As a kid I needed heel figures to fight against my favourites, can’t have all good guys and nobody to fight with can we, merch was huge business back then too
As a kid, I was a heel mark so when the WWF sold their first batch of shirts in 1984, I got a Magnificent Muraco shirt (the only heel shirt in that batch). I still wear it today.
You still wear a shirt that's almost 40 years old? I don't care what kind of quality that shirt was. It has to be threadbare by now with a few holes in it. That's gross dude.
Im I'm genuinely surprised Jim cornette doesn't realize that the reason we all bought action figures and dolls of heel wrestlers was so that we could pick them up against our favorite Babyface wrestler action figures in our toy rings.
Cornette should applaud Ciampa and his heel work. Fans wanted his Blackheart tee he wears but Ciampa refuses because he was quoted to have said, "No one deserves my shirt".
I walked into a mall here in houston and saw Ahmed Johnson playing a video game with one of his shirts on.And this was when he was feuding with ron Simmons in wwf.
Best selling heel merch of all time? Austin 3:16, he was still a heel when he cut the King of the Ring promo on Jake Roberts and it became a best seller
This. Action figures are different from other swag, they're toys. Kids got their Hulk Hogan, but needed opponents for him. The point was to "bring the action home". Real OG fantasy booking.
Sounds like Jim's talking in hindsight about what he was thinking in '86. But if you didn't grow up with action figures, I can understand not immediately making that connection. Older wrestling merch seems like stuff you brought to the shows as a show of support thing and that's probably how Jim was thinking of it then.
Even in "oldschool" times, there's no harm in heels having merchandise, they probably just won't sell as much of it. Think about it, do you believe everyone in the audience is a babyface? There are real-life heels, and they might just sympathize with the bad guys.
That was completely the point. 98.9% of the fans back in the 70's and 80's hated the heels. Almost no one read dirtsheets, you're trying to apply todays mentality to back then and it doesn't work.
Something I don't get with the majority of wrestling fans,as far as the heel/babyface thing goes. Why can't people support the "heel"? For example if I use Kevin steen as an example. When he debuted for NXT he turned on Sami zayn so he could challenge for the championship, get more money and support his,family. While he went about it in the wrong way it was still relatable which is why people supported him.The same can be said for when devitt turned heel and started the bullet club there are many other examples. I just feel like wrestling has gone beyond the point of just heros and villains.
It's an old school thing. The heels back then were unconditionally irredeemably rotten so you could build that emotional struggle in the ring. Heels these days are just more edgy than the babyfaces, since they're going for a more "entertainment" aspect where you have sympathetic villains and such.
Medication102 I agree stone cold is a perfect example of an anti hero and a great one. Can't believe he slipped my mind, I suppose I was just looking for more recent examples
KangDo I also think it has a lot to do with society in general. You see it in sports and even in other forms of entertainment people just seem to love pricks. For example look at how people support Connor mcgregor.
1. An anti-hero is a baby face. 2. A bad guy never thinks that they're doing wrong. In thier own mind they can always justify thier actions and twist them to make it seem right. 3. Every form of storytelling these days is trying to push beyond good vs evil, but most of the best stories from the beginning of time are tales of good vs evil. From The Oddessey, to the Bible, to King Arthur, to Star Wars and the Avenger movies. It's a dynamic that has served not just wrestling well for the last 70 years but every form of storytelling for the last 7,000 years. It's dumb to try and re-invent it.
Jim is mostly right on this...but back in the day I wa all about the horsemen, not the other heels though, bought some of that stuff at several spot shows in Charlotte in the mid 80s.
Screw that if I am a heel look at Dx, Nwo, Wolf pack, Bullet Club or Styles when they were all heels being a good heel doesn't mean you have to freakin starve either. "I am tired of doing the starving artist thing"-Big Sexy
The issue with merch now is that a lot of how WWE pushes people is based on merch sales, and now that that info has leaked out, some people are more likely to buy said merch in hopes that their person gets a push. Meanwhile, the family that destroyed wrestling is laughing all the way to the bank. Though the wrestlers do make some of the money on them, and since most wrestlers make way less than they would have in 1980, they need all the money they can get.
Like JC said, in the old days nope. However, with the internet and the kayfabe only in myth or one in every thousand. People know that these people are playing characters and they aren't evil themselves. So, the ones that like the character will naturally buy it and it would be stupid to not sell it.
I know. I had a cool poster of the Horsemen in Tuxedos and they just cleaned house with some punks. JCP was a little behind the curve and in the 80s everyone was behind compared to the NWO, Stone Cold merch. Just think of all the merch they would have sold had the Horsemen hit ground in the Monday Night Wars.. NWO were just thugs but the original Horsemen were the cream of the asswhoopin crop.
Back in the day the babies used to kick back some of their gimmick money to the heels. When I was in the business I would sell gimmicks like pictures or $5 tshirts with my image and a red circle with a line through it. I had a friend sell them for me so I wasn't a heel out their breaking kizayfizabe and it actually worked to some degree. I usually made enough for gas and some food for the ride home.
Raven shoots that during his Portland Scotty the Body run, they sold Snotty Scotty t shirts. And Scotty would pitch a bitch fit over the shirts and yell at fans not to buy them. That's how a heel sells merch.
The way the general majority of the fans react in the opposite of the desired way these days frankly is getting tiresome, especially when they're just doing it to be a bunch of wise-asses. But I'm well aware we really can never go back to the way it was, there's no getting the genie back in the bottle. At the same time though with WWE, Vince and his crackpot writers don't even understand how to do things the new way all that well a lot of the time which makes the product even more unwatchable, for me anyway. A lot of it has to do with the rigid death grip they have over everyone's air time and promos. Regardless of who the talent in question is, we don't really ever get to see much of their real personalities come out in their gimmicks, every goddamn line is written for them and they recite it back on camera with that deer caught in headlights stare on their faces. It's so blatantly apparent when one of those shitheel TV writers with a very different vocabulary is putting words in a wrestler's mouth. If the talent were made to learn how to better improvise while talking on camera, you'd get a more natural flow to everything and their real personalities would dictate who to cheer and who to boo. If anything, you'd definitely find out real quick who can't really talk at all which would make for a good opportunity to bring back wrestling managers to be their mouthpiece. Not that that would ever happen.
Clifton Smith of course I know that. But those were done during a super show featuring the American NWO (Hall, Nash, hogan, etc.). 5 million in one night.
Did Jim really say that Jericho had to lead Omega by the nose to get decent match out of him? Come on Jim. You may hate Omega but stop acting like he doesn't have talent. He is one of the best in the world in ring wise so stop ignoring that. Jericho and Omegas match was great because they both were great.
Jim cornette - are you going to Fire Brian last? Kenny bolin just made TWO videos - saying "Brian last SUCKS! !". And "Brian last is a MARK / a fan boy" Please confirm. Thank you.
