Executive Meddling/Professional Wrestling: Difference between revisions

* [[Hulk Hogan]]. Full stop. The guy was trained by Hiro Matsuda, himself well known in Japan and a shoot wrestler of some considerable skill. Looking at Hogan's non-WWF, non-WCW matches in Japan, most would swear they were looking at an entirely different wrestler. After all, who could ever imagine ''HULK'' freaking ''HOGAN'' pulling an ''ENZUGIRI'' on someone, let alone the Great Muta?! But believe it or not it happened in a match in Japan when he was in his fifth reign but wasn't competing for the WWF in the match. The match was a mix of technical and brawling from both wrestlers and it was one of the more entertaining matches either man has been in in the last twenty years. Hogan even points this out in his first autobiography. When he got to the WWF under Vince McMahon Sr. he was told to wrestle like a generic 'big man' character, and Vince Jr. wanted him to do the same when he returned to win his first world championship there, wanting to have Hogan wrestle like a generic power wrestler and get by on his, admittedly, massive amounts of on-screen charisma. By the time he got to [[WCW]], American fans were so used to the style he was forced to use for over fifteen years in the US that it would have been largely pointless to show his actual skills this side of the Pacific, so he never did. Ahh, [[What Could Have Been]].

** It depends on when he's speaking and who he's speaking to, but the story at times has changed from "they wouldn't let me do it" to "they never asked me, so I didn't put in the effort." Much of the legend of Hulk Hogan in Japan is due to him having to work a lot harder (his American routine would not have gone over well in Japan, and in fact didn't in 1990 even against a motivated Stan Hansen and Genichiro Tenryu), and working against smaller, faster, more motivated wrestlers who could carry him (most of his American opponents were stiffs, with the main small ones, Piper and Savage, being more of Memphis-style cheap heat magnets as opposed to workhorses).

* Turner Networks also forced WCW to keep their shows at a PG level, which made it difficult for WCW to compete with the more risque WWF. This was in theory not a bad idea - they were counting on WWF's programming alienating their sponsors and putting WCW at a more advantageous position. However, some of the changes were somewhat silly. For example, renaming "foreign objects" (a pro wrestling term for weapons introduced into the match" to [[Political Correctness Gone Mad|"international objects"]].

** They also nixed at least one gimmick before it started; Seven, a mysterious dream/SevenDeadlySins character, was introduced in promos the network felt uncomfortably close to child abduction.

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[[Category:Professional Wrestling]]