. Yet, between the excellent booking and him delivering a great performance that made him look tough to the crowd without pandering to it, him winning the tournament was met with a great reaction.

[Matt D]

Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, to some degree, go back to the medium changing. It's an age of binging. It's not about creating shows to be sold to syndication where you want any episode to be evergreen. It's about selling to things like Hulu and Netflix where people can watch whole seasons at once. People consume media differently in a digital age (And a DVD age before it for a lesser degree). Vince has always had a product which was capable of that, where there could be continuity from year to year and build to greater things. It's weekly. It's serialized, like superhero comics. It's basically one of the only three forms of fictional media in the world (that I know about) like that, with the third being Soap Opera. You can absolutely get that from watching old Memphis, which very often lived with its own history over time.

 

The story always goes, however, that Vince can't remember minutia from a few months ago so he figures the fans wouldn't either.