The Legacy of World Wrestling Entertainment

Rayaan Ibtesham Chowdhury

Valued at 1.65 Billion Dollars, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is the biggest sports entertainment brand in the world.

Owned by Vince McMahon, WWE defeated long time rivals, Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in the famous Monday Night Wars TV Ratings Fight and ultimately bought WCW in 2001.

Founded as Capitol Wrestling by Jess McMahon

Jess’ son James renames the company to World Wrestling Federation (WWF)

Vincent K McMahon purchases the company from his father and gains complete control

The first WrestleMania is held which starts the WWE’s Flagship Megashow, one that runs till today

The Attitude Era begins. With stars like Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, WWF gains incredible mainstream success and records regular TV ratings of 6 million plus for its weekly Monday Night Raw

The company changed its name to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) after legal disputes with the World Wildlife Fund

Capitol Wrestling became highly successful in the 70’s,

Especially after the rise of Bruno Sammartino

However, they were just one of many promotions in the country

In 1982, Vincent K McMahon

Purchased the company from his father and started on his journey towards making the WWF a national sensation

Vincent Kennedy McMahonWrestling’s Greatest Innovator

The late 80’s saw a Golden Era as the WWF rode on the

back of Hulk Hogan to sell out stadiums andgain prime time TV slots.

Vince McMahon aggressively raided other companies for top talent and made many enemies in his path of making his company the industry leader

Features of Wrestling in this Period

Super Hero-esque Good Guys

The “Good Guy” characters were created to be straight out, idealistic good guys, much like Super Man without any known human flaws

Hulk Hogan was the best known example of this

Stereotypical Villains

The villain characters were also basically written villains with very simple motivations for being evil.

The Cold War themes played a part and foreigner characters were often cast as villains e.g. The Iron Shiek, who played an Iraqi Sympathizer

By and large, wrestling was very black and white in terms of writing

Within a decade, McMahon had transformed the WWF into a national sensation.

He showed a keen knowledge of marketing and established

individuals like Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, The Ultimate Warrior and a bit further down the road,

Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart and Shawn Michaels as national icons.

The WWF was going strong.

In the 90’s, Texan billionaire Ted Turner got behind a struggling company known as World Championship Wrestling and

everything started to change.

Funded by Turner’s millions and the creative genius

of Eric Bischoff, WCW started to overtake WWF.

For starters, they lured away all of the WWF’s biggest stars including Hulk Hogan with lucrative contracts,

After that, they took wrestling down a whole new creative direction.

WCW brought in realism and edginess to their

product. Gone were the black and white good guys/bad

guys. Now wrestlers were characters with grey personalities Good guys did bad, bad guys did

good.Lifelong superhero Hulk Hogan

turned into a degenerate!

WCW’s new creative direction yielded great results and for a large part of the mid 90’s, WCW beat WWF in the ratings, to the point where WWF was facing potential bankruptcy.

Faced with the possibility of going out of business, McMahon was desperate…….

Faced with possible bankruptcy, McMahon decided to go all out to compete with WCW. And thus, the Attitude Era was born!

WWF adopted WCW’s ideas but did so with far more intensity.

WWF’s Attitude Era gave a whole new meaning to wrestling as the storylines

became far more violent, content

became a lot more sexual and the product was elevated to truly meet the tastes of the era.

The Attitude Begins

By 1998, WWF had overtaken WCW again and were consistently beating them in the ratings.

WWF was back as the industry leader but was now a global brand,

The success of the Attitude Era allowed WWE to purchase WCW in 2001. Since then, no wrestling company has managed to come anywhere close to competing with Vince McMahon’s juggernaut.

Their success as a brand is evident in how they are now synonymous with wrestling. In terms of market monopoly, dominance of this nature has rarely been seen.

Future wise, WWE is extremely secure financially and is only going strength to strength