May 14, 2020 18:40:07 GMT RT said:

May 14, 2020 14:29:53 GMT KJ said:

I knew the Smackdown launch on FOX was fucked the minute they debuted a 30-year-old AC/DC song as their theme. Remember when Smackdown used Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People" when it debuted because the WWE actually had a pulse on pop culture?

Yeah ... those days have long passed.

Oh my GOD thank you. Half the Internet was jerking themselves off over the Smackdown opening when it premiered, saying that Vince shelling out AC/DC money meant they were taking the show seriously.

Nobody clued in to the fact that it was cringey and stupid and just proving yet again that this company is out of touch.

...

I haven’t read the whole thread yet but everyone touching on reality TV makes me happy. I’ve been saying forever that the WWE Network is going to go down as one of the biggest failures in wrestling history because of exactly this. They don’t utilize that tool AT ALL and it’s easily the most powerful at their disposal.

The fact they didn’t transition the company to a 24/7 reality TV show and use the Network (and social media) to bring back the curtain of kayfabe is ridiculous. They have dropped the ball so hard with that. It was right there and now they’re that meme of LeBron pointing at JR Smith. Only we’re LeBron and WWE is Smith.

Like if you want to do Ride Along, fine. But you better make sense of it. It better be people that should be in a car together, extending their characters and storylines.

Why isn’t there a SportsCentre type show every morning, recapping all the WWE news from the previous day? You give us WWE Backstage once a week? You have enough people on your roster to fill an hour every day, you know you do. You just don’t care.

I could almost argue against it, over saturation has driven down interest in the product. WWE has already proven they value quantity over quality.

The other question is, WWE particularly is struggling with an identity crisis - are we sports? And do we present a factual sports show. Or are we entertainment? And present the live chat shows in character and maintaining some degree of kayfabe? And how do you do either respectfully without making the business look like a joke.

The core attraction is RAW/SD and neither show has been good for a number of years, let alone expanding too large and trying to build an entertainment world around it.

And I’d argue, you’d only ever get a small percentage of the audience watching, similarly to Talking Smack and the preshows.

Right now, if you’re a wrestling promoter sitting on your ass during covid, you’ve wasted 2 months. This is the reset button. The relaunch.

May 18, 2020 0:21:03 GMT Strobe said:

I'm going to suggest that the voting pool here were actively engaged with the WWE more 5 years ago than they are now. How many people around here seem to particularly care about what's been going on the last couple of years? Becky Lynch as this big-time star doesn't matter to them or resonate as much as Sasha's big NXT matches with Bayley did at the time (although I think I preferred the Sasha/Becky match to both of them).

The homogeneous "feel" of wrestling, and other media, on the scale of years, maybe even a decade is becoming more and more apparent to me. Those Sasha/Bayley matches are coming up on being 5 years old. Mania I to Mania VI timescale. Mania VI to Mania XI timescale. If you stick it on right now, does it immediately feel distinct from just switching on a pre-Covid 2020 match? Maybe to a fan who has been an avid follower during all that time it does. I even think looking at Mania 26, 10 years ago, and the "feel" is similar. I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts and if anyone else gets this.

Feel like this fits better here.

And to answer the question... Yessss.

Nothing has felt different to me since WrestleMania 27. And that stretch has only felt marginally different than WrestleMania 21 to WrestleMania XXVI. WrestleMania XX felt like TransitionalMania, and WMX8 & WMXIX felt like a two-part overly drawn-out goodbye to the Attitude Era. Comparing WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001 to WrestleMania WrestleMania 23 in 2006 feels almost as crazy different as comparing WrestleMania VI in 1990 to WrestleMania XI in 1995.

And yet WrestleManias 27 through 36 feel like they could've all just been back-to-back monthly PPVs in the same calendar year somehow.

Can't be a good thing... Can it?