Watching some old WCW stuff today. Wow is the in ring work garbage. It's sloppy. People aren't selling moves, just really lazy stuff. Except for the cruiserweights obviously.
I'm sure WWF Attitude was atrocious as well. Have to look into it. But WWE has come so far over the last 15+ years with conditioning, move sets and talent development.
Actually I'm disappointed a bit with modern WWE. We don't see as many suplexes, body slams, DDTs etc as were used in the 90s.
Yeah, WCW is borderline terrible to rewatch today. It's almost sad how few standout wrestlers they had.
The main problem with the WCW was that basically all of their top guys were slow, plodding guys that only used a couple of moves. Stone Cold was a pretty pedestrian in-ring guy, but the eight to ten moves he used were still about four more than Hogan ever learned. You need to base your program around dynamic guys, and the WCW never pushed the ones they had. The WWE is doing something similar right now (bringing back guys nobody wanted like Batista and ramming him down everyone's throats) and it's backfiring on them.
The Attitude era was, in my opinion, vastly superior. There were some boring wrestlers, to be sure, but the WWF actually had quite a bit of talent on their roster, and a lot of the guys were willing to do some pretty crazy shit.
Mick Foley, for example, wasn't a good wrestler, but he was a good mic guy and he was basically willing to kill himself to give the crowd an unforgettable moment. I think everyone who watched wrestling back then remembers him getting chucked off the Hell in a Cell cage by the Undertaker and then chokeslammed through it, or his retirement match with Triple H where he fell through the top of the cage and broke the ring.
Then you had all those Hardy/Dudley matches. Those were just batshit insane, and stand up really well upon rewatches.
I don't remember which PPV it was in, but there was one from 1998 that has a fantastic match between Triple H and Owen Hart during their first (I think) rivalry before Owen joined the Nation.
As an aside, I've always thought that people underrate Triple H as a wrestler just because they hate him. I have no idea if he's any good now because I haven't really followed wrestling since the early nineties (aside from reading the tops here and on Grantland, and catching the occasional PPV when I'm out at a bar on a Sunday night, which kind of keeps me up to speed), but back when I watched he had quite a few great matches. Whenever he got paired up with someone dynamic, they pretty much always put on a great match. I think the real issue is that he wasted too much of his career fighting boring, plodding guys like Kane, which is probably true of a lot of the WWE's better talent.
It just really depends on who you watch. When I'm going through the Network, I can basically look at who a match involves and decide whether or not it's worth watching. I'm usually right.