TR's Thoughts #11

In this weekly column, I will comment on the past week's goings-on in WOW, and whatever else it occurs to me to discuss :-) I also hope that a big part of the column will be printing and responding to your e-mails. So please send them in (the address is thatthing35@yahoo.com)!

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4/30/2001: What Went Wrong?

After only four months of tapings, WOW shut down and very well may stay that way. How the heck did this happen? This week, I'll talk about some of the things WOW did that I feel were mistakes. This is concentrating on the in-ring product, as opposed to three weeks ago, when I talked about things WOW could do to save money. If WOW goes under, consider this an autopsy; if it survives, consider this a "to do" list for the second season. Each section is listed in order, from the things I think hurt WOW the most to those that only hurt a bit.

In-ring work

Many WOW wrestlers had only a couple of months total of wrestling training before the show went on the air. It's fair to assume that the product was "rushed to market" more than a little bit. Be that as it may, these were the results of that rush:

• Very slow workrate.
• All wrestlers were seemingly taught the same basic moveset, meaning that a lot of WOW matches looked very similar to each other. There was an extreme overreliance on certain unexciting moves -- bodypresses, clotheslines, catapults, headlocks (the wrestlers seem to have been told to "stomp in" the headlocks -- why? Does anyone seriously think that makes them look more painful??), and drop toe holds (what good is a drop toe hold if you don't have any moves to follow up with on a downed opponent, which most WOW wrestlers don't?) For every wrestler who developed a decent repertoire of moves, there was another wrestler who seemed limited to the basics described above, even lacking finishers.
• Lacking these basics, it's almost superfluous to add that very few WOW wrestlers have shown adeptness at ring psychology and generalship -- the abilities to tell a story through a match, and to give the match a sense of natural flow. The closest WOW came to that was usually... random screaming. (Danger and Slam Dunk, I'm looking in your direction.)
• Foreign object hits in WOW (Lana Star mirror shots, Riot bat shots, Selina Majors trashcan lid shots, etc.) have almost always looked weak and unconvincing.

Production

All things considered, for a startup fed, WOW's production was not terrible. Hell, WCW hardly looked any better half the time. But there were two big consistent problems.

• Commercials inserted in the middle of the action took viewers out of the matches. Since WOW matches were often quite short, it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some other way to do things.
• The cameramen seemed to miss important in-ring action pretty frequently. To be fair, they were probably covering for blown spots a lot of the time.

Characters/angles

WOW's McLane-promoted predecessor GLOW was chock-full of "crotch shots" and rolling-around-on-the-floor catfights. By contrast, WOW placed an emphasis on wrestling, attempting to appeal to aficionados of the squared circle. But, in general, the characters and angles showed very little knowledge of what appeals to the modern wrestling fan.

• One-dimensional gimmicks made the matches look silly, and also made it impossible to develop the characters. What compelling storylines were "Tanja, Warrior Woman" or "Wendi Wheels" supposed to get involved in? You really have to stretch to think of any. It speaks volumes that the WWF just dragged out a bunch of these type of gimmicks at Wrestlemania... as a joke, poking fun at their own past mistakes!! Many of the WOW gimmicks were directly recycled from GLOW, ignoring the failure of that promotion.
• WOW's writing was often weak. Catchphrases were often stale and unexciting. Some characters, such as Ice Cold, had extensive interview time and used it to make a series of gimmick-related puns, rather than to flesh out the character. Some angles, such as the epic Lana Star "you turned my hair green" saga or the melodramatic Selina Majors "you hurt my knee" saga, were played out interminably despite drawing very little heat. Innumerable angles were teased and then either got dropped very quickly, or were never picked up in he first place.
• The writing problems were made worse by the fact that many of the personnel seemed to be reading directly off a script. Few seemed to be given any room to improv. The resulting reaction from the viewer was "oh, c'mon, people don't talk like that."
• None of the characters or angles were done the least bit of service by McLane's horrible announcing. McLane pushed the faces beyond all reason, went off on total non sequiturs, made many clearly untrue statements, and often mangled the language. If he did manage by accident to come across an angle, he put it across so heavy-handed as to make it cartoonish and implausible. Hell, even his ring announcing (yes, he sometimes does that too) was heavy-handed, cartoonish, and implausible. McLane also dragged Lee Marshall, who can be an entertaining announcer, down with him; Marshall usually had nothing of substance to work with. Bobby Heenan's stint at the WOW: Unleashed PPV showed how much the repartee between announcers can add to a match... and how absent it was when McLane took the mic. And Heenan doesn't even really know a damn thing about WOW! He just has a gift that McLane doesn't.
• The WOW champion, for all but one show, was Terri Gold. Terri's humble, quiet "skilled athlete" persona is reminiscent of '70s WWF champ Bob Backlund, so it's 30 years out of date at this point. Backlund had to become a heel to make it in the '90s WWF. How about Kurt Angle, whose gimmick is very similar to Terri's, and who the WWF originally tried to present as a face... but who was booed so much that he had to be turned heel. Not convinced yet? How about the humble, quiet "Blue Chipper" Rocky Maivia? You know, the guy who later became the Rock... back when people were chanting "DIE ROCKY DIE!" at him and he was almost literally booed out of the business? Clearly, wrestling fans don't root for characters of Terri's type anymore. To entertain wrestling fans now, you need mic skills, humor, a bit of attitude, and/or charisma (physical or psychological). Terri hasn't really shown any of these. She's a real dead fish. She would also have trouble cracking the list of WOW's top half-dozen in-ring workers. Putting the belt on her at all was a mistake, never mind making her the perpetual champ.
• The other faces also showed no personality, and most of them were jobbers. So, inevitably, fans gravitated to the heels. This might not even have been quite so bad, except that WOW had two face announcers who both tried to shove the faces down fans' throats.
• Wrestlers who had both in-ring and mic skills, such as the Disciplinarian, Poison, and Roxy Powers, were often ignored, while other wrestlers who lacked one or both skills were often pushed.
• The random nature of title shots in WOW devalued the belts.
• The botched Mystery angle, for which see that profile.

Many, many Pay Per View mistakes

You may remember how much WOW hyped the Feb. 4 "WOW: Unleashed" PPV event. Given how much money the corporation was losing on buying TV time, the PPV was pretty much a go-for-broke proposition. It broke. Replays were cancelled, reportedly due to consumer complaints, and ultimately, only 5,250 buys were made. What the heck went wrong?

• Having every wrestler in the fed -- 36, by my count -- participate. Many, if not most, of the wrestlers had stepped in the ring for the first time six months before the PPV. A lot of them simply were not ready for prime time. By no coincidence whatsoever, the less advanced technical wrestlers were also, in almost every case, the same ones who had no storylines built up going into the event. If they weren't required to be there creatively, and they weren't going to make the company look good in the ring... why were they there? This segues nicely to the next point.
• I have to say that, if I wasn't too familiar with WOW, and I watched only the first hour of the PPV, I might have turned it off and asked for my money back too. Not only did you have sloppy wrestling, but the matches were two minutes long! And, not only that, but some of them were two minutes long with screwjob endings!! Why do a double pinfall ending in Farah/Paradise vs. Beach Patrol, where honestly, no one cares who wins anyway? Just put one of them over the other... who cares? And, going to the other extreme, why do a double-DQ ending in Slam vs. Roxy which was built up (somewhat), and thus needed to be blown off? Five of the last six PPV matches were good... but when the first seven matches stink, not everyone is gonna stick around to find out.
• Hyping the "haircut match" above and beyond all other matches. Yeah, I'm sure it drew a small cadre of fetishists (and McLane in the infamous "someone's gonna get their head shaved completely off" speech sure sounded like one of them). But for those of us who like wrestling -- i.e., the people who buy PPVs -- this was not a draw. Sure, have the match happen... sure, mention it... but don't treat it like the main event! WOW fans, and wrestling fans, wanted to pay to see people wrestle... not to see the culmination of a non-wrestling-related angle that never really drew anyone in to begin with. Can you believe that, in addition to shoving the haircut match down viewers' throats, WOW also emphasized it to prospective investors?? The press release announcing the PPV quickly mentions the title matches, and just as quickly shoves them aside: "but the match WOW fans have been waiting for" is the haircut match. As if they were deliberately trying to be stupid, they actually include McLane's quote about how "few things can excite a woman as much as the idea she may lose her hair." This is a press release, designed to spur investment in the company! To ask the familiar question, what were they thinking?
• I don't know the qualifications of the PPV production crew. But if they hired a crew that had no experience putting together an event of this magnitude, they certainly paid for it. Sound and video problems made the PPV look bush league.
• The Bronco Billie ranch angle. Although this is not as big a deal as the other things I mention here, I'm sure it was a factor in at least a couple of those consumer complaints. If you saw six bad matches in a row, and then saw this as your first introduction to a WOW angle, well, what would you think? The angle was telegraphed from a mile away; the characters had no prior history with each other to set it up; and it certainly made no sense from a gimmick perspective (an elementary school teacher buys a ranch?)

After all that ranting, you may well be wondering why the hell I even like WOW in the first place. I'll refer you alllll the way back to my first column. What I say there is actually even more true now that there literally is only one wrestling federation. I see so much potential in WOW. Every week, it could be giving us compelling angles -- simple ones, perhaps, but often the simplest angles are best -- carried out by attractive women who are also gifted athletes. When I first started watching WOW, due to the stuff I describe here, I was pretty appalled by everything not involving Riot. But I loved Riot, so I kept watching it, and most weeks, it got better than it was the week before (in my opinion, that's who's). It was very exciting to see the improvement. And you could tell that the people involved were working very hard to do things that might not necessarily come naturally to them. You really had to root for them. And I still do, of course; I hope they can deliver on that promise. WOW was a very fan-friendly organization, before they started having financial problems and decided to make like ostriches. They really seemed to listen to what we had to say, and I think (although I'm not totally sure) that they were trying to adapt to what wrestling fans now demand. Hopefully, it wasn't too little too late.

Please e-mail me with your thoughts about anything WOW-related!
(e-mail: thatthing35@yahoo.com)

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