HHH taking over from Vince on RAW

[blueminister]

The NAO pre-DX as brutal smart-aleck chickenshits was a nice little run. Them failing to complete their ring entrance twice at that one In Your House because the Road Warriors kept bucking at them was great.

[ohtani's jacket]

The problem is those days is that being over often meant having a catchphrase people liked to chant along with. The NOA got tremendous reactions during their intros, but the matches usualy got zero heat. The Attitude crowds didn't care about wrestling nor most of the characters. They cared about the catchphrases, the puppies, retarded signature spots (the worst of all being the WORM) and people being put through tables. Oh, and be seen on TV with their signs, of course. Very few workers on the undercard really were "over" in the sense that the audience cared for them like in the 80's. That's also why the Attitude era was such a horrible product, no matter how much money it made. Things only got better once Russo left and the WCW crew and Angle got on board.

I liked the early Attitude era stuff. The WWF up until and including Summerslam '98 was reasonably well booked. It's not something I'd ever want to revisit, but skits like Mankind visiting Mr. McMahon in the hospital were entertaining. I hated the early Radicals stuff. It turned me right off the WWF. Benoit and Guerrero didn't get good until after I quit watching.

[El-P]

I liked the early Attitude era stuff. The WWF up until and including Summerslam '98 was reasonably well booked.

You said it all right there. The Attitude era peaked with SummerSlam 98. I loved the whole Austin vs McMahon feud with the involvment of Mick Foley as the henchman. I enjoyed the build to Asutin vs Taker a lot, to me SummerSlam 98 was the apex of this era in term of expectations. Then with the fall, things started to slowly degrade, there was less and less wrestling and more and more bullshit, Survivor Series was the first WWF show I really didn't enjoy at all as it was all about the infamous swerve. Then Royal Rumble 99 ended my ten years relationship with the company that had made me a wrestling fan to begin with. Sad days, really. Ruso fucking up the company then fucking up WCW even worse drove me out of US wrestling.

[Log]

I was at Survivor Series and enjoyed it. Then again, I was drunk. I was very entertained by my friend Jay who was convinced Mankind's mystery opponent was going to be a wild boar. Again, we were pretty drunk.

[anarchistxx]

I think 1999 was the only truly turgid year of the Attitude Era. 1998 had a lot of great angles and a few memorable big matches, and was helped by things still feeling fresh. By 2000 there was solid wrestling all over the card and some interesting new faces. WWF in 1999 was like one of those great comedy shows that had suddenly got hugely popular in the mainstream, but had run out of ideas, so the writers ratchet everything up and throw in a load of gross gags, toilet humor and exaggerate all the characters to the point where they lose the essence of what it was originally.

 

That 1999 was the year in which the popularity of the product peaked says a lot about casual wrestling fans, and how virtually nothing the current incarnation of WWE could produce will ever win them back. The management seem essentially reconciled to that now, and have adjusted the product accordingly to hit different demographics.

[Sidebottom]

I don't think 99 was dry creatively at all?

 

You had Rock vs Mankind at the start which was great, then the Austin and Rock stuff was great also.

 

HHH came into his own after his great heel turn. It may have taken a few months after standing in the back of Corporate Ministry segments, but post SummerSlam he steadily got better leading to his excellent 2000.

 

Jeff Jarrett was reinvigorated and was having blinding matches with D Lo who seemed at the time destined for bigger things.

 

Test rose through the ranks in 99 and seemed like one of the next big stars. Jericho came in, but sadly trod water for a little while. Still, at the time he was fresh as hell on screen. Babyface X Pac was white hot at certain points in he year - him taking out Undertaker was amazing.

 

Hardyz and Edge and Christian found their groove as players setting them up for 2000, and by the end the Dudleyz got thei shi together.

[Dooley]

Don't bother trying to say anything nice about '99 WWF. It will always be viscerally hated by hardcore wrestling fans because of the lack of focus on in-ring action and the infiltration of the casual fan to their playground. It doesn't matter that is was the high-water mark business-wise and they sold out the arena wherever they went, NOTHING GOOD HAPPENED.

[anarchistxx]

I loved it at the time, but then I was a young kid. Being generous, January-April had some fun matches and feuds, and October-December was a decent prelude to the awesome stuff that was to follow in 2000. May-September was fairly awful though.

[tim]

I started watching around June 99. One of these days I half want to rewatch all of WWE programming of 98 and 99, or as long as I can stand it just to see how it is from a modern dispassionate perspective. I did rewatch all the RAWs from the beginning of 1998 to WM14 a couple years ago and did think it was very well booked and really had a feeling of legitimate excitement.

[jdw]

I thought late 1998 through Mania was perfectly fine. Rock getting the belt screwing over Austin, Rock-Austin (with the exception of the chairshot match), Austin-Vince, then the Rock-Austin build into Mania which everyone was waiting for since the night after Survivors... that was all solid-to-strong top of the card booking. Hell, I loved the Austin-Vince stuff at the Rumble, and I typically hate Rumble matches. Their cage match was a blast of WWE-spectactle stuff and Vince willing to take an epic ass kicking. Plus the climax at Mania of Austin getting the belt back.

 

The rest of the card? Pretty forgettable. But I thought the booking and storylines at the top in that run from November to Mania might have been the strongest they had in the entire attitude era: they elevated Rock to the very top level, they elevated Mick to an entirely different level, they had a sense of what their top match was (Rock-Austin), teased it on Raw the night after Survivors and figured out how to keep the two apart until the final cycle leading into Mania with their own strong storylines (Rock with Foley and Austin taking his feud with Mr. McMahon to a cage match payoff). In the more modern era of having to not only feed content to a full slate of 12 PPV a year, and also feed content to keep weekly TV ratings up, that's high on the list of them feeding both those things just about perfectly.

[Matt D]

I liked that stuff so much as a high concept that I'm a bit annoyed they've run Bryan vs Orton 3 PPVs in a row instead of mimicking it.

[Strummer]

Today is Hunter and Stephanie's 10th wedding anniversary.