Ah wrestling, I remember you.
Growing up in the small Australian country town of Lithgow I had a friend down the road with cable television and every Tuesday night a group of about twenty of us would crowd into his house to watch a show called RAW.
And what a show it was! I mean, not many of us really cared about the wrestling matches, they just got in the way of the real point of the show, which was what trouble would Vince McMahon, or in 2000 Triple H, stir up for our heroes The Rock, Steve Austin, Mankind and Kane this week? People weren't watching this for wrestling, they were interested in the characters, they were connected to the characters, to the point where people who truly found the wrestling part boring still loved the show and would park their backsides in front of the telly every week to see what was going to happen to their favourites. Heck, we'd even throw some money in to watch the PPVs every month so we could see what our heroes would do. RAW, every week was an event. A social gathering.
But around 2001 something seemed to change. The WWF had bought out their competition. Good on them. Good job boys, but then for some reason they thought that we WWF fans actually cared about the WCW guys. Hello, if anyone had cared about them, wouldn't they still be in business? And so guys who I didn't care about and had no investment in started coming on the show in prominent roles, the guys we cared about went off to do other things and so did we. The magic, the entertaining portion of the show was gone and it was replaced by a straight wrestling show, the show becoming almost unrecognisable from the one I'd come to love in the late nineties.
I watch RAW occasionally these days and can't sit long without changing the channel. There is no reason to care about the characters and what they do from week to week. No reason to become emotionally invested in their story lines. The villains aren't evil enough for us to side with the heroes and the heroes are nowhere near interesting enough for people to side with them just for the hell of it.
Anyway seven years ago, I stopped going along on Tuesday nights, I was too busy, or more to the point, didn't care enough about RAW to make time to watch it. Not long after that everyone stopped coming.
Of those twenty plus people I used to watch wrestling with only two still watch. RAW used to be must see, now all I see when I turn it on is how laziness and a loss of focus has ruined a show I used to get a great deal of enjoyment out of.
Oh well, such is life.
Growing up in the small Australian country town of Lithgow I had a friend down the road with cable television and every Tuesday night a group of about twenty of us would crowd into his house to watch a show called RAW.
And what a show it was! I mean, not many of us really cared about the wrestling matches, they just got in the way of the real point of the show, which was what trouble would Vince McMahon, or in 2000 Triple H, stir up for our heroes The Rock, Steve Austin, Mankind and Kane this week? People weren't watching this for wrestling, they were interested in the characters, they were connected to the characters, to the point where people who truly found the wrestling part boring still loved the show and would park their backsides in front of the telly every week to see what was going to happen to their favourites. Heck, we'd even throw some money in to watch the PPVs every month so we could see what our heroes would do. RAW, every week was an event. A social gathering.
But around 2001 something seemed to change. The WWF had bought out their competition. Good on them. Good job boys, but then for some reason they thought that we WWF fans actually cared about the WCW guys. Hello, if anyone had cared about them, wouldn't they still be in business? And so guys who I didn't care about and had no investment in started coming on the show in prominent roles, the guys we cared about went off to do other things and so did we. The magic, the entertaining portion of the show was gone and it was replaced by a straight wrestling show, the show becoming almost unrecognisable from the one I'd come to love in the late nineties.
I watch RAW occasionally these days and can't sit long without changing the channel. There is no reason to care about the characters and what they do from week to week. No reason to become emotionally invested in their story lines. The villains aren't evil enough for us to side with the heroes and the heroes are nowhere near interesting enough for people to side with them just for the hell of it.
Anyway seven years ago, I stopped going along on Tuesday nights, I was too busy, or more to the point, didn't care enough about RAW to make time to watch it. Not long after that everyone stopped coming.
Of those twenty plus people I used to watch wrestling with only two still watch. RAW used to be must see, now all I see when I turn it on is how laziness and a loss of focus has ruined a show I used to get a great deal of enjoyment out of.
Oh well, such is life.