I was too young to really be involved in popular culture at the time. Now if I remembered reading correctly on these forums within the past three or six months, did the decline of business in the WWF actually not start at the end of 1990? Many people attributed the Golden Era to end around 1993 when Hulkamania died, but lately I had been seeing people post links to statistics indicating that revenues and sales were down by the end of 1990, so it probably did not mean the whole year of 1990 was considered financially unsuccessful.
Anyway, I didn't watch wrestling until after growing up and not being a kid, but remembered young kids at the bus stop talking about it before school. For some reason, it felt like I knew the main people, and who was popular and who was considered crappy. For example, I remembered a kid about three years old or four years old talking way too much for that age about wrestling, saying things like "people don't like Hulk Hogan now anymore, because he hardly comes and he's strong but all he does is punch and do a stupid leg drop". Well he didn't say "stupid leg drop" but he went through about two or three short bursts of almost complete sentences, about why "jumping on the legs" was looking stupid.
Also, he was saying things like "Bret Hart is getting more famous and popular" and "but he sucks because he isn't that strong, and he looks cheap and he punches a lot". I distinctly remembered him saying out loud that "oh and there is this one guy who is really strong, but he doesn't win a lot yet, and that is the BRITISH BULLDOG!" in a very loud outburst in front of everybody.
So it seemed like he was watching to critique things, since they weren't going on in the way his older brother used to remember, from times before. Oh and they used words like "body slam" a lot, and said "every wrestler can do a body slam". When I started actively watching in July of 1999, they would barely reference that move, and it was hard to find names for it unless you turned on captions in video games, which had it described as a "scoop slam".
So that reminds me, going back to about Hulk Hogan, it seemed like he was really getting hated by certain people, as it was either that fans loved him or people were jealous of him or did not want to like him. The same boy was saying things like "Hulk Hogan wins almost all the time, nobody can beat him, but one guy did beat him, and that was the Warrior!", and then he described how the Warrior was so wild, but he could only do the "body slam" and probably nothing else. It was almost funny hearing these things from a small kid who was probably not even in kindergarten yet. As he got older, he would describe how Hulk Hogan came in movies but that he sucked in them, and stuff like that, and mentioned names like Tatanka and Shawn Michaels, whom he was indicating to be hard workers but also not being main guys. I of course had to pretend I was interested, since I didn't start watching until 1999 when a friend asked me to tape "WWF Sunday Night Heat and "WWF Raw is War" for him.
As the years went on into the "mid nineties", I kept hearing about how "jerks like Shawn Michaels and punks like Bret Hart" had managed to have had "hung around for so long", as if three years later after 1992 or 1993 actually constituted a long time in an industry, but I of course had only started hearing the name of Shawn Michaels around those times, and didn't believe my older cousins who kept insisting that he had been there for so long, for some reason, not that it would have mattered, since I didn't want to watch anyway, insisting that it was not a real sport, probably fake in physicality and plainly stupid in concept, with naked guys running around.
Now the other funny part was, that same young boy was outside one day, and I happened to casually ask, for the sake of it, almost sarcastically but dissapointingly since I wanted to avoid the topic, "What is Hulk Hogan doing these days? Still beating people up?", and he said, "no there is this new fat guy that beat him, he's like five hundred pounds or six hundred pounds, and he took the belt from him to get the championship, that's Yokozuna!" and I almost wanted to fall down laughing, because the idea of such a large guy, with an odd name almost sounded way too fictional to be true. Also, he went on to say "Well there is still one other new guy that is also as strong as Hulk Hogan, and he did a 'body slam' on Yokozuna when nobody else could do it, and that was Lex Luger!". For some reason, I kept thinking that he and the other kids were intentionally mispronouncing the name, and referring to Lex Luther from the movies about Superman, and that this guy was somebody wanting to copy the name, but since I didn't watch, I didn't comment.
Back to the "mid nineties", I remembered people saying Shawn Michaels was a "***", and even heard him referred to with the full blown out word of "******" on not one but several instances, and they were within a serious context of a conversation too. I thought they were mad because he actually managed to stay in the company for a while, when people assumed he wouldn't make it, but they went on to explain that he did things which were considered girly, like wearing bright shiny clothes and long earrings, and went on to call him gay, as if it was something so new and unexpected in society for the time, but I won't give any hatred to people who are oriented that way, since we're supposed to respect people of different backgrounds. Now, with that said, I was impressed to hear that he survived an hour against Bret Hart, in what I later read in the late nineties about, referring to the "Iron Man Match". Around this same time, people said Hulk Hogan went back to making movies which weren't that famous or even great, and then they said he went to a weak cheap company called "WCW" where old people would go, and that he was getting old.
So to sum up, it seemed like society in that time was mainly interested in guys that were so strong to the point of coming with very impressive physiques, and that being gay was still a taboo.
