National TV Exposure: Good or Bad for Wrestling

[dawho5]

Watching the Flair/Davey match from England really made me think about a few things:

1. How national TV exposure completely changed the requirements of wrestlers.  Also, how long did it take the wrestling industry to figure this out?

2. Looking at AJPW, it's hard not to see their need to continually evolve.  Their main market is Tokyo, competing with NJPW and these fans would have seen all the major matches.  So you constantly need new blood or new ways the old blood operates to keep the fans coming.  As an example:

- Flair worked the NWA touring champ match with Davey for the British crowd and they ate it up.  How many times would those same people need to see that match or the variations on it before they decided to put their entertainment dollar elsewhere?

So given that AJPW (which I prefer, but they were not often the popular choice over NJPW) wanted to capitalize on these 5 talented guys, they had to continually evolve their in-ring style and have them grow to keep fans interested.

3. Another question it asks is about Kawada.  Again, I love watching him, always have.  But one way of looking at his career is that he didn't care for the idea of ever expansive moves becoming the new en vogue finisher.  Where Misawa, Kobashi, Akiyama and Taue all added considerably to their arsenal, Kawada stayed pretty much the same with the gamengiri, powerbomb, backdrop and stretch plum.  He did start using a brainbuster, yes. 

But what did he do when given the freedom to be the main guy?  He seemed to try to do more with a more pared down style and substitute violence for the need to come up with a flashy new finisher because the old one was wearing out.  He worked with wrestlers of different styles and tried to adapt to what they did instead of pushing them into better matches.  Or was lazy and with one foot out the door, depends how you want to look at it.  I start to wonder if that isn't the main reason Kobashi was pushed ahead of Kawada in the late 90s.  Kawada had shown an unwillingness to adapt to the needs (maybe he didn't see them, I just saw it today myself) of keeping up with the competition.

I need to watch more modern wrestling to get a better idea of how it affects wrestlers today, but my suspicion is that modern puroresu faces a very similar issue and every few years (or less) you see guys adding something to the arsenal and changing things up to keep crowds on their toes.  Sure, they use the old favorites, but that's not enough to stay on top, even for a company like NJPW.

WWE is different.  It all flows from Vince and I'm not sure he feels the need to care about any of this just yet.  And I doubt he has to.  I imagine Triple H, for all the disparaging of him that goes on, is unaware of this and he has to have some plans in place.

[Laz]

1. National exposure, and later global exposure, has been better than not for the business. In terms of product presentation, it forced the hands of lazier promoters and bookers to evolve in order to compete and stay relevant. This may have ended the territories as they were known, but it also gave fans a wider breadth of products to consume and talent a greater marketplace to sell themselves to. When it comes to the quality of ringwork as a whole? It's proven that flavors may be stronger in one geographic area than another, but that styles need not be confined to regions.

2. New blood, new faces, new takes on the subject. That is how all art and forms of entertainment evolve, and evolution is required. What worked 20 years ago wouldn't necessarily work now. The downside to national (and, again, global) exposure is the risk of homogenization, which occurs not due to how many eyes/ears are tuning in but, rather, from how many different sights/sounds are on display. The "three ring circus" ideal has held truest, in that the more variety offered under one tent the more likely you are to attract a wider audience. I can't speak too much on how the AJPW model did/did not work, long or short term, but I can point out that relying on one handful of talents ultimately hurt the company economically (with the exodus and formation of NOAH). With hindsight being 20/20, if Baba had sent some of his Pillars away on excursion and had allowed younger talents to grow and flourish, perhaps the exodus wouldn't have hurt the company as hard, but that's purely speculation on my own (under informed) part.

3. Kawada represents the double-edged sword of planting one's heels instead of evolving. On the one hand, he and Kobashi are my favorites of that era. Kawada's resistance to change coming from his own mastery of the style and understanding of his role is a big reason to love him, and Kobashi's emotional resonance made up for whatever shortcomings he had in the ring compared to his peers. On the other hand, Kawada's refusal to evolve did not help as the tastes of the audience changed, nor did Kobashi's willingness to sacrifice his well-being allow him a lengthier career (to say nothing of Misawa, RIP). National exposure or not, the attitude and approach are what matters, and we see it today in the west with talents like Chris Jericho, always looking for ways to stay fresh and relevant (and successfully reinventing himself every few years), and Randy Orton, who refuses to do anything but what's expected and has seen his star fade more each year.

 

Overall, I can't see an argument against national exposure, but I also don't think that questions 2 and 3 are necessarily related to it, at least in an "A to B to C" sense. Times change, and those that keep up while holding true to themselves stay relevant while those who ignore cultural evolutions, for better or worse, get left behind.

[Slasher]

9 minutes ago, Laz said:

1. National exposure, and later global exposure, has been better than not for the business. In terms of product presentation, it forced the hands of lazier promoters and bookers to evolve in order to compete and stay relevant. This may have ended the territories as they were known, but it also gave fans a wider breadth of products to consume and talent a greater marketplace to sell themselves to. When it comes to the quality of ringwork as a whole? It's proven that flavors may be stronger in one geographic area than another, but that styles need not be confined to regions.

2. New blood, new faces, new takes on the subject. That is how all art and forms of entertainment evolve, and evolution is required. What worked 20 years ago wouldn't necessarily work now. The downside to national (and, again, global) exposure is the risk of homogenization, which occurs not due to how many eyes/ears are tuning in but, rather, from how many different sights/sounds are on display. The "three ring circus" ideal has held truest, in that the more variety offered under one tent the more likely you are to attract a wider audience. I can't speak too much on how the AJPW model did/did not work, long or short term, but I can point out that relying on one handful of talents ultimately hurt the company economically (with the exodus and formation of NOAH). With hindsight being 20/20, if Baba had sent some of his Pillars away on excursion and had allowed younger talents to grow and flourish, perhaps the exodus wouldn't have hurt the company as hard, but that's purely speculation on my own (under informed) part.

3. Kawada represents the double-edged sword of planting one's heels instead of evolving. On the one hand, he and Kobashi are my favorites of that era. Kawada's resistance to change coming from his own mastery of the style and understanding of his role is a big reason to love him, and Kobashi's emotional resonance made up for whatever shortcomings he had in the ring compared to his peers. On the other hand, Kawada's refusal to evolve did not help as the tastes of the audience changed, nor did Kobashi's willingness to sacrifice his well-being allow him a lengthier career (to say nothing of Misawa, RIP). National exposure or not, the attitude and approach are what matters, and we see it today in the west with talents like Chris Jericho, always looking for ways to stay fresh and relevant (and successfully reinventing himself every few years), and Randy Orton, who refuses to do anything but what's expected and has seen his star fade more each year.

 

Overall, I can't see an argument against national exposure, but I also don't think that questions 2 and 3 are necessarily related to it, at least in an "A to B to C" sense. Times change, and those that keep up while holding true to themselves stay relevant while those who ignore cultural evolutions, for better or worse, get left behind.

Well said.

[dawho5]

This last return to watching wrestling I am noticing things I was probably too set in my ways to notice before.  I give a lot of matches a shot that I might not have before due to being more open to the changes that took place since (big surprise here) the early to mid 90s.  I still retain the idea that national exposure breeds a certain kind of homogenization (I like your reasoning on why) and I tend towards liking wrestling that is less rather than more homogenized.

2 and 3 were more leaps that helped me reason out (using the same phenomenon under different circumstances) something that had long irritated me about AJPW.

The 1990s AJPW model was never going to work long term, just like the territories.  The worst part is Baba had a great talent (Takayama) sitting on his midcard that he had no interest in.  Just goes to show that you can be a complete and total genius in some ways and clueless in others.

My feeling on Kawada is that he was the guy always pushing for working with other companies to freshen things up.  I know it got him in trouble when Baba was around and he was really active, as well as super adaptable in style, after everyone left and he started doing cross-promotional matches.

Personally, Kawada has always been my favorite of the 4 Pillars.  This last return to watching wrestling I am noticing things I was probably too set in my ways to notice before.

[Laz]

To clarify my homogenization point, the reason only certain sights/sounds go on display is because promoters/bookers find a new talent/style that gets over big, undercard talents and rookies see that's what's being booked and try to match it, and fans grow accustomed to that and expect it. Today it's a dozen false finishes and flips, yesterday it was table spots, in the mid 90s mainstream US we had chinlocks galore before the inevitable babyface comeback where they block a back body drop, etc. You need young, hungry talent to step up and change things, and promoters who are willing to take risks. 

[dawho5]

I was actually thinking of it in a way that Kevin Sullivan described it when talking about mid-90s WCW.  He didn't understand why people thought Benoit/Eddie/Malenko/etc. were thinking they should be the main guys.  He understood why, but he talked about it in the sense that the whole thing was a circus and you had all these different styles of attractions for different people.  The cruiserweights brought in some, as did some of the other non-mainstream types that populated the midcard.  But you got a lot more people watching due to the Hogans and Flairs of the world because they knew those guys and would tune in despite the tendency towards less going on in those later matches on the show. 

I remember watching and wondering why Hogan and the NWO got all the love they did (this was towards the end of that run) and the more exciting in-ring guys who had more action in the matches weren't pushed more.  I get it now and have for a whole, but I wonder if maybe towards 99-2000 they might not have gotten some benefit from putting some more active guys in the main event scene.  I look back at that and wonder if maybe WCW management wasn't a little behind the curve in what would have sold to TV audiences at the time.  Part of the reason ECW got so big was they had the more athletic guys in main event spots.  They had a decent run on TNN before their talent was gutted.

[Laz]

Even further damning evidence to that effect, those workrate guys went to the WWF and some flirted regularly with the main event, which only furthered the divide in audience size. The issue was never "these guys do too much" or "these guys are too small," it was always "how can we use them best." This is why I will always defend HHH in 2000, as he showed so much ass that it was believable for guys like Jericho and Benoit to possibly dethrone him (and, eventually, they did). 

That's branching off into another topic, about cycling main stars in/out versus gearing for a larger audience, but maybe not as they tend to go hand in hand. Ensemble casts usually do better long-term than one trick ponies.

[dawho5]

Yeah, I would agree.  Adding them in did help the WWE in the short term and you can always cycle them in and out as you mention. 

The highlight of what you said for me is "how best to use them."  Every wrestler has strengths (and weaknesses) that can be used to make compelling characters on-screen.  It is just a matter of finding where they fit in the overall tapestry, not trying to plug them all into one singular system.

[Slasher]

That is true for any form of entertainment. The more talents you showcase, the wider your fanbase will be, because more people would be able to latch on to their favorites and follow their stories. An one man show would be nearly impossible to get a good sized following unless that one person is an once in a lifetime talent. And even then, you still need more than that. Look at Hogan and Austin. They were the undisputed top dogs of their time, but you still had a lot going on elsewhere on the cards like Macho Man, Ultimate Warrior, the tag teams, etc for Hogan and DX, Foley, The Rock etc for Austin.