>>16055015the issue was mostly that the nwo birthed cool heels that, as a concept, required cooler babyfaces which were near impossible to make.
wcw got as far as they could with their THREE non-complete dorks (ddp, sting and goldberg), but they didnt have the juice to replace the nwo merch machine, so you couldnt just outright end it.
they might have done something with bret to prolong the inevitable, but there's no scenario where bret hart merch out paces anything wcw already had going for them.
the novelty of the nwo gimmick is what put wcw on the map in popular culture, withut it, we'd have no idea what a wcw was. that's likely true for wwf, too.
