#wwe #wrestling
News of Chris Benoit’s murder of his wife Nancy and their young son Daniel and this own suicide, dominated airwaves in the summer of 2007. Benoit changed the course of wrestling forever on the heels of his heinous actions. WWE implemented several changes to its company in the wake of the tragedy: some having to do with the wellness of its talents and the use of steroids. The most important change WWE made was to its creative. Post-Benoit, the image of pro wrestlers was at an all-time low in the eyes of the public. This forced McMahon to turn John Cena into the super hero character he became from 2008-2013. Otherwise known as “Super Cena” by fans, this version of John Cena was everything you’d want in a man and face of the company. He never backed down in the face of adversity and always triumphed thanks to his beliefs in hustle, loyalty and respect. Cena also did tremendous charity work, becoming a face of the Make-a-Wish foundation. On the other hand, a lot of die-hard wrestling fans hated this version of Cena which led to a decline in fan interest of WWE. In a lot of ways, Chris Benoit ruined wrestling. I spoke about this idea in a video already, I’ll link that in the description, and I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t. Benoit wasn’t the only reason why WWE cleaned its image up by deciding to go PG. Linda McMahon, wife of Vince McMahon, was embarking on a political career around the time of July 22, 2008, which would be the day WWE officially went PG. Linda ran for Senator of Connecticut throughout 2009 and 2010, and surely her political career would benefit greatly from WWE toning down on the raunchy television of the late 90s and early 2000s. Linda made it far in her political endeavors, eventually being elected to President Trump’s cabinet in 2016. But at what cost was that to WWE in terms of their creative? It was detrimental in that aspect, the PG Era was largely filled with awful television for over 10 years. The transition period in 2008 and 2009 was fine and WWE post-tribal chief has been superior. But those years in between from 2010-2019 were BAD bro. There was one other main reason for WWE going PG, sponsors. Honestly, the sponsors might have led to WWE going PG anyway, so the Benoit tragedy and Linda’s politics might not deserve any of the blame. The creation of the Super Cena character is more to blame on Benoit than the actual PG Era. If it weren’t for the PR hit wrestlers took post-Benoit, WWE may not have gone so extreme with the good-guy Cena character. WWE is at the mercy of their sponsors since becoming a publicly traded company on the stock market. Meaning, they legally have to do what’s in the best interests of the company’s shareholders even if it comes at the expense of their fanbase. So at some point WWE would have had to bend the knee to the sponsors. However, in recent years, WWE has shown that they can attract sponsors outside of the family friendly ones like Coke and Mountain Dew. WWE now is sponsored by vodka so yeah perhaps it is a combination of all three of those factors that forced WWE into moving into the PG Era. Perhaps, attracting ultra family friendly sponsors was also in response to the bad PR from the Benoit situation. Let’s focus on what was on screen for a moment. The PG era was bad for a lot of reasons, for example, oversaturation of content. This era saw the advent of three-hour raws, and eight-hour pay per views. On top of that, creatively the company was stale, it was like they did a complete 180 from the attitude era days. It was so kid-friendly that it was cheesy, and kids didn’t even want to watch wrestling anymore. And then at some point, it just became about the psychotic old man Vince booking whatever he wanted to see regardless of it driving away viewers in record numbers. As time goes by, I feel like wrestling fans, mostly internet fans have glorified aspects of the PG Era that weren’t that great but only stood out because of how bad the product was on a year-by-year basis. And I feel like the PG Era is actually worse than you remember. I was doing a deep dive into it and man there was so much bad stuff going on. WWE was so bad for so long that nowadays they pack out arenas and regularly break profit records solely by putting out solid content. I don’t think the content of today’s WWE is as good as the Attitude Era or even the Golden Era, but it sure is nice to have a good product again. These past 2 years since Triple H took over actually makes the WWE PG Era look worse than I remembered it being. And I can’t believe I spent so much time throughout the years watching WWE religiously with hopes that it would be as good as it was during my childhood. The reality is that if Vince was still around, it’d be just as bad, thankfully, things are looking great since merging with TKO and Nick Khan and Triple H firmly in charge at the top.