- 5 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.
02:27You simply can't. Before it unfolded, decades before Edge vs Randy Orton at Backlash 2020,
02:33the WWF practically guaranteed you'd see the best match ever, as Bret Hart locked up with Shawn Michaels.
02:40It wasn't even the best match in WWF that year, but again, that's an opinion. It is a fact that
02:46about 99.9% of the time, evidence of a great match, or a popular slash overmatch, is echoed by the crowd
02:54reaction and the sheer mind-melting extent that they are into it. That's called psychology, brother.
02:59On that front, Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels in the Iron Man was something of a failure,
03:05because the crowd were dead. In another indictment, many were leaving the arena as the match unfolded.
03:11VHS viewers could tell which colour the seats in the arena were, and Dave Meltzer, who attended live,
03:16wrote in an edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that, and I quote,
03:20To say they were leaving in droves would be an overstatement, but there were probably a few thousand empty seats
03:26by the time the match reached its climax.
03:28Number 8. The Original Plan for Shotgun Saturday Night
03:32In 2002, knowing that it was obscenely difficult to strike a halfway decent TV deal,
03:37NWATNA had the idea of airing weekly pay-per-views as a compromise,
03:42and 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
03:50speech that basically amounted to, we're gonna do car crash TV with breasts,
03:55the WWF wanted to launch something similar. It didn't work either.
03:59The idea was for the WWF to air a risky one-hour weekly pay-per-view aimed at the adult audience.
04:05This bid to capitalise on ECW's underground momentum, or maybe rip it off,
04:10ultimately manifested as Shotgun Saturday Night, which premiered as a TV show in January 97.
04:16Shotgun 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,
04:24that if the weekly pay-per-view model did amount to anything, it would have been much more edgy.
04:29In a neat trivia note, when Dave Meltzer relayed the story in an August edition of The Observer,
04:34he said the internal word within WWE was that the Saturday specials would, and I quote,
04:39push the envelope.
04:41Vince would go on to use that exact same verbiage when kickstarting the Attitude Era in December 97.
04:47There was a company-wide awareness in the then-WWF that things needed to change,
04:52but these experimental ideas only took root months, or even years later.
04:57Number seven, the clique's chokehold was real.
05:00The clique had a chokehold over Vince McMahon, which they used, allegedly,
05:04to throttle the life out of anything that did not involve them, and anything that they could get away with.
05:09And they manifested this quite brutally in 1996.
05:12Dave Meltzer, that man again, reported in a May edition of The Observer that Vader had to do
05:18criminally short dark match jobs for Shawn Michaels ahead of their SummerSlam main event.
05:22Jim Cornette has always said that Shawn didn't want to take the beating that came with working Vader,
05:28and he was right.
05:29If you look at the data on Cage Match, or another website,
05:32Shawn often went over Vader in under five minutes.
05:36Meltzer reported that Vader was so furious at this that he was once heard saying,
05:40this 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,
05:48who was already on the way out of the company.
05:51But you'll never guess who Razor Ramon did jobs for on the way out.
05:54Between May 17th and 19th, in four matches across the legendarily brutal WWE schedule,
06:01Scott Hall stared at the lights for one Hunter Hearst Helmsley.
06:04Helmsley, subsequently, was punished for the curtain call.
06:08Or was he?
06:10Number six, the Triple H narrative was fake.
06:13In May, when Diesel and Razor worked their last matches for WWE at a Madison Square Garden house
06:19show, each member of the clique broke kayfabe by banding together, face and heel alignments
06:24be damned, and bowing out.
06:26The curtain call is a Mandela Effect phenomenon in and of itself.
06:30Somehow, the idea has taken root in some circles that Triple H was squashed by the Ultimate Warrior
06:35at WrestleMania 12 as a punishment for his role in it.
06:39But this simply cannot possibly be true, considering WrestleMania took place before the curtain call.
06:45And if Vince McMahon could see into the future, he'd have probably made a phone call to the
06:49Wall Street Journal at some point.
06:51Moreover, the curtain call was apparently some huge transgression that incensed every corridor
06:56of Titan Towers, but again, that's not true.
07:00Measured against everything else, it was actually pretty tame by the clique's standards, although
07:05Triple H was apparently punished as a fall guy to pacify some old head road agents.
07:10But the truth is, he was barely punished at all.
07:12The curtain call happened on May 19th, and Hunter dethroned Intercontinental Champion Mark
07:18Mero in October.
07:19Yes, Hunter didn't win King of the Ring that year, but it was only delayed by a year,
07:24and his punishment, quote unquote, lasted a whopping 155 days.
07:29There were no firm plans to actually punish the guy, it was just an exercise in optics,
07:35and a half-assed one to boot.
07:37Number 5, the real explanation for the Ultimate Warrior Mania squash.
07:41As established in the previous entry, Ultimate Warrior did not squash Triple H at WrestleMania 12
07:46as a result of an etiquette breach committed two months earlier.
07:49So, why did it happen then?
07:52The truth is, Triple H wasn't remotely over with the crowd by WrestleMania.
07:56WWE hadn't pushed him with the same conviction they had in the months after his debut,
08:01and while he was hardly a jobber, with the collapse of the territory system really being felt,
08:06WWE wasn't exactly overflowing with options in 96.
08:10So, Warrior no-sold the pedigree.
08:12He didn't even kick out at one, he just popped up, hit his signature move,
08:16and went home.
08:17The match was originally booked to be a more competitive back and forth,
08:21but that didn't work for the Warrior, brother.
08:23Per the April 22nd Observer, Warrior vehemently refused to do anything that would help Helmsley.
08:29Which is both funny, and a fascinating snapshot of the politics at the time.
08:34As corrosive as the clique were, Vince McMahon was always, always gonna favor an absolute muscle freak
08:40over 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 too
08:49stupid even for the WWF of the late 1980s.
08:53Great as the sheepherders, in the Fed, they were not.
08:57Very much the brand of comedy that only Vince McMahon found to be a riot, they simply weren't funny.
09:02They weren't even caricatures of people, or even stereotypes, which Vince McMahon loved.
09:08People from Australasia don't do daft movements with their arms or lick people indiscriminately,
09:12at least the ones I know.
09:14They do normal human stuff, and get attacked by spiders the size of horses.
09:18Everybody knows that.
09:19To understand the extent to which Vince was in the midst of an identity crisis as a promoter,
09:24in the same year that he first began to recognize that there were actual human beings underneath
09:28the glorified Hasbro plastic known to most people as skin, the bushwhackers returned after
09:33several months away, and crikey, they evolved into Australian stereotypes, which is particularly
09:39absurd considering they were from New Zealand.
09:42Great.
09:43Number three, one wrestler had no business being in the ring.
09:46Terry Gordy was a fantastic wrestler in his heyday.
09:49A massive unit who could bump and move, he was mean, legitimate, and a perfect contrast to
09:55the clean-cut Von Erichs, against whom his fabulous freebirds warred to mega-drawing effect in the 80s.
10:01Gordy was special, and as such, he starred for All Japan Pro Wrestling in the early 90s.
10:06Impressive, given the stratospheric in-ring standard in that company.
10:11The trajectory of Gordy's career, and indeed life, changed forever when, in August 93,
10:16he entered a coma for five days following an overdose.
10:19He had to learn how to do everything in life all over again, but tragically, he awoke an
10:25entirely different person.
10:27This different Terry Gordy was a stranger to himself, almost.
10:30He had suffered profound brain damage, and yet, as a favour to Michael Hayes, hired by
10:35the WWF a year earlier.
10:38Gordy was brought in and repackaged as a turncoat druid to be The Undertaker's last monster of the
10:43week.
10:44Gordy, potentially through muscle memory, could somewhat emulate being a pro wrestler, but he
10:49just wasn't present.
10:50Jim Ross stated on his podcast that he was glad Terry didn't end up hurting himself or
10:55somebody else.
10:56But, wrestling being wrestling a gross industry, he continued to work until 2001, the year of
11:03his passing.
11:04Number 2.
11:05A Funny Legal Letter
11:06Scott Hall, as you'll know, turned up in WCW to initiate the New World Order angle.
11:12On an otherwise 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.
11:23It was heavily implied that he was an unwanted guest operating on behalf of the WWF, which
11:28was great, but an untenable idea.
11:31This was a WCW storyline not even remotely endorsed by the WWF, and that aspect of the
11:37act was abandoned when Hall was threatened with legal action.
11:41Were he to not drop the voice, the WWF would withhold both merchandise royalties and the
11:46pay-per-view payoffs that were due to him.
11:48What's hilarious about this is that it was technically the IP of Universal Pictures, in
11:53a very roundabout way.
11:55Razor Ramon was heavily, heavily inspired by Tony Montana, the lead character in 1983's
12:01Scarface, but Vince McMahon simply hadn't seen it.
12:04Scott Hall quickly started speaking in a voice almost indistinguishable from his own, but
12:09the sheer ignorance and hypocrisy of the legal threat was really funny.
12:13And at number one, the irony of tribalism.
12:16You 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,
12:29looking foolish.
12:30Last year, for example, in 2023, WWE fans questioned why AEW 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.
12:45The worst AEW fans continue to insist that WWE does not care about wrestling when gunfire exists.
12:51WWE fans, meanwhile, will say that blood is bad when Vince McMahon himself bled more at Survivor Series
12:582003 than Jon Moxley ever has.
13:01AEW fans will bury WWE for criticizing their fanbase, while Tony Khan recently told his fans
13:06to put their money where their mouth is and stop whinging, and so on.
13:10Tribal WWE fans, which is absolutely not to say all of them, mocked Tony Khan's recurring
13:16huge announcement gimmick.
13:17And rightly so.
13:18It's getting pretty annoying now, Tony.
13:20But those type of WWE fans don't know the half of it.
13:24The WWF promoted the returns of the fake Diesel and fake Razor Ramon with more hype than AEW's
13:30first dance.
13:31And that is barely an exaggeration.
13:33Tony Khan could hype an important announcement for a full month, reveal that he had signed
13:38Ryback to a 35-year contract, and it still wouldn't come close to Vince McMahon's desperation
13:43in the autumn of 96.
13:45I've been Andy.
13:46Thank you so much for tuning in.
13:48If you like this video, check out the next one.
13:50See you later.
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