In the Jim Herd days, WCW was anything but great. It was damn awful. I mean, they had Robocop save Sting in a match once. Herd fired Flair, even though he was the biggest draw they had. He had Big Josh go to the ring with dancing bears. He tried to make Stan Hansen a funny cowboy. During this time, all their PPV's had fans chanting "We want Flair!" distracting heavily from the matches.
When Flair came back and Herd was gone, they did everything they could to cover up the Herd years and really pretend they never happened. Everyone was laughing at WCW when they tried to compete with WWF and just making fun of them because they knew WCW couldn't compete...
Yes, AEW is a new promotion. But that really doesn't hurt them because they are getting many well known wrestlers. Now AEW may not yet have the name recognition or the history, but they have Chris Jericho, and Jericho has history as well as name recognition strong enough to get people to give it a chance. And when they come to see him, they might just end up liking the ones they don't know yet.
When the WWE Network came out, I argued like hell with people that it was a great idea and it would succeed. they lost money in the first quarter of the network's life, but that was due to startup capital. I kept telling people it would succeed and people kept telling me that the hemmoraging of money had to stop. And look what happened. It became their most successful business model of all time and WWE's worth has doubled since the Network was released.
My point is only to not just assume something isn't going to work because it seems futile or like just a bad idea. Many times when people feel that way, they end up eating a lot of crow.
I still feel that a better comparison for AEW would be upstart TNA, if the Jarretts had Turner money. A new company with little to no history, started and run by wrestlers, using a combination of top indie talents and guys recognizable from the big promotions. Hell, it may not be weekly, but theyre even starting out with a PPV-only model.
Honestly, I think if they really want to "evolve wrestling" or whatever their stupid mission is, they should be looking to get a weekly major wrestling show onto one of the big streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or even YouTube Red (or whatever YouTube's streaming thing is called). Streaming services are the future of television after all, and are growing in the number of users every day. Capitol Wrestling, House of Hardcore, AAA, and Impact (among others) are all starting to use Twitch as a way to broaden their audience and make it feel more interactive. WWE even is starting to do this in recent years with the whole Facebook Watch thing.
I get your point, and I'm not entirely disagreeing with you on it. I'm not totally shitting on it and am willing to give it a fair shot, because at the end of the day I'm a stupid wrestling fan who will basically watch anything if wrestling is on the marquee. I am simply just not thrilled with this card in the slightest, and am genuinely curious as to what makes AEW so special compared to other "major" companies on TV.
What AEW different from MLW, RoH, and Impact is kind of obvious. Every Wrestling company has a different feel to it, I should know as I was watching around 12 or so companies at one time and each one "felt" different. C*4 Wrestling felt different Progress, Progress felt different from Demand, Shimmer felt different from Women's Wrestling Revolution, Stardom feels different from Ice Ribbon, and so forth. Hell even hardcore promotions felt different ,and those are the ones that get told they are the same thing over and over again. Impact has a very professional feel and it makes a great WWE alternative because they are kind of like them to some extent. You get the same feel, but it seems more personal. Ring of Honor feels like a professional Indy promotion that is used to enhanced future wrestlers, and MLW and even NWA have that old skool territory feel to it. AEW will have the feel of either early WWF when they gave a shit about their fans or it will have the feel of WCW when it was top dog and gave a shit about their fans. As I said before each promotion I watched felt different and All In was a celebration of all that so it felt unique so to say, and even though I am done with wrestling I will say that Double or Nothing and even AEW will have its own unique feel to it.
Just my two cents.
This is more towards the point I was making. I just don't know how I feel about it until they do something other than a big PPV. Will they still be running 15-20,000 seat arenas every week? Or will they be running smaller venues and only using big ones for the major shows? Is Jim Ross on commentary a good idea at this point? Will AEW end up being anything more than a glorified circle jerk for Cody and his friends like their YouTube show? Will they be able to continue to generate the buzz they have now for their once in a while shows once they start running weekly? I do think there is potential in AEW, and again, I'm gonna give it a fair chance. I think it's fair to be skeptical of promises being made or ideas being offered, though, when there are other companies out there that have already been doing the same thing and have only seen moderate results once the initial buzz wore off
