New School Wrestling vs Old School Wrestling

[Milkyway!]

From 1948 to 1955 wrestling was going through a transitional stage due to exposure from the newly invented television. Ratings were high, and it was literally a national sensation. After a while due to overexposure professional wrestling began to lose its ratings, sponsors, and quickly fell from the graces of the 3 major programming stations.

Then in the 1980's the "wrestling boom" happens and wrestlers such as Andre, Hogan, etc became huge starts; and wrestling had arguably the greatest era in it's prolific history. However, it was a very very different format from Monday Night Raw. We saw Saturday Night Main Event and Prime Time Wrestling take stage in what still have record rating when it comes to wrestling. (15.2 with 33 million viewers)

WrestleMania III had 93,000+ people in attendance, still the highest amount of people at a wrestling event, ever.

The numbers would like to say that Old School Wrestling is overwhelmingly better than New School Wrestling.

I often times see posters on this site referring to Hulk Hogan in terms of debate when it comes to John Cena, largely in the thread John Cena thread. They say he's the second version of Hulk Hogan, without the Charisma of Hulk Hogan.

However, this has led me to ask myself one question. If Hulk Hogan had to get his Eat your Vitamins speech every single week on episodic television; would he have been anywhere near the sensation he was?

If we were forced to see Ric Flair vs Steamboat each and every single week, how long before that became stale?

If the Old School product was produced today, would it still have garnered 15.2 on the ratings scales? Do the numbers lie to us suggesting that Hulk Hogan, Andre, Steamboat, Savage, etc based on ratings, attendance, etc were so much better than the likes of Cena, Orton, Triple H, etc?

I would also like to know personal opinions on overall quality of matches. Which were better? The New Generation's matches or the Old Generations matches? Based on psyche, charisma, flow of matches, etc; who had better matches, feuds, overall product, etc?

 

[cubuff37]

I think this is an interesting topic. Mainly because its not solvable. The Hulk Hogan era will never be matched. But you can't get a non-biased opinion.

The first pro wrestling match I watched from start to finish was Johnny Nitro & Edge vs. Ric Flair & John Cena. So i'll always consider the new pro wrestling better because its the kind that I grew up watching. But comparing today's pro wrestling to old school pro wrestling is like comparing Nickelback to The Beatles. You just can't do it. Both dominate their era, but people from Nickelback's era are gonna typically like Nickelback more, and people from The Beatles' era are gonna typically like The Beatles more. But trying to be not biased, I think guys like Hulk Hogan and Ricky Steamboat were pioneers, they found styles that are genious. Without them, would we even know who John Cena is? Would we think of the term 619 as anything other than an area code? Probably not. So I think we owe it to them refer to them as the greatest age of pro wrestling.

 

[Wald]

You're right in saying that the current booking and weekly TV shows would run classic characters and feuds into the ground. Your example of Flair vs Steamboat is a good one and I don't think it's improbable to suggest it would be booked like this today:

MitB PPV: Flair wins MitB
MitB PPV: Steamboat defends against Terry Funk in a no DQ match, Steamboat wins but Flair comes out and cashes in to take the title
Raw: Flair out to run down Steamboat, we get a rematch that night, Flair gets DQ'd
Raw: Tag match involving Flair & Arn vs Steamboat & Dusty
Raw: 2 on 1 match involving Flair & Arn vs Steamboat
Raw: Steamboat vs Arn, Flair interferes for a beatdown

and it goes on from there, basically it would get run into the ground pretty quickly.

It's no surprise that the build for Taker vs Triple H, both last year and this year, is made better because they don't touch each other until the PPV. I expect to see Triple H maybe lay out Taker with a pedigree on the go home show on Raw, but that's about it.

And you're right, Hogan doing his schtick every week on TV would get tired very quickly