JOE BABINSACK LOOKS AT HEROES, FREDDIE PRINZE JR AND WWE
- 08/03/2008 (3:15:35 pm)
- Georgiann Makropoulos
…..
Heroes is coming September 22, 2008. Actually, this season is called Heroes: Villains, or some such play. If you haven’t watched the series, it’s an awesome comic book inspired power fantasy episodic entertainment show. You know, much like professional wrestling, only lots better. It’s a funny thing to watch a great show like Heroes, and then compare it with pro wrestling. In wrestling, we live in the age of the “tweener” and the concepts of heroes/baby faces/ good guys, and villains/heels/bad guys, have been so twisted, perverted and all but forgotten. In Hollywood, at least one show is building up the concepts and playing on the “two sides of the street” mentality that once was an ingrained staple of wrestling. But to be fair, there’s a lot of the episodic and long time expectations in characters, in Heroes, that most wrestling fans appreciate. There is enough mixing of motivations and mystery and character quirks such that the heroes aren’t just milksops and the villains aren’t just insane. And of course, with Sylar, there’s the old adage in pro wrestling that even the worst heels always turn into baby faces after enough time. With my comic book background and pro wrestling understanding, I’m just biding my time for the right, new and ultra-powerful villain to come around and make Sylar a necessary good guy by default. But enough about Heroes. And then again, let’s play off of the concepts in Heroes: Villains. Pro wrestling is desperate for a paradigm shift. And it’s been that way for the better part of this decade. The WWE is still running on the fumes of the McMahon/Hart incident in Montreal, which established the WWE’s owner/CEO as the ultimate bad guy, and transformed the dynamics of good guy/bad guy in pro wrestling to one of win-at-any-cost characters up against corporate greed and malfeasance. But that paradigm was based upon the awesome capabilities of Stone Cold Steve Austin, and an equally awesome cast of characters. It relied upon wrestling history, and the previous decade or so of expectations, character development and wrestling talent. It played upon the concepts of good and bad that were rooted in the bulk of professional wrestling fans’ minds. And most importantly, it was played out by experienced talent -- well versed in the trappings of the psychology of the sport -- and even the talent of Vince McMahon to play the villain he always seemingly wanted to play. Today, however, we’ve lost almost all of that talent. Sure, Shawn Michaels is around, but despite the accolades he gets, he was always in the role of the tweener, and rarely shined so bright in the role of the pure baby face. Of course, recently he’s been in such a role, but he’s also manipulated himself, and finds himself, in a situation where there aren’t many pure baby faces out there, and he looks different in doing so. But are there any pure good guys? John Cena remains the closest, but his potty-mouth scripts and his inability to win over the bulk of the fans seems to bring him down. Then again, we still live in an age where the good guy just will never be “cool” so there’s at least a breakthrough when Cena can appeal to younger fans. Which is an appeal that needs to be heightened and promoted. Now, I could outline some concepts and run with some fantasy booking, but that ain’t my style. Why give a billion dollar company free ideas? The WWE knows where to find me, but they’re more interested in Freddie Prinze, Jr. Go figure. The funny thing is that for all the Hollywood writers on staff, the WWE is incapable of mimicking the success and concepts of Heroes. They are incapable of mimicking the success and concepts of the very sport they produce, as well. Funny how Heroes can name one of their biggest and popular characters Hiro. It’s cute, but it’s a real Japanese name. Too bad current WWE writers couldn’t make the reference to Hiro Matsuda, a guy who helped break Hulk Hogan into the sport. (Ok, there’s a can of worms which I should run away from very fast!) Then again, Hogan is the root of a lot of the fading age of the tweener. When the Hulkster turned on the fans, he put a stake through HULKAMANIA. And while the Hulkster was never the fan favorite, draw nor contained the personal integrity of Bruno Sammartino, he had become the face of professional wrestling, spewing his now hopelessly hypocritical demands of prayers, exercise and vitamins. There have been few attempts to recreate the magic of mass marketed Hulk Hogan, or the inherently more awesome efforts of Bruno Sammartino. The best we have is John Cena, and that’s a problem. The worst remains Kurt Angle, who had the misfortune of entering the scene at the peak of the tweener era, when Stone Cold Steve Austin made it so a good guy Olympic Gold Medalist had to be a villain, booed out of his own home town arena at his first appearance. Funny, how the Pittsburgh crowd, with a newspaper article and an inherent understanding of the sport was so eager to participate with Kurt’s character building. Today, the WWE is so one-dimensional, that they don’t understand the power of the fans, the power of promoting and the internet age capabilities of building up characters and expectations and storylines. Instead, they’ll go the celebrity route, which is the way Presidential politics is going, which is the way most people get famous today, and which is surprising that the wrestling world is all too fast to sign up the Johnny Fairplays and Freddie Prinze Jr’s of the world, but seem hopelessly incapable of bothering to try to create their own stars. So, the moral of the story is this -- it will be interesting to see how long Freddie Prinze Jr remains a WWE writer, and how much of the political infighting, sycophantism and mindless drivel he can take. Because the other expectation, that the WWE could actually invent a new paradigm to create a buzz, interest in its product or even a new star or two, is something that has been proven, for almost six years, to be an impossibility…. Joe Babinsack can be reached at [email protected]. Funny how being a fan, if you’ve got no clue about the business, is a resume builder. Anyway, look for some interesting reviews of books and DVDs shortly, and drop me a line if you’ve got something for me to see. |
Tags:
