Author's Notes:
Well, so that's my proposed season two of WOW. I hope that it eased your separation anxiety after the show stopped production. When I began it, I was hoping that the new season would be starting up around now, but obviously that didn't happen. (Even back then, I knew it wasn't too likely, but I was hoping ;-) As I discuss in my final thoughts, I hope this also shows that pretty much any thoughtful wrestling fan could have done a better job than the WOW writers. (Hey, wait... I didn't even get paid for this! :-) Hopefully, as a result of doing this, no one will respond to my criticisms of the writers with the "those who can't do, criticize" argument. (I think that's a bogus argument anyway, but whatever.)
The general booking philosophy I used incorporates one of the things I really liked about WOW, the old-school tendencies of the booking. The big difference, of course, is that I didn't try to shove syrupy sweet goody-goody faces down the fans' throats like WOW did. But I did try to present cheating and the use of foreign objects as heelish traits, and I tried to present the faces as the folks who don't cheat and who would win a fair fight. I think you can still have "attitude" and realistic characters, and yet retain that distinction. That's one booking strategy I think any new fed could use to provide an alternative to WWF without presenting an "out of touch" product.
As WOW did, I tried to avoid run-ins when possible, although I did have to do one approximately every couple of weeks. (Better that, I think, than do what WOW had to do, and have multiple screwjobs at the pay-per-view :-)
I tried to build up the belts, and I tried to make sure that the feuds were either about the belts, or at least about status on the WOW ladder. That said, I could easily see someone arguing that I passed the belts around too much for my goals to actually be accomplished. But that was the idea, in any event. I also introduced new belts, so that the mid and low card wouldn't be the total plotless wasteland it was in real-life WOW.
Where would I go from here? Well, by this point, everyone is pretty much where I want them, so presumably there would be fewer turns and more straightforward plots. Danger (face), Riot (tweener), Jungle Grrrl (tweener), and Terri Gold (heel) would be the main eventers going for the World Title (you didn't seriously expect me to let Danger keep the belt forever if I kept doing this, did you?? ;-) Selina Majors (heel) would be just below that level. Eventually, the Star Stable (heel) would have to build up a reasonable World Title challenger... I felt it was more important to establish those other folks first, but if the Star Stable were to have long-term legitimacy, they would need to be represented in the World Title picture. Presumably, that would either be Jane Blond, or California Wendi (perhaps with a gimmick change). I would also like to make sure that Roxy Powers (face) was at the main event level. I put her there as a "test run" when I was building Danger vs. Riot and the Terri heel turn, and then brought her back down. For now, Roxy would have to kill time beating midcarders until the opportunity arose to move up again. Yeah, I know... call her Y2Roxy :-) First up would be the new, meaner Slam Dunk, who Roxy would have a tougher time putting down, but would eventually defeat.
As far as the midcard goes, I tried to at least give everyone a character, and see where it went from there. Well, I admit that when it came to the cheerleaders and the Daughters of Darkness, I didn't even try :-) But, hopefully with the other people, I moved beyond the "I'm Ice Cold and I'm going to freeze the WOW title belt" level of characterization, and provided something that could ultimately lead to compelling and entertaining storylines. In other words, the goal was to have characters, rather than gimmicks.
To that end, everyone at least got some sort of angle and some sort of mic time, although of course, not everyone was equally developed. The hardest part of all of this was balance. Time devoted to one wrestler is time not devoted to the other three dozen or so wrestlers. If you push someone, someone else has to job. There's just no way around these things. I definitely understand much better now why so many WWF wrestlers seem to be "not going anywhere" or "underutilized".
It was important to me to provide a plausible transition from WOW as it actually was to WOW as I felt it needed to be to have larger appeal. (Again, the assumption was that the show had continued uninterrupted.) I started with the gimmicks as they were. Then I tried to reinterpret them in a way that I felt gave them more depth, or if I felt that was impossible, tried to come up with some logical way to dump them. Either way, I tried to do it in a way that would seem continuous with the established characters, and not seem like some "new guy" had come in and decided to change everything right away.
Creating stables helped a lot, I think. The Star Stable was the big one. There was also the Terri-Beckie-Roxy-Tanja alliance, and the "Caged Heat plus Selina" stable. Stables made it easier to book matches and get more people involved. They allowed a match to be supported by an angle even if the angle was not specifically about the two performers in the match. Additionally, stables can help define a wrestler's character, since stables themselves have characteristics. The Star Stable also allowed me to keep Lana as a focal point, and have her be part of storylines that revolved around wrestling matches, without actually having to put her in the ring much.
I did mention in the episodes some of the costume changes that the characters would undergo. I also envisioned all sorts of other things... changes to the entrance videos... changes to the music (I think it would most likely be more than worth it to license "real" music)... and the like. I didn't want to stray too far from the limited production costs that the show had. But, based on the characters I drew, hopefully you can sort of imagine for yourself what I had in mind.
My favorite skit was the Star Stable movie in show #38. After writing that, next time I ask myself "why do wrestling writers seem to want to write sitcoms?", I'll know the answer. I also liked a lot of my other angles, but I guess that's obvious from the fact that I thought they were worth writing, so I won't bore you with details ;-)
Well, that's all the summing up I've got. Again, hope you enjoyed my efforts.
- TR, 8/26/01