Vince Russo's The Brand

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to work for the WWE. At just 8 years old, I fell in love with professional wrestling. It was the catchphrases that I sang along with whenever the wrestler shouted them out! The first genre of music I ever fell in love with was wrestlers’ entrance themes. I’d sit around playing with my wrestling action figures, whilst playing through the themes on WWF Attitude the video game. Each time I brought a new toy, they instantly did a run in and won the WWF championship – Yes, D’Lo Brown was once my bedroom heavyweight champion.
I’d get all my VHS tapes down from the shelves and create an audience rail with them, along with the Titan-Tron playset, and build my own arena!

It was how cool The Ministry of Darkness was, how badass The New Age Outlaws were – Even the tiniest of things sucked me in, such as, how cool I thought Triple H’s pink shiny tights at Summerslam 1998 were!

Each week I’d tune in and Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler would be rooting for The Corporation, and to me, whoever he was rooting for, I wanted to see take a beating!

An 8 year old English kid, running around his classroom in school, singing “What Does Everybody want! – Head!” – at the time I had no idea what I was actually saying, and now all those detentions make a whole lot of sense! I just loved Al Snow, and I loved Head…I still do..

I just loved professional wrestling!

I look back to when I was a kid, and I think – I don’t have that dream that everyone else does, where you are main-eventing Wrestlemania. My dream was always to write wrestling. To come up with the characters, to produce wrestling. I wanted to be the guy that came up with the names of the Pay Per View and designed what that Pay Per View arena would look like.

(Authors Note: My personal favourite – Royal Rumble 2000 with the ally way and taxi cab!)

I wanted to be the guy that wrote the angles and came up with the characters. And this dates back all the way to when I was a child, making my own arenas and storylines with my action figures.

(Authors Note: I have a vague recollection of Leonardo & Donatello from the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ being my tag team champions…I’m also pretty sure Stone Cold Steve Austin did the job for Pikachu from Pokémon – Kevin Sullivan, eat your heart out!)

I never liked WCW. On Raw you had The Ministry of Darkness, The Brood, Kane, and The Rock – and whenever I switched WCW on, it was rasslers, like Arn Anderson and Fit Finlay. To an 8 year old, that isn’t fun. The wrestling was great on WCW, but I didn’t learn to appreciate the sport side of the show until my teenage years.

I always wanted to write for the WWE. Until recently. I’ve seen how they treat people – and I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. No one has influenced this opinion I have of the WWE. Every time I switch on ‘Legends with JBL’, they always find a way to bring up Vince Russo and bad mouth him. And more recently with the passing of Chyna, and how they have behaved regarding this. I honestly feel that they genuinely do not care, ’cause everything they say has been such cookie cutter corporate BS. It feels to me with the passing of Chyna, that it’s done them a favour and for the first time in my life, I’m ashamed to be a wrestling fan.

I’m fed up with the BS propaganda that they put out on their Network just because history is written by the winners. I don’t consider them winners in The Monday Night Wars. Vince McMahon Jr built his empire by taking advantage of the trust that was built amongst the territory bookers. He just took all the top talent and put them all onto one show. The Attitude Era wasn’t a decision he made, it became what it was because the WWF was desperate, that they threw everything, including the kitchen sink, at the wall and saw what stuck.

If Vince McMahon is truly the genius that the WWE likes to make him out to be, why can’t he stop his television show from being such dog-crap?

I’m a huge television fan – and I have been since I was around 13. Every night it was Lost, 24, Buffy, Angel, X-Files and Sopranos. Whilst all my friends were watching cartoons, I was watching TV dramas for mature audiences. And I’m still like it now, and I can honestly say that WWE Raw is the worst television show out there. Because that’s what it is, it IS a television show. It’s a show about wrestling. Not a wrestling show. There’s a difference, that’s why WWE compares themselves to Seinfeld and The Simpsons and not Ring of Honor or TNA.

Look at this Shane McMahon angle. They have all the tools to make this a perfect angle, and to really draw back the millions of viewers, who might I add, LOVE seeing cartoonish characters, where the good guy is beating up the bad guy, and now more than ever with the rise of the superhero genre in film – you’d think WWE would try and take advantage of that audience – because they could if they wanted too.

This Shane McMahon angle could have been the perfect way to do that. What made it so exciting to see Shane come back for the wrestling fans was the fact that it felt like ‘The Attitude Era’ for a brief moment, all of the IWC felt 8 years old again.

Maybe this angle could of turned a few heads back around, and got them talking. So their mates’ heads would turn back around and get THEM talking, etc. etc.

But now, they have screwed it up by insulting their audience’s intelligence.

There is absolutely no logic to any of this angle since Shane returned. He didn’t have to agree to the match at Wrestlemania. He loses the match and Vince takes the lock box, and we never find out what was inside it.. So basically “I have a secret… But I can’t tell you what it is…”.

For Vince’s amusement, he allows Shane to run Raw.. Then, Vince decides to make Shane and Stephanie co-runners of Raw. None of this junk makes any sense. Why are they teasing their audience with a big secret in regards to this lock box? So now Vince has it back, we’re never going to find out what was inside it? Why did Vince make Shane and Stephanie co-runners? SHANE LOST THE MATCH!

Are we supposed to forget about that? It was only a month ago.. Jeez!

What it seems to me, is the WWE were desperate for this year’s Wrestlemania in regards to spectacles, because they really shot themselves in the foot when they broke The Undertaker’s streak. They barely had any talent, as most of the top draws were injured, so the idea of Shane jumping from a Hell in a Cell was the main selling point because “Shane McMahon in a hell in a cell. He’s definitely going to jump off it”, and he did and it was great. But I would have happily traded that moment for a storyline that made sense. It’s like Vince told the writers “Ok, Shane is going to jump from the cell. Work backwards from that.”

It’s this type of writing that insults my intelligence. And I’m fed up with it. I’m trying my best to steer clear of wrestling articles because I only have negative things to say about contemporary wrestling. I’m more inclined to write a movie review, or a review of a television show. I don’t want to depress anyone. But I’m just sick and tired of Vince McMahon slapping me in the face every Monday night and expecting me to smile.

This past year, I feel that I have seen what the WWE really is. I’ve always had confidence in myself and my ability, and for so long my goal was to write for the WWE. I don’t want to anymore. Because how they treat people is disgusting, look at Chyna, look at Vince Russo, and look at CM Punk. That company is poisonous unless you pukka up and kiss ass!

As always Brand! Thank you for reading. I appreciate every word you read!

Follow Jake on Twitter @IAmJakeJesus