10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 1996

You will struggle to find two years in WWE history more tonally different than 1995 and 1997

95 was an antiquated bleak nightmare, 97 meanwhile was absolutely wild, with WWE on the cusp of

something truly amazing ahead of its next boom period. Given these huge differences

it only makes sense that the year in between 95 and 97 was pretty damn wacky

Hello there my very good friends, I'm Andy from WhatCulture and here are 10 things you didn't know about WWE in 1996

10. A Creative Spike While not necessarily a great year, 1996 was about as creative as the then WWF ever got

The creativity wasn't necessarily good or even consistent a lot of the time

but the willingness to explore virtually every new direction underscored a crazed response to the omni-shambles that was 1995

The WWF either invented or borrowed no less than eight new gimmick matches that had never been seen on its own programming before

Including the Iron Man match, Boiler Room Brawl, Buried Alive, and the Crybaby match, which was absolutely dire

Of these new stipulations, the Boiler Room Brawl was key. Mankind and The Undertaker destroyed one another in a violent and compelling backstage fight that unlocked a new realm, a new creative outlet, and informed the endlessly entertaining hijinks of the imminent Attitude Era

1996 was the year in which, between the incredible brawling of the strap and boiler room matches and the technical purity of the Iron Man, the WWF embraced true stylistic change for the first time

1996 was the year in which the WWF started to get it

Number 9. About that Iron Man match, the WrestleMania 12 main event is canonized by

WWE to this day as a classic, a true highlight reel moment in the career of Shawn Michaels

The promotion of the match has trickled down to the fandom. It routinely makes and ranks highly

in lists of the best matches ever. Now, wrestling is very subjective, as is every single art form on

the planet, so this list entry right here isn't something along the lines of trying to tell you

that the match was actually bad, even if subjectively the match was actually boring until the last 15

minutes. But you go ahead and try watching this one back today and tell me it's one of the best

things you've ever seen. You simply can't. Before it unfolded, decades before Edge vs. Randy Orton

at Backlash 2020, the WWF practically guaranteed you'd see the best match ever, as Bret Hart locked

up with Shawn Michaels. It wasn't even the best match in WWF that year, but again, that's an

opinion. It is a fact that about 99.9% of the time, evidence of a great match, or a popular

slash overmatch, is echoed by the crowd reaction, and the sheer mind-melting extent that they are

into it. That's called psychology, brother. On that front, Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels in

the Ironman was something of a failure, because the crowd were dead. In another indictment

many were leaving the arena as the match unfolded. VHS viewers could tell which colour the seats in

the arena were. Dave Meltzer, who attended live, wrote in an edition of the Wrestling Observer

Newsletter that and I quote to say they were leaving in droves would be an overstatement but there were probably a few thousand empty seats by the time the match reached its climax 8 The Original Plan for Shotgun Saturday Night In 2002 knowing that it was obscenely difficult to strike a halfway decent TV deal NWATNA had the

idea of airing weekly pay-per-views as a compromise and a bid to generate more money than a series of

house shows. It didn't work. Well over a year before Vince McMahon formally introduced the

Attitude Era with a verbose speech that basically amounted to, we're gonna do car crash TV with

breasts, the WWF wanted to launch something similar. It didn't work either. The idea was for

the WWF to air a risque one hour weekly pay-per-view aimed at the adult audience. This bid to capitalize

on ECW's underground momentum, or maybe rip it off, ultimately manifested as Shotgun Saturday

Night, which premiered as a TV show in January 1997. Shotgun was exciting and creative, if not

exactly great TV, but it was quite tame. You have to think, away from stricter standards and

practices, that if the weekly pay-per-view model did amount to anything, it would have been much

more edgy. In a neat trivia note, when Dave Meltzer relayed the story in an August edition of

The Observer, he said the internal word within WWE was that the Saturday specials would, and I quote

push the envelope. Vince would go on to use that exact same verbiage when kickstarting the Attitude

Era in December 97. There was a company-wide awareness in the then-WWF that things needed to

change, but these experimental ideas only took root months, or even years later

Number 7, The Click's Chokehold Was Real. The Click had a chokehold over Vince McMahon

which they used, allegedly, to throttle the life out of anything that did not involve them

and anything that they could get away with. And they manifested this quite brutally in 1996

Dave Meltzer, that man again, reported in a May edition of The Observer

that Vader had to do criminally short dark match jobs for Shawn Michaels

ahead of their SummerSlam main event. Jim Cornette has always said that Shawn didn't want to take the beating that came with working Vader

And he was right. If you look at the data on Cage Match or another website

Shawn often went over Vader in under five minutes. Meltzer reported that Vader was so furious at this that he was once heard saying

this is BS laying down for this guy when storming to the ring

Shawn went double time going over Diesel on the house show circuit

who was already on the way out of the company. But you'll never guess who Razor Ramon did jobs for on the way out

Between May 17th and 19th, in four matches across the legendarily brutal WWE schedule

Scott Hall stared at the lights for one Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Helmsley subsequently was punished for the curtain call. Or was he

6. The Triple H narrative was fake In May, when Diesel and Razor worked their last matches for WWE at a Madison Square Garden house

show, each member of the clique broke kayfabe by banding together face and heel alignments be damned

and bowing out. The curtain call is a Mandela Effect phenomenon in and of itself. Somehow

Now the idea has taken root in some circles that Triple H was squashed by the Ultimate

Warrior at WrestleMania 12 as a punishment for his role in it

But this simply cannot possibly be true, considering WrestleMania took place before the Curtain

Call, and if Vince McMahon could see into the future, he'd have probably made a phone

call to the Wall Street Journal at some point Moreover the Curtain Call was apparently some huge transgression that incensed every corridor of Titan Towers but again that not true Measured against everything else

it was actually pretty tame by the click's standards, although Triple H was apparently

punished as a fall guy to pacify some old head road agents. But the truth is

he was barely punished at all. The curtain call happened on May 19th

and Hunter dethroned Intercontinental Champion Mark Merrow in October. Yes, Hunter didn't win King of the Ring that year, but it was only delayed by a year and his punishment

lasted a whopping 155 days. There were no firm plans to actually punish the guy

it was just an exercise in optics and a half-assed one to boot

Number 5, The Real Explanation for the Ultimate Warrior Mania Squash. As established in the

previous entry, Ultimate Warrior did not squash Triple H at WrestleMania 12 as a result of an

Etiquette breach committed two months earlier. So why did it happen then? The truth is, Triple H

wasn't remotely over with the crowd by WrestleMania. WWE hadn't pushed him with the same conviction

they had in the months after his debut, and while he was hardly a jobber, with the collapse of the

territory system really being felt, WWE wasn't exactly overflowing with options in 96. So Warrior

no sold the pedigree. He didn't even kick out at one, he just popped up, hit his signature moves

and went home. The match was originally booked to be a more competitive back and forth, but

that didn't work for the Warrior brother. Per the April 22nd Observer, Warrior vehemently

refused to do anything that would help Helmsley. Which is both funny and a fascinating snapshot

of the politics at the time. As corrosive as the clique were, Vince McMahon was always

always going to favour an absolute muscle freak over the lot of them

Number 4, The Bushwhackers Were Still Around You may remember the bushwhackers, the arm-throwing, head-licking mad lads who may well have been too stupid even for the WWF of the late 1980s

Great as the sheep herders in the Fed, they were not. Very much the brand of comedy that only Vince McMahon found to be a riot, they simply weren't funny

They weren't even caricatures of people or even stereotypes, which Vince McMahon loved

People from Australasia don't do daft movements with their arms or lick people indiscriminately, at least the ones I know

They do normal human stuff and get attacked by spiders the size of horses

Everybody knows that. To understand the extent to which Vince was in the midst of an identity crisis as a promoter

in the same year that he first began to recognize that there were actual human beings

underneath the glorified Hasbro plastic known to most people as skin, the bushwhackers returned after several months away

and crikey, they evolved into Australian stereotypes, which is particularly absurd considering they were from New Zealand

Great. Number three, one wrestler had no business being in the ring. Terry Gordy was a fantastic wrestler

in his heyday. A massive unit who could bump and move, he was mean, legitimate, and a perfect

contrast to the clean-cut Von Erichs, against whom his fabulous Freebirds warred to mega-drawing

effect in the 80s. Gordy was special, and as such, he starred for All Japan Pro Wrestling in the

early 90s. Impressive, given the stratospheric in-ring standard in that company. The trajectory

The history of Gordy's career and indeed life changed forever when in August 93, he

entered a coma for 5 days following an overdose He had to learn how to do everything in life all over again but tragically he awoke an entirely different person This different Terry Gordy was a stranger to himself almost

He had suffered profound brain damage, and yet as a favour to Michael Hayes hired by

the WWF a year earlier, Gordy was brought in and repackaged as a turncoat druid to be

the Undertaker's last monster of the week. Gordy, potentially through muscle memory

somewhat emulate being a pro wrestler, but he just wasn't present. Jim Ross stated on

his podcast that he was glad Terry didn't end up hurting himself or somebody else, but

wrestling being wrestling a gross industry, he continued to work until 2001, the year

of his passing. 2. A Funny Legal Letter Scott Hall, as you'll know, turned up in WCW to initiate the New World Order angle. On an

otherwise dire nitro, on May 27th, he interrupted the match and famously said

you know who I am, but you don't know why I'm here, delivered in his Razor Ramon voice

It was heavily implied that he was an unwanted guest operating on behalf of the WWF, which was

great, but an untenable idea. This was a WCW storyline not even remotely endorsed by the WWF

and that aspect of the act was abandoned when Hall was threatened with legal action. Were he to not

dropped the voice, the WWF would withhold both merchandise royalties and the pay-per-view payoffs

that were due to him. What's hilarious about this is that it was technically the IP of Universal

Pictures in a very roundabout way. Razor Ramon was heavily, heavily inspired by Tony Montana

the lead character in 1983's Scarface, but Vince McMahon simply hadn't seen it

Scott Hall quickly started speaking in a voice almost indistinguishable from his own

but the sheer ignorance and hypocrisy of the legal threat was really funny

And at number one, the irony of tribalism. You can prefer one wrestling promotion to another

It's almost impossible not to do that, given that that's how taste and preferences work

But you can't, or at least shouldn't be, a demented loyalist without, at some point, looking foolish

Last year, for example, in 2023, WWE fans questioned why AW had allowed MJF to perform with a torn labrum

Meanwhile, to use just one example, Rey Mysterio in WWE worked through a serious knee injury for several months

The worst AEW fans continue to insist that WWE does not care about wrestling when gunfire exists

WWE fans, meanwhile, will say that blood is bad when Vince McMahon himself bled more at Survivor Series 2003 than Jon Moxley ever has

AEW fans will bury WWE for criticizing their fanbase, while Tony Khan recently told his fans to put their money where their mouth is and stop whinging

And so on. Tribal WWE fans, which is absolutely not to say all of them, mocked Tony Khan's recurring huge announcement gimmick

And rightly so. It's getting pretty annoying now, Tony. But those type of WWE fans don't know the half of it

The WWF promoted the returns of the fake Diesel and fake Razor Ramon with more hype than AEW's first dance, and that is barely an exaggeration

Tony Khan could hype an important announcement for a full month, reveal that he had signed Ryback to a 35-year contract, and it still wouldn't come close to Vince McMahon's desperation in the autumn of 96

I've been Andy, thank you so much for tuning in, and if you liked this video, check out the next one. See you later