Shining a Spotlight 10.14.10: A Better Build

Bound For Glory is getting a lot of talk this week and as you can imagine, the opinions are pretty wide-ranging. The usual TNA fanatics talk of how it was a brilliant show but others are less kind, ripping into the finale and other parts with glee. I admit, the sight of New World Order version 356 being formed is annoying but I’ll actually wait and see a bit how it all unfolds to fully judge. My main issue is they kept talking about this being some batch of outsiders coming in but instead it’s guys who have been in TNA for a while. I was also bugged by the Lethal Lockdown match as, aside from a bunch of guys in Philly who still think it’s 1996, who was asking for EV2.0 to go over Fortune? Still, more good than bad for the show but the overall feel of the ending marred things for fans. Then again, the news they paid J-Woww $15,000 for an appearance doesn’t do much to differentiate them from WWE at their worst.

It made me think of the topic for this week, which is how the build for matches and events has become a bit marred the last several years. Sometimes there isn’t as much care taken with them, others it’s not enough time but the end result is that wrestling angles have been a lot more rushed and that often ends up wrecking them badly. It’s become more of a problem in the last few years but sadly is something unlikely to change as writers and bookers are adapting to the changing times, times that don’t have quite the patience anymore for the build to last as long.

The Old Ways

Once again, my length as a fan does influence some of my views. Back in the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, the build for big matches and angles was a lot longer. You didn’t have monthly PPVs (hell, until about ’87, the PPV market barely existed) and no prime-time programming so things could have a longer build. Even by 1990, WWF only had four major events of the year and would really take the time letting programs work out. They’d start stuff in November that would last all the way until Wrestlemania in April, letting you see the twists and turns all the way, heightening the tension for the big blow-off. NWA/WCW worked a bit differently with the emphasis on house shows but could still master some long-range feuds like the Magnum TA/Nikita Koloff U.S. title series in 1986. It was the same for the smaller territories who relied on local markets to sustain themselves and were able to work it well.

It was interesting how much such care went into things. Promoters and bookers could really take the time planning these out, keeping feuds going for months through small matches to build up to the big one. The Ricky Steamboat/Jay Youngblood vs Sgt. Slaughter/Don Kernolde feud for the NWA tag titles was brilliantly done in 1983, both teams going at it in great matches, ambushes and more, culminating in a match so huge thousands were turned away at the gate. Another great ’83 program was NWA Champion Harley Race putting a bounty on Ric Flair, Flair seemingly injured and out of action but coming back to face Race at Starrcade, all of it wonderfully planned out. WWF could also work stuff like the Steamboat/Savage feud and Hogan’s programs with the likes of Paul Orndorff and Andre.

That was all well and good but there were drawbacks to this longer style. A glaring one was in 1988 when the planned Ric Flair/Lex Luger NWA title payoff didn’t come off due to some backstage politics, which jarred up fans who had been expecting Luger to win the belt. The constant rematches with Flair retaining the belt by chicanery wore fans down and helped contribute to Crockett’s loss of income that forced the sale to Turner. WCW would make one of the biggest mistakes in 1993 when they decided to tape months worth of programming in advance for their syndicated weekend shows. This turned out to be a huge error as they had to have programs set in stone for months, causing problems like when they gave away the Hollywood Blondes losing the tag titles but Brian Pillman got injured to they had to substitute Steve Regal in his place for the title switch to make the programs work.

Even the rise of the monthly PPVs didn’t affect longer programs too much. However, the Monday Night War did shift things up a lot as WWF and WCW were more likely to do big twists in order to get viewer attention. That led to a bunch of mistakes like WCW blowing potential millions by giving the first Goldberg-Hogan match for free instead of waiting for the PPV. Even long programs failed such as how they spent fourteen months building up to Sting vs Hogan with the only logical conclusion being Sting winning the belt but instead ruined it with Hogan dominating en route to a crazy “fast count” and botched ending. Indeed, it’s telling that as the tide of the War turned on them, WCW became even more short-sighted, programs coming and going without any real rhyme or reason, no real care put into them (which fits well into what a mess WCW was then). WWF did seem more capable as 2000 was a terrific year for them but after WCW fell, they too seemed to sink into more of a mess. Today, in both WWE and TNA, the idea of the “slow build” seems a forgotten concept and one that appears unlikely to come back.

Why it’s changed

It’s easy to blame this on the standard of monthly PPV’s that has cropped up. When you have only weeks before the next big show, you no longer feel the need to keep programs and feuds going on indefinitely and less time to set things up. Plus, there’s the need to keep folks watching the weekly prime-time shows by giving them big twists and turns and events as well. It’s not easy to be doing wrestling programming these days and you can imagine the difficulties in making it work for an audience that gives out differing views.

But the key reason it’s changed is the times. The sad fact is, we’re in a world of much shorter attention spans. Back in the ‘80’s, it was fine for fans to have the patience to keep up with weeks or months of slow build of programs and local house shows sustaining them and that kept up through the mid-90’s. But the coming of the Internet brought the first change, allowing the IWC to grow and build, for fans to come together to share opinions and such. The promotions did take notice, trying to do “swerves” at times and reach out to a new base, which allowed for more knee-jerk reactions (especially in Vince Russo’s WCW tenure) that could make things even worse.

Today, it’s even bigger as we’re in the era of twitter and text messages, an age when younger folks expect stuff much faster. Yes, I do feel old trying to communicate with kids in this time; no more so than when I heard some high schoolers complain of having to do so much Internet research for a book report when I had to do that stuff the old-fashioned way of actually reading books from the library. It’s harsh but it’s how things work now, a different audience for a different age, one who lack a lot of patience.

The Attitudes

It’s hard for older fans to get the changes. A lot in the IWC are fans who got into it early on like I did while others came on board during the “Attitude Era.” So we’ve been around from when wrestling was at a real high to today and find it easy to slam today as nowhere near as good as it once was. But newer fans don’t have that insight, they don’t get how things once were, they just see it for how it is. To them, the rather haphazard booking of WWE and TNA is just the way wrestling is, nothing really different. ROH does offer more of an “old-styled” way but it’s important to remember that this younger generation just see things so differently.

That pertains to wrestling history as well. I’ve brought up before how kids like my nephews don’t really care too much about long-past wrestling history, just what they see. And keep in mind, to a lot of today’s teens, 1990 is “ancient history” in their minds. Most don’t really care about the lineage of WWF champions or longest reigns or any of that, they leave that to wrestling historians. They enjoy the shows for what they are and can often place them as slightly forgettable after a bit.

This short attention span also contributes to the repeating of gimmicks and angles. Recycling has been something wrestling has done for a long time but promoters feel they can get away with it a lot more because there are fewer fans to see the original events around. To most of the new generation, the NWO was something they just saw via old tapes or talked about a lot, not seen in their prime. So seeing some batch of guys “invading” or taking over with either Nexus or whatever the new batch in TNA is going to call themselves, is something big. They don’t get that so many angles from the ‘90’s are being repeated because they weren’t there the first time so it doesn’t annoy them as much. Of course, you should remember that wrestling has been repeating angles and match styles for decades and gotten away with it so this is hardly new.

But the build has suffered and that connects to how some new stars are pushed. Now, it’s true some guys are given a push big before they’re really ready as Sheamus was a sudden choice as WWE champion and despite a couple of reigns, still a lot of doubt out there. Even Cena or Orton were given a bit of time to develop before being given the big slots. It’s not like a lack of patience in pushing is new in wrestling; Lex Luger stands as a great example of someone pushed from the very start before he could really learn the ropes and develop and that haunted him for the rest of his career. It’s always hard to really predict who will and won’t be a star as some guys like Steve Austin and Sting had stardom written on them from the start while guys like Rock and HHH needed a bit of time and work to get their potential out. It’s why both WWE and TNA are relying on older stars and guys around for a while, they know they have name recognition and it’s easier to lean on that rather than take a chance on guys who might not work out. The fact that these guys don’t work as well because they don’t have the right backing doesn’t seem to occur to the promoters but that’s something that happens a lot in wrestling.

Still, we seem to be in a time where the build just isn’t as big as it once was. That seems bad a bit but in some ways, it fits. The time where angles could be dragged out months at a time has passed by with an audience eager for things to move along fast. Plus, it’s not like a long build always means a great payoff. A lot of us can hope they can go back to when the build really mattered but in our monthly PPV and weekly prime-time show world, that seems quite unlikely as it’s hard to regress for an audience who looks forward.

Summation

It’s easy to think we can go back to “the old ways” but keeping that mentality ignores how vastly different the young audience in wrestling is today. You can’t throw out a sixty minute Broadway and have it wow them like it did in ‘80’s Carolinas. Time has really shifted tastes and viewpoints up; for example, to those who saw it in 1994, the Razor Ramon/Shawn Michaels ladder match was one of the wildest things ever but today’s fans, used to the crazier TLC bouts, cite it as downright dull. The basics of booking will stick around as the habit of recycling makes clear but promoters do have to shift with the times and with a generation used to getting info and entertainment faster, that’s something that’s got to shift up as well. Wrestling has always shown an ability to adapt to the times when need be and in a world of much faster information, it’s time some older fans accepted (as hard as it is) that maybe it’s time to look to the future with the build rather than the past.