Okay. So perhaps I embellished that Undertaker origin story a little bit. I don't think the pre-wrestling days of the character were ever uncovered. I suppose a quick Wiki search would clue me in but... I'm pretty sure my version is more interesting. Who wouldn't want to see this guy battle demons and hellspawn to get back to the land of the living?!
Times change and entertainment evolves as our culture does. Innocent fun is now blasé. Today's entertainment needs a sharper edge. WWE fans would laugh Koko B. Ware out of the arena in 2015, and he wasn't even the zaniest character of the 1980s.
I don't watch wrestling any more. I loved it when I was a kid during the 80s boom when Hulk Hogan made himself a household name, and got in pretty deep during the 90s boom when Stone Cold Steve Austin reached similar heights of popularity. But even then, the antics were getting more serious and that started to suck some of the fun out of it.
These days I have friends that still love the WWE (and even podcast about it sometimes) so I have a tangential idea of who today's superstars are. Maybe I don't watch closely enough, but it seems like every current WWE star is similar to the rest – a big, overly tan meathead. A quick scroll through WWE.com's Superstars lineup doesn't hurt my case. Though "The Bunny" has potential.
The wide breadth of interesting characters offered in the 80s (and to an extent the 90s) is gone. In the 80s you'd get a guy like Brutus the Barber Beefcake squaring off against the Honkey Tonk Man. The backstories of the characters meant just as much as the actual wrestling.
I guess this makes me the crotchety old man that misses the "good old days" of the 80s. At least when it comes to wrestling.. and Transformers.
-Gint
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