Wacky Wrestling Theory 02.27.10: The Invasion Angle & September 11th

Posted by Jake Chambers on 02.27.2010

A wacky look at re-booking the Invasion angle and any controversy that might have come out of the WWF using deeper symbolism from the war on terrorism inside the story.

When Avatar, a thinly veiled attack on the US government's policy of war in the past ten years, becomes the most financially successful film of all-time, then it's possible to assume that it's safe to exploit or criticize the conflicts in Iraq/Afghanistan in popular culture. Does professional wrestling count when it comes to the same kind of unwritten rules that govern narrative fiction? Where does pro-wrestling, and more specifically the WWE, stand when it comes to putting political messages into its storylines? Health care? Gay marriage? Drug Crime? Abortion? Terrorism? The WWE product could be critically analyzed to find out how stances on all these issues are embedded subconsciously inside the stories. But what should the WWE do, more directly, when an event as huge as the terrorist attacks of September 11th happened right in the middle of the insurgency narrative taking place inside the WWF Invasion angle of 2001?

Considering they were/are a live, non-stop, broadcasting event, it's more difficult for the WWF to re-tool their storylines on the fly, and certainly didn't they have the luxury that the inaugural season of 24 had when it came to editing out scenes of an airplane bombing. So we all might remember what the WWF did in response to 9/11, they were the first new programming on television, with a non-continuity Smackdown episode of tribute matches. They followed this with a short patriotic title chase and victory for American ‘hero' Kurt Angle. But did a medium that is hardly know for it's class or subtlety have to be so low key when it came to implementing the world events surrounding September 11th into their programming? That's an issue I would like to discuss in this special edition of Wacky Wrestling Theory.



Recently a Wrestling Zone Top 5 motivated many writers to think of ways in which the Invasion angle could have been re-booked, yet no one drew comparisons between the WWF vs. Alliance storyline and the way the WWF handled the aftermath of 9/11. The WWF most certainly used that event as part of their programming, but could it have been utilized even more? Although I missed the cut-off for submission for that Top 5 column, I now present a longer, and admittedly wacky take on the re-booking issue. The first four entries are purely wrestling related points, but the final entry on my list is one that I wanted to delve more deeply into in conjuncture with the use of political events inside the storytelling of pro-wrestling.

Five Ways I Would Re-Book the Invasion Angle

1. Even Faster Destruction of WCW

Some of the silliest things I think critics of the Invasion angle say are that WCW should have been ‘kept strong' and they should used the ‘real' WCW stars. Well, certainly the WCW that existed in 2001 wasn't the one that was leading the ratings war in 1997, and let's be serious, it was because of the inability of wrestlers like Goldberg, Hogan, Sting, Luger, Hall and Nash to put on compelling matches that WCW fell apart (some may argue that it was the nonsensical booking, which of course was terrible, but the horrendous main event matches they put on week after week are what truly turned people away, in my opinion). To true WWF fans, McMahon buying WCW and embarrassing them by appearing on their own show to basically cancel it was the ultimate vindication. This was finally proof that we were right all of those years when the WWF was down and we were trying to wake everyone up to the truth that WCW sucked! So I was happy to watch WCW get destroyed symbolically during the Invasion.

To think that it would be in the WWF's interest to spotlight lame wrestlers and put on matches from an inferior product is ridiculous. Putting Goldberg, Hogan, Hall and Nash in the Invasion angle would have been like McDonald's buying out Burger King and then starting to sell Whoppers and telling everyone that these were the best burgers all along. WWF at least tried to use the wrestlers that were having okay matches in the final year of WCW's promotion in an attempt to give the WWF fans some of the quality wrestling they helped win the war with, and for that reason I've always admired the booking of the Invasion angle

Therefore, if I could have changed things I would have humiliated WCW even more. Take those lame ‘stars' like Sting, Hogan, Hall, Nash and Goldberg and have them all squashed, ala DDP and Kanyon. Come SummerSlam, let Austin destroy Goldberg, Rock kill Sting, Foley come out of retirement to retire Hogan, Undertaker and Kane defeat Hall and Nash in 30 seconds, let the Hardy Boyz embarrass the Steiners and put Albert over Luger… ah, that would have been the best!

2. Jeff Jarrett

Before Paul Heyman got involved with the ECW Alliance and added some real passion to the Invasion, the WCW faction was kind of silly and had no realistic reason for ‘invading' other than a translucent claim that Shane McMahon ‘bought' WCW and wanted to start his own company. With Jeff Jarrett as part of the WCW side, not only would you have a legit (and recent) main event heel WCW World Champion, but you'd also have a number of good ‘shoot' angles to play with, including Austin refusing to work with him in the past, and Jarrett extorting WWF to pay him upfront before losing to Chyna. Jarrett was a great heel when under the tutelage of the WWF, and could have done a lot to add hatred to the WCW faction in the place of traditional Alliance babyfaces like Austin, RVD, Shane and Booker who people really wanted to like.



3. Cruiserweight Tag Team Division

The one part about WCW that was critic proofwas that awesome cruiserweight division. Yet unlike those nWo storylines that fizzled and died painful, painful deaths right in front of us all, the cruiserweights were still going strong in WCW's final year. In fact, in the company's last month there was a pretty good tournament to crown brand new Cruiserweight Tag Team Champions. Rather than bringing in the Cruiserweight Title, as WWF did only to have it lost in the mess of titles and divisions at the time of the Invasion, I would have booked the Cruiserweight Tag Team Championships to come in instead. A division that included AJ Styles and his weird partner, Elix Skipper & Kid Romeo, Evan Karagias & Shannon Moore, Kaz Hayashi & Jimmy Yang, Champions Kidman & Rey Mysterio, throw in Sugar Shane Helms & Jamie Noble and then the Hardys, X-Factor, and even Los Guerreros, and you've got an awe-inspiring wet dream of match-ups that would actually highlight something cool and unique about WCW rather than just re-regurgitate old stars.

4. Batista, Cena, Orton & Brock

These four future main event-ers all debuted in the WWF less than a year after the end of the Invasion angle. Therefore, it would have been very easy to package Brock, Batista, Cena and Orton as Shane McMahon's next generation of stars to headline for WCW. In hindsight, this really wouldn't have been much of a risk, and definitely would have worked out better for a serious attempt at a stand alone WCW brand than anything that ever came out of the short term booking that involved Hogan, Hall, Nash and Goldberg in the post-Invasion WWE.

5. 9/11

The terrorist attacks of September 11th happened right in the middle of the Invasion angle and thus gave the WWF the opportunity to integrate world events into their floundering storyline. Actually, the WWF did use the patriotic image of Kurt Angle to get a quick pop at the Unforgiven Pay-Per-View held a few weeks after the tragedy, but I think they could have exploited this even more, especially given the obvious comparison. Let me explain.

The Alliance was pretty much an outside terrorist group trying to bring down the established dominant power. They resorted to guerilla tactics, such as backstabbing, lying and infiltrating in order to try to destroy the WWF from the inside. If the WWF had done more to highlight this parallel between the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that protected them, the catharsis at Survivor Series when the WWF finally puts them down could have been incredible. This type of booking is not past the WWF, who basically pulled the exact same move at Wrestlemania VII when they turned former GI JOE American legend Sgt. Slaughter into an Iraqi sympathizer, in order to build to a huge pay-off when the ‘real' American Hulk Hogan beat the shit out of him. In retrospect this storyline seems pandering, yet at the time it was popular and who knows how huge it would have been had the US not stopped short of invading Iraq at the time and thus screwed up the WWF's planned Wrestlemania payoff timeline.

Following in this mold, if the WWF would have made the extremist Paul Heyman the Adnan-esque Taliban sympathizer, thrown a headdress on American icon Steve Austin like they did with Slaughter (and would have worked with Austin's slow descent into insanity at the time), and tossed in a token Col. Mustafa type Arab (the dark skinned Tazz might have done), and made them take control of the Alliance in a super-restrictive way, would have been interesting/silly. If they had done things such as force all the divas to dress in burkas (not unlike the eventual Taijiri-Torrie storyline) or maybe have it their ultimate goal to force everyone in the WWE to wear singlets and wrestle in the conservative Olympic style, it would have drawn relevant parallels to the conflict in Afghanistan. Then it would have been all that much more epic when Olympic hero Kurt Angle champions the All-American brawling pro-wrestling style to bring down the oppressive Alliance regime.



Pop culture has used this tragedy and many others in the past, including the Holocaust, to create action movies, dramas and comedy (yes, I'm talking about Hogan's Heroes) so to think this topic should somehow be off limits to pro-wrestling is confusing. While mainstream Americans already look at the WWE like trash culture and would expect, rather than be offended, by such a storyline, there is no doubt that the harshest critics of such a storyline would have been the self-loathing pro-wrestling super-fans themselves.

In 2001, people were angry, so angry that they were willing to support the retaliation of force that would eventually cost the country more lives than were lost in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, so why should the WWE not play to that emotion as an interactive, theatrical narrative machine? While casual fans of wrestling might have truly enjoyed the symbolism and catharsis of the storyline I proposed, I think that regular pro-wrestling fans would never accept this because they have shown in the past to hold pro-wrestling up to a delusional moral standard. Pro-wrestling super-fans will almost violently defend the respectability and theoretical artistry of the ‘sport' they are addicted to, in the face of the ridiculousness and reality of what they are actually watching each week.

For example, there was a huge internal fan backlash against the Mohammad Hassan character and when he used masked men for a pseudo-terrorist attack on the Undertaker. Whereas this kind of dramatic display is used regularly from critically acclaimed movies such as United 93 or The Hurt Locker and on television shows like 24 and NCIS, for some reason wrestling fans could not accept this symbolism within their universe.



To think that pretty much harmless clip had a backlash against the WWE and yet the following clip is from of the most popular shows currently on television:



If NCIS is able to use exploitation, extreme violence, tasteless jokes, while name dropping Muslim phraseology without a bit of criticism, it must only show the double standard that exists towards professional wrestling. Pro-wrestling is all about two guys fighting! Usually they are fighting over big issues, so why is wrestling somehow the wrong place to show Americans fighting terrorists? A similar double standard seems to take place in the comic book universe where weekly attacks on the earth, murder and destruction of cities occur yet they have to basically ignore the attacks of 9/11 and resulting wars. Pro-wrestling, a place that consistently fakes hatred and near murder based on backstabbing and personal plots, must also irrationally exist in a neutral place outside of real world politics and law. This is why my proposed integration of the war on the Taliban would have been offensive in use during the Invasion angle, not because it betrays any sense of good taste, since wrestling should be doing that with it's very existence, but because of the fans delusion that they are somehow above politics and have created their own sense of moralistic values based on an irrational defense of wrestling from the constant criticism of it's phoniness, and thus forces the WWE to pretend to be high valued while putting on the lowest form of low culture that exists.

Proof of this comes in the form of the annual WWE Tribute to the Troops show. For whatever reason, the WWE strongly supports the US military with this annual special, along with free broadcasts and front row tickets to individual soldiers. For whatever reason they do this, it is genuinely commendable because they are extending their neutrality towards those who require the most support because they actually put their lives on the line daily, and yet the shows the WWE puts on are consistently neutral in content as well. On the other hand, if by contact alone the WWE is seen as supporting the wars that so many in the media and pop culture worldwide criticize, then why can't they incorporate the content of the conflict into their shows?

The Invasion angle was a historically appropriate time period for the WWF to combine their support of the US military with a storyline that involved fighting against the forces that were threatening the country. To do it in a way that is ‘tasteful' is highly subjective, especially considering this is pro-wrestling we're talking about, but, if booked properly, this storyline could have been interesting and eventually lead the WWE to make something enthralling, exhilarating, moving and patriotic, with their generally bland Tribute to the Troops shows.

My idea was for the WWF to do what they do best, highly exaggerated storylines and character stereotypes to make a hyper-ridiculous storyline that would have played off the patriotic blood lust that was in America following the attacks of September 11th. I don't even think it would have been that controversial, as wrestling is supposed to be like this, and the only people who don't see that are the conservative super-fans who would reject this idea on the grounds of a delusional moral double standard that can cause controversy in pro-wrestling where it doesn't in other genre. If they had set the this standard with the Invasion angle, then when the WWE goes to entertain the troops a decade later they could at least do storylines that aren't just T&A and weak matches, but real, enemy ass-kicking style shit! What's wrong with that?