Quote from Buckethead on May 14th, 2009, 10:10pm:I don't compare the different eras. Its not even the same. It would be like comparing 70s/80s arcade culture to kids nowadays staring at their cell phone twittering all day.
Like Bobby Heenan so eloquently stated years ago.....
The magic is gone.
Edge could hold the world title a hundred times and it wouldn't mean anything. I don't even know how people watch this garbage anymore.
In this current culture we live in, the titles have to constantly rotate because our society has such a short attention span. A Flair or Hogan type title run will never occur again.
Titles mean nothing now. They are simply a tool to rotate the roster and "re-brand" individual wrestlers for public consumption.
You're right and in addition to becoming a culture of people with short attention spans, we have become a culture that wants and expects immediate gratification. Wrestling is something that is best when experienced in person, at the arena. But people with their 150 channel cable TV packages and the ability to rent movies instead of seeing them at the theaters conditioned people to just want to stay at home and not take the effort to go out and experience things. Hell, we don't even drive to the store to rent movies now, we pay to rent them through Netflix, and worst of all, the really lazy people simply steal them off illegal internet sites. We shop for other things through the internet without leaving the house. People "chat" with their friends on the keyboard instead of actually getting together with their friends (not all the time, I admit, but a lot).
This has all led to the creation of what I call "the fast food culture." We want something as quickly and inexpensively as possible while spending as little effort as possible.
Quality has been sacrificed in this pursuit of immediate gratification. Wasn't it more exciting to drive to the arena, and wait to see the title change for months and months, and years sometimes, until when it finally happened it was something huge? Well, that was the quality that has been sacrificed. That quality has been traded in by a culture in exchange for the simplicity of staying at home instead of going out to the arena. They couldn't go out to the arena too often anymore even if they wanted to because almost every wrestling promotion has been driven out of business and instead of wrestling coming to your town weekly, or at least monthly, it comes maybe twice a year.
So, people buy their wrestling cards on pay per view without the 'hassle" of leaving the house to go to the arena and interacting with other fans as they cheered for their favorite wrestlers and booed the wrestlers they loved to hate. People have become conditioned to be satisfied with a less exciting overall experience that is easier and simpler when all they have to do is click on a button to order the pay per view of the month where they stand roughly a one in three chance each time they buy a PPV of seeing the world title change.
But hey, at least Vince was able to finally take wrestling "mainstream"!