Why am i watching Wrestling Again?

Lately i have been asking myself the very real question; Why am i watching professional wrestling again?

As of late, i have found my self turning on the WWE on monday nights. In the last month i have watched it at least twice. Granted i have not watched the whole show but just bits and pieces. I wonder if it is because i am bored and at that point and time there was nothing else on, but i have a Netflix, and Crunchy Roll account, so i have more than enough shows in my cue, plus my On-Demand has enough content to keep my attention for weeks.

So why do i keep flipping back and watching the show? When i was young, i used to watch wrestling every night it was on. I had always been a fan of the WWE (Formerly the WWF) over all the other wrestling companies that were on television, but this was back in the 90’s when i was watching it. I was a fan of Wrestling when you had NWO, DX, Stone Cold, The Rock, Hulk Hogan, etc… Something about those guys always made the show exciting, but as they got older and new characters emerged, my attention shifted to other things and away from wrestling. Before this year, i hadn’t watched a single episode of WWE since the late 90’s Early 2000’s.

To be honest, i just got tired of the boring story lines that seemed to repeat day in and day out, not to mention everyone was jumping from good guy to bad guy every other week and it was rather confusing. I preferred when you had the established bad guys like NWO or Stone Cold who was always a fan favorite because he did what he wanted. I remember he drove a giant beer truck to to ring side and Sprayed vince McMahon with a fire hose filled with beer. I remember i thought that was one of the coolest things. I remember The Undertaker and Mc Foley falling through the cage. Those were good times.

To be honest as much as i am not a fan of the new WWE, i still watch the shows. I think it is because i am amazed how popular it still is. I guess you could say the same thing about my love of Hockey, Football, and Soccer. Those Athletes don’t stay young forever and to keep the product alive you need to refresh the talent pool with newer and younger stars, but it just seems that this new Era of Wrestling is more Soap Opera and less People beating each other into a pulp on top of a 20 foot cage, or someone being thrown off the Entrance ramp onto a pile of tables and cables.

I realize that the characters back in the day were more gimmicky than they are now, but honestly i liked that more. I heard someone talking about wrestling in the modern day and how the characters now are more relatable and that those people are someone you could aspire too or look up to, but i find that boring. Every character is pretty much the same now a days. They are a guy or a girl and they are good or bad, and they are friends with this wrestler but they hate that other wrestler.

The wrestlers back in the 80’s and 90’s were far superior in my opinion. You had characters like Jake the Snake who always carried that giant python around and occasionally he would use it to scare or distract people. You had Ray Mysterio who always had that mask and even though he was small, he was fast and agile. I liked the characters who were a little bit out there, they almost had a sense of superhuman to them. I liked that they seemed a little too farfetched to be real because that is what made the show so much better, these almost wacky characters fighting for championships or just because they didn’t get along with someone, all the while having some bizarre back story that made their personality all the much more amusing. I even remember when the four horsemen were still around and would occasionally make an appearance. I remember seeing Ken Shamrock wrestling, only to find out years later he was an MMA fighter.

I don’t see the same unique characters in the Modern Wrestling era, the majority of them are just cookie cutter copies of the others. The Miz who started his television career on Reality Tv is a narcissist who thinks that he is the greatest wrestling star in the world and that he is god’s gift to the world. The most interesting thing about him is his former Stunt Double. Damien Sandow who at the time went as Damien Mizdow was hilarious. He was quirky in a way that as The Miz was getting pummeled, Damien would pretend like he was getting beat up as well. I enjoyed watching Damien act out everything The Miz was doing almost as if he was actually mocking him.

Another Character who also plays a narcissist is Seth Rollins, he was the 2014 winner of the Money in the Bank match and he walks around in this almost paranoid delusion that is fueled by triple H and Stephanie McMahon which the two of them seem to be called “The Authority” which is rather odd, but i understand why. I never see him wrestle, but then again i haven’t watched much, but the times i have seen, there seems to be twice as much conversation. Seth is always talking how he is the future of wrestling and how he is the best and what not, but i never actually saw him fight.

I could go on and list more characters that fit this narcissistic, or sociopathic tendencies, but i could fell several pages with it. I miss the crazy characters that seem to be dwindling. Going through the WWE’s active roster, I see only a handful of truly unique characters like Star Dust, Diego, Fernando, Sin Cara, and there are a few others. Even Kane has succumbed to the mainstream demystification of the wrestlers. There was a time where Kane was the supposed hell spawn brother of the Undertaker. Kane used to come out in this red leather mask that covered his face, and when he entered the ring, red fireworks would explode from the corners of the ring. He never spoke, he just beat everyone into submission and occasionally he shot fireballs into peoples faces, but now he shaved his head and is a normal every day joe wrestler.

I can’t say that I am fully back into the wrestling, but i have found myself flipping to that channel every once and a while to see what is going on. I think that it is a curiosity of what is happening more than it is anything else. I don’t find myself having to watch the whole thing, just a few minutes of curiosity and i am good. I am not saying that wrestling is dumb or anything, i just can’t say this modern wrestling really impresses me, call it what you will but i prefer the 90’s wrestling where someone would get a beer dumped on them or occasionally buried alive, to me that will be when wrestling was at its best.