Look at the crowd as the attack goes on.  They want to kill the bad guys in there for hurting their hero.  Dusty had connected with the people and they wanted their champion to be ok.  This is the exact same idea used at Summerslam 1994 with Owen Hart and Jim Neidhart locking the cage and destroying Bret while the Hart Family storm the cage to get Bret to safety.

About a month later, Dusty Rhodes returned to television with something to say about what Ric Flair had done to him.  Did I mention he was facing Flair for the title at Starrcade 1985?

This promo, called Hard Times, is widely considered the greatest promo of all time because the people could and did identify with it. People got what Dusty was talking about and as they listened, they could see what he was talking about in their own lives. The fans identified with Dusty Rhodes and what he was talking about, making Dusty Rhodes THEIR hero. As luck would have it, this hero would be facing a man who was everything the common man wasn’t at a major wrestling event, and YOU could watch it if you paid your money right now.

That’s how you build to a match people.  It gave the fans a reason to want to see the match because it was THEIR hero fighting the man that wants to hold all of them down.  It’s a perfect buildup and the whole thing still works to this day.  Not so much the match but you get the idea.

You can check out a review of the match (which isn’t Required Viewing) here:

T.L. Hopper was a wrestling plumber.  End of gimmick.  Seriously, that’s it.  He was a wrestling plumber and nothing more.  We didn’t know whether to cheer him, boo him, or anything about him other than his job.  Why was he a wrestler?  Why not stay a plumber?  Was he the WWF plumber?  Was it a side job?  Why are we thinking of all these questions?  In short, there was nothing to this character and it didn’t shock anyone when he was gone in less than a year.

At the end of the day there was one major issue above all others with Hopper: there was nothing special about him.  Open your phone book and see how many plumbers you find in the yellow pages.  There are probably dozens if you live in a decent sized city.  In other words, there’s nothing special about a plumber.  This one happens to wrestle and that’s the end of the differences between him and any other plumber you can name.

Flash forward to about 2011.  Down in Florida Championship Wrestling, a power lifter turned wrestler joined the WWE developmental system.  His name was Big E. Langston and all we knew about him was that he was strong.  He needed a nickname so he was christened Florida’s Strongest Man.  Uh…..ok?

That’s kind of impressive but is he stronger than everyone in Oregon?  On the street I live on?  Can he out lift everyone in Bismark, North, Dakota?  Tell you what: I’ll go to Oregon and if the strongest man there sucks, I’ll come buy a ticket to see Langston, providing there isn’t a flight to Bismark later in the day.  It also didn’t help that there was a guy on the main WWE roster known as the World’s Strongest Man.  It really makes Langston look like a low rent imitation, so why would I want to pay for someone who might be one of the strongest men in the country, let alone the rest of the world?

The lesson here should be obvious: make the gimmick something you can’t find elsewhere.  Look at Kurt Angle when he debuted.  The emphasis was on the fact that he was the ONLY Olympic Gold Medalist in WWF History, as in no one else has ever done this.  Randy Orton is the APEX Predator, as in the top of the food chain.  Most titles are the WORLD Heavyweight Championship, not the Louisiana and Missouri Champion.

In short, make a gimmick something that will draw a crowd, not something that makes people look at what better options there are.  Make them say “I want to see THAT!”

The awards cover the period from I believe July of 2012 to June of 2013 or something close to that.

This is called repackaging and it can be the solution to anyone’s problems.  A ton of people have been repackaged over the years to incredible results.

Hulk Hogan – Generic heel to REAL AMERICAN

Papa Shango – Voodoo priest to pimp

Bret Hart – Cowboy to Excellence of Execution

Steve Austin – Ringmaster to the Texas Rattlesnake

Undertaker – Demon who worshipped Vince McMahon to biker

I could go on and on but you get the point.  The key thing to repackaging is that somewhere out there, there’s a gimmick that works for you if you have the talent.  Look at Kane for example.  He went from generic heel characters like Unabomb and Doomsday to a gangster in WCW named Bruiser Mastino (he fought Sting once on WCW Saturday Night) to an evil dentist to a fake Diesel until they FINALLY found the character that worked for him: the Undertaker’s brother who could manipulate fire.  The key thing though was the man had talent and the key was putting him in the right character to make that talent come out.  He tried everything and finally got it right, giving him a career that has run 16 years and a ton of titles.

Now jump back to WWE today: think of how many people could thrive as a completely new character.  Wade Barrett comes to mind.  He’s just a generic English brawler.  A new gimmick could do wonders for him.  Look at what happened to guys like Brodus Clay.  He went from a monster heel with a good look to the Funkasaurus and was the hottest act on Raw for a long time.  It can be done, but the key is to do the work, which WWE seems to not want to do most of the time.  Instead they would rather have a guy lose and lose and lose and lose then give him two wins and wonder why no one cares about him.

Now let’s flash back to my childhood and a few years before.  The voice of the WWF was Gorilla Monsoon, a play by play announcer who would later become Commissioner.  Monsoon had been a wrestler in the 70s but retired in 1981, several years before I was born.  I never saw Monsoon wrestle and to the best of my knowledge his last match was in 1987 in an old timers battle royal.

This brings us to modern TNA.  Hulk Hogan is now retired and the GM of Impact.  He’s wrestled two matches in TNA but is far from an active competitor.  As mentioned, Hogan last wrestled in 2003 and to call him a regular back then is a stretch.  For all intents and purposes, Hogan’s last full year as an active wrestler was in 1999.

Therefore, unless you’re about 17 or older, you probably don’t remember Hogan as an active wrestler.  I’m sure you’ve heard of him and know who he is, but there’s no direct connection to him.  Growing up, I knew who Monsoon was and that he used to be a wrestler but I knew nothing about his career other than a few Coliseum Video matches.  In other words, Monsoon was an old guy who used to be a wrestler apparently.

For younger fans, that’s what Hulk Hogan is in TNA.  He’s like Jack Brisco or Dory Funk Jr. to someone my age.  I know of their work and I respect what they did, but there’s nothing that ties me to them, much like younger fans with Hogan today.

Yet in TNA, Hogan is the focal point of the show a lot of the time.  The portion of the audience that has a connection to him as a wrestler is shrinking and the portion of the audience that knows him as that guy who used to wrestle is growing.  To them, Hogan is a guy they’ve never seen wrestle other than on DVD.

And they wonder why their audience barely grows.

It’s the story that sells the feud.

Here’s his podcast page which has episodes of him just talking about whatever comes to mind or interviews with legends like Angle, Hart and Nash plus many others.

http://www.podcastone.com/Steve-Austin-Show?showAllEpisodes=true

Think about that for a minute when you hear Cole talking about Orton and Cena and HHH having like 40 world title reigns between them.  They’ve done that in less than 15 years combined.  The 40th WWF Title reign took 35 years to reach in 1998.  See why old fans get annoyed at how fast the title changes hands in modern times?