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.
00:071995 was an antiquated, bleak nightmare. 1997, meanwhile, was absolutely wild,
00:13with WWE on the cusp of something truly amazing ahead of its next boom period.
00:18Given these huge differences, it only makes sense that the year in between 1995 and 1997
00:24was pretty damn wacky. Hello there my very good friends, I'm Andy from WhatCulture and here are
00:2910 things you didn't know about WWE in 1996. 10. A Creative Spike
00:36While not necessarily a great year, 1996 was about as creative as the then-WWF ever got.
00:42The creativity wasn't necessarily good or even consistent a lot of the time,
00:47but the willingness to explore virtually every new direction underscored a crazed response to
00:53the 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,
01:04including the Ironman match Boiler Room Brawl Buried Alive and the Crybaby match,
01:09which was absolutely dire. Of these new stipulations, the Boiler Room Brawl was key.
01:16Mankind and The Undertaker destroyed one another in a violent and compelling backstage fight that
01:21unlocked a new realm, a new creative outlet, and informed the endlessly entertaining hijinks of
01:27the imminent Attitude Era. 1996 was the year in which, between the incredible brawling of the
01:32Strap and Boiler Room matches and the technical purity of the Ironman, the WWF embraced true
01:38stylistic change for the first time. 1996 was the year in which the WWF started to get it.
01:459. Eh, about that Ironman match. The WrestleMania 12 main event is canonized by WWE to this day
01:52as a classic, a true highlight reel moment in the career of Shawn Michaels. The promotion of the
01:58match has trickled down to the fandom. It routinely makes and ranks highly in lists of the best
02:04matches ever. Now, wrestling is very subjective, as is every single art form on the planet,
02:10so this list entry right here isn't something along the lines of trying to tell you that
02:14the match was actually bad, even if subjectively the match was actually boring until the last 15
02:20minutes. But you go ahead and try watching this one back today and tell me it's one of the best
02:25things you've ever seen. You simply can't. Before it unfolded decades before Edge vs Randy Orton at
02:32Backlash 2020, the WWF practically guaranteed you'd see the best match ever, as Bret Hart
02:38locked up with Shawn Michaels. It wasn't even the best match in WWF that year, but again,
02:44that's an opinion. It is a fact that about 99.9% of the time, evidence of a great match or a popular
02:51slash overmatch is echoed by the crowd reaction and the sheer mind-melting extent that they are
02:57into it. That's called psychology, brother. On that front, Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels in
03:02the Ironman was something of a failure, because the crowd were dead. In another indictment,
03:07many were leaving the arena as the match unfolded. VHS viewers could tell which colour the seats in
03:13the arena were, and Dave Meltzer, who attended live, wrote in an edition of the Wrestling Observer
03:18Newsletter that, and I quote,
03:32In 2002, knowing that it was obscenely difficult to strike a halfway decent TV deal, NWATNA had
03:38the idea of airing weekly pay-per-views as a compromise and a bid to generate more money than
03:44a series of house shows. It didn't work. Well over a year before Vince McMahon formally introduced
03:49the Attitude Eater with a verbose speech that basically amounted to, we're gonna do car crash
03:54TV with breasts, the WWF wanted to launch something similar. It didn't work either.
03:59The idea was for the WWF to air a risque 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, ultimately
04:10manifested as Shotgun Saturday Night, which premiered as a TV show in January 1997. Shotgun
04:16was exciting and creative, if not exactly great TV, but it was quite tame. You have to think,
04:22away from stricter standards and practices, that if the weekly pay-per-view model did amount to
04:27anything, it would have been much more edgy. In a neat trivia note, when Dave Meltzer relayed
04:31the story in an August edition of The Observer, he said the internal word within WWE was that the
04:37Saturday specials would, and I quote, push the envelope. Vince would go on to use that exact
04:43same verbiage when kickstarting the Attitude Era in December 1997. There was a company-wide
04:48awareness in the then-WWF that things needed to change, but these experimental ideas only took
04:54root months, or even years later. 7. The Click's Chokehold Was Real
04:59The Click had a chokehold over Vince McMahon, which they used, allegedly, to throttle the life
05:04out of anything that did not involve them, and anything that they could get away with. And they
05:09manifested this quite brutally in 1996. Dave Meltzer, that man again, reported in a May edition
05:16of The Observer that Vader had to do criminally short darkmatch jobs for Shawn Michaels ahead of
05:21their Summerslam main event. Jim Cornette has always said that Shawn didn't want to take the
05:26beating that came with working Vader, and he was right. If you look at the data on Cage Match,
05:31or another website, Shawn often went over Vader in under 5 minutes. Meltzer reported that Vader
05:37was so furious at this that he was once heard saying this is BS laying down for this guy
05:43when storming to the ring. Shawn went double time going over Diesel on the house show circuit,
05:48who was already on the way out of the company. But you'll never guess who Razor Ramon did jobs for
05:53on the way out. Between May 17th and 19th, in four matches across the legendarily brutal WWE
06:00schedule, Scott Hall stared at the lights for one Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Helmsley, subsequently,
06:06was punished for the curtain call. Or was he? In May, when Diesel and Razor worked their last
06:15matches for WWE at a Madison Square Garden house show, each member of the clique broke
06:21kayfabe by banding together, face and heel alignments be damned, and bowing out.
06:26The curtain call is a Mandela Effect phenomenon in and of itself. Somehow the idea has taken
06:32root in some circles that Triple H was squashed by the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania 12 as
06:37a punishment for his role in it. But this simply cannot possibly be true, considering WrestleMania
06:43took place before the curtain call, and if Vince McMahon could see into the future,
06:47he'd have probably made a phone call to the Wall 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. Measured against everything else, it was actually
07:02pretty tame by the clique's standards, although Triple H was apparently punished as a fall guy to
07:07pacify some old Ed 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,
07:24and his punishment, quote-unquote, lasted a whopping 155 days. There were no firm plans
07:30to actually punish the guy, it was just an exercise in optics, and a half-assed one to boot.
07:37The Real Explanation for the Ultimate Warrior Mania Squash
07:41As established in the previous entry, Ultimate Warrior did not squash Triple H at WrestleMania
07:46as a result of an etiquette breach committed two months earlier. So 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 1996.
08:10So, Warrior no-sold a pedigree. He didn't even kick out at one, he just popped up,
08:15hit his signature moves, and went home. The match was originally booked to be a more
08:20competitive back-and-forth, but that didn't work for the Warrior Brother. Per the April 22nd
08:24Observer, 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,
08:37always gonna favor an absolute muscle freak over the lot of them.
08:414. The Bushwhackers were still around
08:44You may remember the Bushwhackers, the arm-throwing, head-licking madlads who
08:48may well have been too stupid even for the WWF of the late 1980s.
08:53Great as the sheepherders in the Fed, they were not. Very much the brand of comedy that
08:58only Vince McMahon found to be a riot, they simply weren't funny. They weren't even
09:03caricatures of people, or even stereotypes, which Vince McMahon loved. People from Australasia
09:09don't do daft movements with their arms or lick people indiscriminately, at least the ones I know.
09:14They do normal human stuff, and get attacked by spiders the size of horses. Everybody 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
09:27beings underneath the glorified Hasbro plastic known to most people as skin,
09:31the Bushwhackers returned after several months away, and crikey, they evolved.
09:36Into Australian stereotypes. Which is particularly absurd considering
09:40they were from New Zealand. Great.
09:433. 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 Erics,
09:56against whom his fabulous freebirds warred to mega-drawing effect in the 80s. Gordy was special,
10:02and as such, he starred for All Japan Pro Wrestling in the early 90s. Impressive,
10:07given the stratospheric in-ring standard in that company.
10:10The trajectory of Gordy's career, and indeed life, changed forever when, in August 93,
10:16he entered a coma for 5 days following an overdose. He had to learn how to do everything
10:21in life all over again, but tragically, he awoke an entirely different person.
10:27This 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 the week.
10:44Gordy, potentially through muscle memory, could somewhat emulate being a pro wrestler,
10:49but he just wasn't present. Jim Ross stated on his podcast that he was glad Terry didn't end up
10:54hurting himself or somebody else, but wrestling being wrestling, a gross industry, he continued
11:00to work until 2001, the year of his passing. 2. A 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 a 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 was
11:29great, but an untenable idea. This was a WCW storyline not even remotely endorsed by the WWF,
11:36and that aspect of the act was abandoned when Hall was threatened with legal action. Were he to not
11:42drop the voice, the WWF would withhold both merchandise royalties and the pay-per-view
11:47payoffs that were due to him. What's hilarious about this is that it was technically the IP of
11:52Universal Pictures, in a very roundabout way. Razor Ramon was heavily, heavily inspired by
11:57Tony Montana, the 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.
12:131. The Irony of Tribalism
12:16You can prefer one wrestling promotion to another. It's almost impossible not to do that,
12:21given that that's how taste and preferences work. But you can't, or at least shouldn't,
12:26be a demented loyalist without at some point looking foolish. Last year, for example. In 2023,
12:32WWE fans questioned why AEW had allowed MJF to perform with a torn labrum. Meanwhile,
12:38to use just one example, Rey Mysterio in WWE worked through a serious knee injury for several
12:45months. The worst AEW fans continue to insist that WWE does not care about wrestling when
12:51exists. WWE fans, meanwhile, will say that blood is bad when Vince McMahon himself bled
12:56more at Survivor Series 2003 than Jon Moxley ever has. AEW fans will bury WWE for criticising their
13:03fanbase, while Tony Khan recently told his fans to put their money where their mouth is
13:08and stop whinging. And so on. Tribal WWE fans, which is absolutely not to say all of them,
13:14mock Tony Khan's recurring huge announcement gimmick. And rightly so. It's getting pretty
13:19annoying now, Tony. But those type of WWE fans don't know the half of it. The WWF promoted the
13:25returns of the fake Diesel and fake Razor Ramon with more hype than AEW's first dance,
13:31and that is barely an exaggeration. Tony Khan could hype an important announcement for a full
13:36month, reveal that he had signed Ryback to a 35-year contract, and it still wouldn't come
13:41close to Vince McMahon's desperation in the autumn of 96. I've been Andy, thank you so much for
13:47tuning in and if you liked this video, check out the next one. See you later.