Clown Says: The Vertigo of Wrestling

The WWE has lost it's appeal to me. It hasn't been interesting for a while, but now it's at the point where I can't even sit through an entire PPV. I stopped watching Wrestlemania three times to go on Youtube because the show was so dull, and I gave up on Extreme Rules altogether.

Many fans seem to agree. Lots of people complain about the 'PG Era', and want the 'Attitude Era' to return. That's not going to happen. The WWE is no longer owned outright by Vince McMahon, it is a publicly traded company. They have to do what the shareholders tell them to, by law. If the shareholders want a nice, family oriented show that they can talk about at their society dinners, then that's what the WWE has to make.

However, I've been thinking over the last couple of days that the WWE has the potential to make the best wrestling product in the world.

There is a market for a more adult-oriented wrestling show. This is a fact. There is a profit to be made in marketing a wrestling product at adults. So how can WWE, whose stockholders want a family oriented show, have a better chance than anyone else of making an adult-oriented show?

Consider Vertigo. DC Comics are a family comics company. They print titles like Batman, and Superman. Comics that parents buy for their kids because they bought the exact same comics when they were a kid. Many of those people would be horrified if DC started printing extreme graphic violence, swearing and blasphemy in their comics. They would either switch to one of DC's competitors, or stop reading comics all together. However, there is a large market for such comics, one that DC wanted to exploit. So what did they do?

They set up Vertigo. Vertigo is a comics company for adult and mature readers. That way, when little Timmy and his dad go to the comic store to buy this month's Superman comic, he doesn't see Preacher on the shelf next to it with a big old DC logo on the front cover (yes, it's been long out of print, but you get my point). In fact, Timmy may have never heard of Vertigo. If he has, he may not know it has anything to do with DC. Similarly, the kind of parents that would boycott a company like Vertigo may not know they have anything to do with DC. However, a large number of mature comic fans get the kind of stories they want - of course, all Vertigo fans know that it's a DC venture.

WWE could do the same thing with ECW. Picture this, one week Vince comes out to ECW and says that sadly, ECW isn't as profitable as they'd like and they're shutting it down. A few weeks later, ECW appears on the television schedules. It's in a different, much later, time slot. No mention of it is made on WWE shows or any of their website. Intrigued, you tune in. The first thing you see is Shane McMachon (or whoever) in the middle of the ring, with a microphone. He goes on to explain that the WWE is a family company, and their product has to be sanitized to be friendly to that audience. However, they know that the old fans don't want the same thing as the new fans. The old fans don't care about Divas, and soap opera, and pyros. The old fans, the real fans, just want to see great wrestling. That's what ECW is for. Even though the WWE will not officially acknowledge the fact on their programs, they want to give something back to the people who have carried them through thick and thin, and because of that a new era of ECW is born.

The new ECW puts on superb extreme wrestling matches. There's blood, there's swearing, weapons are used freely. Every match is no-DQ. The fans want to see weapons being used, and the new ECW isn't going to patronise them with the usual 'Oh look the ref's distracted! And oh, look, he's got a chair!'. They book great technical wrestlers, great high flyers, they bring in guys from Japan and Mexico but don't book them as 'sneaky salt-thrower' or 'petty criminal' but instead simply as great wrestlers. Everything that WWE is doing, ECW does the exact opposite. Instead of putting on shows in front of huge arenas, they put on shows in tiny arenas like the old ECW Arena, the Hammerstein Ballroom, etc.

Since only people who are really into wrestling would know that there's a connection, the shareholders wouldn't have to worry about being embarrassed by the content of the show. The adult fans get what they want. And best of all, there would be great wrestling on TV again. They wouldn't even have to use the ECW brand, they could create an all-new show for this purpose.

This is never going to happen. But the opportunity is there.

- Clown