Popularity Power/Professional Wrestling

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Examples of Popularity Power in Professional Wrestling include:

  • Professional Wrestling uses this trope to full advantage of course, with most wrestlers' positions on the cards determined entirely by how popular they are. However, most pro wrestling promoters aren't above subverting the trope, whether it's to launch a new character, keep things unpredictable, or simply to give the fans a happy moment as the dominant Heel gets beaten by the lowest of the low.
    • One of the most well-known subversions was World Championship Wrestling wrestler Bill Goldberg, who, in his first match, got the standard Jobber treatment—no music, no televised entrance, no flashy costume, just a quick announcement of name and hometown during his opponent's much flashier entrance. And then he won that match. And then 171 more. By the end of that streak, he had his own Popularity Power going.
    • Another storyline involved a WWF Jobber losing a few matches to better-known wrestlers under names like "The Cannonball Kid", "The Good Luck Kid", "The Kamikaze Kid", etc. until finally, now simply known as "The Kid", he scored an upset victory over Razor Ramon. This earned him the name "The 1-2-3 Kid", as his entire gimmick was that he started getting upset victories, winning 2 more times against Razor Ramon, then beating other top heels as they came out of the woodwork to put the kid "in his place". Razor actually made a Heel Face Turn simply by taking his losses in good humor and taking the kid under his wing. Eventually. As a side note, said kid was Sean Waltman, the wrestler later known as Syxx (in the nWo) and X-Pac (in D Generation X)
    • And then there was the famous Barry Horowitz, whose 800-strong losing streak came to an abrupt end when he beat Skip of the Bodydonnas, rolling Skip up for a pinfall when he stopped to do push-ups in the middle of the match. He'd go on to get two more wins, one more against Skip and one against Hakushi, and again Hakushi was able to turn face by taking his loss in good spirits (of course, Hakushi's face turn was somewhat less successful than Razor's, as he went from the enigmatic Badass "White Angel of Death" to a Funny Foreigner).
    • ECW did this with a guy by the name of Mikey Whipwreck, who would take vicious beatings in the ring without getting in a lick of offense. Eventually, the fans started sympathizing with him, and started to root for Mikey to win—and when, as a surprise substitute for Terry Funk in a match for the ECW Tag Team Championship (with tag team partner Cactus Jack), Mikey not only landed an offensive maneuver against his opponents (The Public Enemy), but managed to get the pinfall and win the match, making him even more beloved amongst the fans.
      • WWE tried repeating it with Colin Delaney, formerly Colin Olsen of CHIKARA. However, the angle got abandoned about a month or so in.
    • "The Brooklyn Brawler" Steve Lombardi, a man whose name has become synonymous with Jobber, holds a victory over Triple H.
    • The Futurama example in the page quote, obviously.
  • On the non-subverted side of the fence, there's Hulk Hogan. And Hulk Hogan always, always won, thanks to "the power of the Hulkamaniacs", even when faced with somebody who was bigger, badder, or just plain better. This went on for most of the '80s, and the beginning of the '90s, across two different wrestling promotions, before it got stale enough for a Face Heel Turn to even be considered.
    • There's the half-straight / half-inverted example of John Cena, particularly from his WWE Championship win in 2005 until his return from an injury in 2008. The vast majority of the crowd (i.e. the men) absolutely loathed Cena and would call for his head at every turn... but due to Cena's popularity with women and children, he went on to constantly overcome the odds of more popular Heels en route to one title run that lasted just three months shy of a year (and with only a three week break between his next one that lasted another five months) and one that went just over a month past a full year and even that was only ended due to aforementioned injury.
  • In a Meta Example during the 1990s, The Undertaker had his urn stolen and melted down by Ted DiBiase's henchman, Kama Mustafa. Taker turned to his Creatures Of The Night to give him the strength to beat Kama in a casket match. Being one of the most popular wrestlers in the WWF, he had no trouble getting enough.
  • You can always tell when a Faux Action Girl face Diva is starting to get really popular with the fans: she'll start getting out-of-nowhere victories over heel Divas who are bigger and/or a great deal more athletic. Sometimes this will be due to other face wrestlers helping the good girl out (which is, of course, "cheating" when done by the heels), but at other times it's just due to the heel Diva's stupidity and/or overconfidence. Which is how Stacy Keibler, Maria Kanellis, and Kelly Kelly (who didn't become a true Action Girl until about 2010) were able to gain victories over Molly Holly, Melina Perez, and Beth Phoenix, respectively.
    • Subverted with the debut of Brie Bella on SmackDown, who was immediately put into a match against former Women's Champion Victoria. Brie at first played the part of a Lovable Coward, hiding from Victoria under the ring only to magically reappear from out from the under the other side of the ring, slip behind Victoria, and roll her up for a pin. Yes, in her very first match! Then it was eventually revealed that the girl who'd pinned Victoria was Brie's twin sister, Nikki, who had switched places with her in the middle of the match. (And then, double-subverted in that both of the Bella Twins remained faces for a time).
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