- 9 months ago
1996: when everything changed in Vince McMahon's WWE a year before you thought it did...
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00:00You will struggle to find two years in WWE history more tonally different than 1995 and 1997.
00:0795 was an antiquated bleak nightmare, 97 meanwhile was absolutely wild, with WWE on the cusp of
00:15something truly amazing ahead of its next boom period. Given these huge differences,
00:20it only makes sense that the year in between 95 and 97 was pretty damn wacky.
00:26Hello there my very good friends, I'm Andy from WhatCulture and here are 10 things you didn't know
00:31about WWE in 1996. Number 10, a creative spike. While not necessarily a great year, 1996 was about
00:39as creative as the then WWF ever got. The creativity wasn't necessarily good or even consistent a lot
00:47of the time, but the willingness to explore virtually every new direction underscored a
00:52crazed response to the omni-shambles that was 1995. The WWF either invented or borrowed no less than
00:598 new gimmick matches that had never been seen on its own programming before. Including the Iron Man
01:06match, Boiler Room Brawl, Buried Alive, and the Crybaby match, which was absolutely dire.
01:12Of these new stipulations, the Boiler Room Brawl was key. Mankind and The Undertaker destroyed one
01:18another in a violent and compelling backstage fight that unlocked a new realm, a new creative
01:23outlet, and informed the endlessly entertaining hijinks of the imminent Attitude Era. 1996 was
01:29the year in which, between the incredible brawling of the strap and Boiler Room matches and the
01:34technical purity of the Iron Man, the WWF embraced true stylistic change for the first time. 1996 was the
01:41year in which the WWF started to get it. Number 9. Ehhh. About that Iron Man match,
01:48the WrestleMania 12 main event is canonized by WWE to this day as a classic, a true highlight reel
01:55moment in the career of Shawn Michaels. The promotion of the match has trickled down to the
01:59fandom. It routinely makes and ranks highly in lists of the best matches ever. Now, wrestling is
02:06very subjective, as is every single art form on the planet. So this list entry right here
02:12isn't something along the lines of trying to tell you that the match was actually bad,
02:16even if subjectively the match was actually boring until the last 15 minutes. But you go ahead and
02:21try watching this one back today and tell me it's one of the best things you've ever seen. You simply
02:27can't. Before it unfolded, decades before Edge vs Randy Orton at Backlash 2020, the WWF practically
02:34guaranteed you'd see the best match ever as Bret Hart locked up with Shawn Michaels. It wasn't even the
02:40best match in WWF that year, but again, that's an opinion. It is a fact that about 99.9% of the time,
02:48evidence of a great match or a popular slash overmatch is echoed by the crowd reaction and the
02:55sheer mind-melting extent that they are into it. That's called psychology, brother. On that front,
03:00Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels in the Iron Man was something of a failure, because the crowd were
03:06dead. In another indictment, many were leaving the arena as the match unfolded. VHS viewers could tell
03:12which colour the seats in the arena were, and Dave Meltzer, who attended live, wrote in an edition
03:17of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that, and I quote, to say they were leaving in droves would be an
03:22overstatement, but there were probably a few thousand empty seats by the time the match reached its
03:27climax. Number 8, the original plan for Shotgun Saturday Night. In 2002, knowing that it was
03:34obscenely difficult to strike a halfway decent TV deal, NWATNA had the idea of airing weekly pay-per-views
03:41as a compromise and a bid to generate more money than a series of house shows. It didn't work.
03:46Well over a year before Vince McMahon formally introduced the Attitude Eater with a verbose speech
03:51that basically amounted to, we're gonna do car crash TV with breasts, the WWF wanted to launch
03:57something similar. It didn't work either. The idea was for the WWF to air a risky one-hour weekly
04:03pay-per-view aimed at the adult audience. This bid to capitalise on ECW's underground momentum,
04:09or maybe rip it off, ultimately manifested as Shotgun Saturday Night, which premiered as a TV show
04:14in January 97. Shotgun was exciting and creative, if not exactly great TV, but it was quite tame.
04:21You have to think, away from stricter standards and practices, that if the weekly pay-per-view model
04:26did amount to anything, it would have been much more edgy. In a neat trivia note, when Dave Meltzer
04:31relayed the story in an August edition of The Observer, he said the internal word within WWE
04:37was that the Saturday specials would, and I quote, push the envelope. Vince would go on to use that
04:43exact same verbiage when kick-starting the Attitude Era in December 97. There was a company-wide
04:48awareness in the then-WWF that things needed to change, but these experimental ideas only took root
04:55months or even years later. Number 7, The Click's Chokehold Was Real
04:59The Click had a chokehold over Vince McMahon, which they used, allegedly, to throttle the life out of
05:05anything that did not involve them and anything that they could get away with, and they manifested
05:10this quite brutally in 1996. Dave Meltzer, that man again, reported in a May edition of The Observer
05:16that Vader had to do criminally short dark match jobs for Shawn Michaels ahead of their SummerSlam main
05:22event. Jim Cornette has always said that Shawn didn't want to take the beating that came with
05:27working Vader, and he was right. If you look at the data on Cage Match or another website,
05:32Shawn often went over Vader in under five minutes. Meltzer reported that Vader was so furious at this
05:39that he was once heard saying, this is BS laying down for this guy when storming to the ring.
05:45Shawn went double time going over Diesel on the house show circuit, who was already on the way out of
05:50the company. But you'll never guess who Razor Ramon did jobs for on the way out. Between May 17th and
05:5619th, in four matches across the legendarily brutal WWE schedule, Scott Hall stared at the lights for
06:02one Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Helmsley, subsequently, was punished for the curtain call. Or was he?
06:10Number 6, The Triple H narrative was fake. In May, when Diesel and Razor worked their last matches for
06:16WWE at a Madison Square Garden house show, each member of the clique broke kayfabe by banding
06:22together, face and heel alignments be damned, and bowing out. The curtain call is a Mandela effect
06:28phenomenon in and of itself. Somehow, the idea has taken root in some circles that Triple H was
06:34squashed by the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania 12 as a punishment for his role in it. But this
06:39simply cannot possibly be true, considering WrestleMania took place before the curtain call. And if Vince
06:45McMahon could see into the future, he'd have probably made a phone call to the Wall Street Journal at
06:50some point. Moreover, the curtain call was apparently some huge transgression that incensed
06:55every corridor of Titan Towers. But again, that's not true. Measured against everything else, it was
07:02actually pretty tame by the clique's standards, although Triple H was apparently punished as a fall
07:07guy to pacify some old head road agents. But the truth is, he was barely punished at all. The curtain
07:13call happened on May 19th, and Hunter dethroned Intercontinental Champion Mark Merrow in October.
07:19Yes, Hunter didn't win King of the Ring that year, but it was only delayed by a year, and his
07:24punishment, quote unquote, lasted a whopping 155 days. There were no firm plans to actually punish
07:32the guy, it was just an exercise in optics, and a half-assed one to boot.
07:37Number 5, the real explanation for the Ultimate Warrior Mania Squash. As established in the previous
07:42entry, Ultimate Warrior did not squash Triple H at WrestleMania 12 as a result of an etiquette
07:47breach committed two months earlier. So why did it happen then? The truth is, Triple H
07:53wasn't remotely over with the crowd by WrestleMania. WWE hadn't pushed him with the same conviction
07:59they had in the months after his debut, and while he was hardly a jobber, with the collapse
08:04of the territory system really being felt, WWE wasn't exactly overflowing with options in
08:091996. So Warrior no-sold the pedigree. He didn't even kick out at one, he just popped up, hit his
08:15signature moves, and went home. The match was originally booked to be a more competitive back
08:21and forth, but that didn't work for the Warrior, brother. Per the April 22nd Observer, Warrior
08:26vehemently refused to do anything that would help Helmsley, which is both funny and a fascinating
08:31snapshot of the politics at the time. As corrosive as the clique were, Vince McMahon was always,
08:37always going to favor an absolute muscle freak over the lot of them.
08:41Number 4. The Bushwhackers Were Still Around
08:44You may remember the Bushwhackers, the arm-throwing, head-licking mad lads who may well have been
08:49too stupid even for the WWF of the late 1980s. Great as the sheepherders in the Fed, they were
08:56not. Very much the brand of comedy that only Vince McMahon found to be a riot, they simply
09:02weren't funny. They weren't even caricatures of people, or even stereotypes, which Vince
09:07McMahon loved. People from Australasia don't do daft movements with their arms or lick
09:11people indiscriminately, at least the ones I know. They do normal human stuff and get
09:16attacked by spiders the size of horses. Everybody knows that. To understand the extent to which
09:21Vince was in the midst of an identity crisis as a promoter, in the same year that he first
09:25began to recognize that there were actual human beings underneath the glorified Hasbro plastic
09:30known to most people as skin, the Bushwhackers returned after several months away, and crikey,
09:35they evolved into Australian stereotypes. Which is particularly absurd considering they
09:40were from New Zealand. Great.
09:43Number 3. One Wrestler Had No Business Being In The Ring
09:46Terry Gordy was a fantastic wrestler in his heyday. A massive unit who could bump and move,
09:52he was mean, legitimate and a perfect contrast to the clean-cut Von Eriks, against whom his fabulous
09:58Freebird's ward to mega-drawing effect in the 80s. Gordy was special, and as such he starred
10:03for All Japan Pro Wrestling in the early 90s. Impressive, given the stratospheric in-ring
10:09standard in that company. The trajectory of Gordy's career and indeed life changed forever
10:14when, in August 93, he entered a coma for five days following an overdose. He had to learn
10:20how to do everything in life all over again, but tragically, he awoke an entirely different
10:26person. This different Terry Gordy was a stranger to himself almost. He had suffered profound
10:32brain damage, and yet as a favour to Michael Hayes, hired by the WWF a year earlier. Gordy
10:38was brought in and repackaged as a turncoat druid to be the Undertaker's last monster of
10:43the week. Gordy, potentially through muscle memory, could somewhat emulate being a pro wrestler,
10:48but he just wasn't present. Jim Ross stated on his podcast that he was glad Terry didn't
10:54end up hurting himself or somebody else, but wrestling being wrestling, a gross industry,
10:59he continued to work until 2001, the year of his passing.
11:04Number 2. A Funny Legal Letter
11:06Scott Hall, as you'll know, turned up in WCW to initiate the New World Order angle. On an
11:12otherwise dire Nitro on May 27th, he interrupted the match and famously said,
11:17you know who I am, but you don't know why I'm here, delivered in his Razor Ramon voice. It was
11:23heavily implied that he was an unwanted guest operating on behalf of the WWF, which was great,
11:29but an untenable idea. This was a WCW storyline not even remotely endorsed by the WWF, and that aspect
11:37of the act was abandoned when Hall was threatened with legal action. Were he to not drop the voice,
11:43the WWF would withhold both merchandise royalties and the pay-per-view payoffs that were due to him?
11:48What's hilarious about this is that it was technically the IP of Universal Pictures,
11:53in a very roundabout way. Razor Ramon was heavily, heavily inspired by Tony Montana,
11:58the lead character in 1983's Scarface, but Vince McMahon simply hadn't seen it.
12:04Scott Hall quickly started speaking in a voice almost indistinguishable from his own,
12:09but the sheer ignorance and hypocrisy of the legal threat was really funny.
12:13And at number one, the irony of tribalism. You can prefer one wrestling promotion to another,
12:19it's almost impossible not to do that, given that that's how taste and preferences work,
12:24but you can't or at least shouldn't be a demented loyalist without, at some point, looking foolish.
12:30Last year, for example, in 2023, WWE fans questioned why AW had allowed MJF to perform with a torn labrum.
12:38Meanwhile, to use just one example, Rey Mysterio in WWE worked through a serious knee injury for
12:44several months. The worst AEW fans continue to insist that WWE does not care about wrestling when
12:50gunfire exists. WWE fans, meanwhile, will say that blood is bad when Vince McMahon himself bled more
12:56at Survivor Series 2003 than Jon Moxley ever has. AEW fans will bury WWE for criticizing their fanbase,
13:04while Tony Khan recently told his fans to put their money where their mouth is and stop whinging.
13:09And so on. Tribal WWE fans, which is absolutely not to say all of them, mocked Tony Khan's recurring
13:16huge announcement gimmick. And rightly so. It's getting pretty annoying now, Tony. But those type of
13:21WWE fans don't know the half of it. The WWF promoted the returns of the fake Diesel and fake Razor Ramon
13:28with more hype than AEW's first dance. And that is barely an exaggeration. Tony Khan could hype an
13:34important announcement for a full month, reveal that he had signed right back to a 35 year contract,
13:40and it still wouldn't come close to Vince McMahon's desperation in the autumn of 96.
13:45I've been Andy. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you like this video, check out the next one. See you later.
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