>>8239659Pre-1995 it was where you go to see Real Men solve their problems gallantly, with Sting as the token sports entertainment guy for the kids. Nobody knows anybody who looks and acts like Hogan, Savage, or Warrior, but you might know lots of guys who sort of look like Arn Anderson, Steve Williams, Barry Windham, or Rick Rude, just not as big. Even the ugly-pretty boys with their bleached blond mullets were legit. You'd see guys like that playing Boston covers in a dive bar. By comparison Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart were like cartoon versions of what a "cool guy" looked like, made up by some "hip" young exec in New York. Denver the Last Dinosaur but he's a human.
post-1995: Hogan and Savage came in and the US lost its gritty little wrestling promotion but instead it was suddenly EVERYTHING in the world. You know how people talk about AEW existing in mini-clusters, like the Jerichoverse and the Codyverse where people just feud with the same groups of guys? WCW was the opposite of that, worldwide. You wanna see El Dandy vs. Fit Finlay? Jim Duggan vs. Psicosis? Konnan vs. Bobby Eaton? The matches may not be always good (a lot of them sure aren't), but they had ALL the wrestlers and weren't afraid to mix them completely randomly, and it was literally the first time in the world this had happened on this big of a scale. Meanwhile, the main event, after the Dungeon of Doomshit faded away to the nWo, became basically everyone's favorite gritty unauthorized fanfic reboot of the WWF's glory years, with heel Hulk Hogan and psycho Randy Savage and skanky milf Miss Elizabeth, and Hall and Nash actually being legit cool guys instead of a dumbass fake Cuban gangster and smiling truck driving dipshit.
Not that WWF didn't have its own good shit going on in the late 90s with Austin and the Rock; I mean they did win the ratings war. But they always did have some of that strong New York flavor that rubs non-NYers the wrong way, in ways that most NYers just don't get.
