<blockquote class='quote\\_blockquote'><dl><dt>KG 24</dt><dd>Aug 18 2013, 05:52:05 PM</dd></dl><div>
Bombardier said:
Personally I wouldn't have quoted Jim Ross, great commentator, bad everything else. What he said in the last sentence was a "duh" moment, the talent 'back then' were so successful, because they were able to use Cursing, Foul language and edgy gestures to their advantage to build character and audience interest which then resulted in TV ratings.
Daniel Bryan's firing is a great example of the now vs the past.
Edit: Whose to say they wouldn't have bigger ratings than they do now, if they weren't so heavily restricted? The talent of today would do incredible things.
So what you're saying is that instead of the characters being individuals with their own gimmicks, background, and moves to entertain or enrage the crowd in their own way, they had to use cursing and edgy gestures in order to be relate-able with the core audience of trash TV 18-35 year olds? A rating doesn't limit character or show popularity, its the writers and how they make those characters and shows that determine what can happen. Would you rather go with the guy who can turn a piece of shit into gold, the guy who has bronze but can't make anything better or worse with it, or the guy who is given gold but somehow always turns it into shit?
And you can't tell the quality of the show just by it having either high or low ratings. There are great shows with low ratings, and there are horrible shows with high ratings. Just because people would rather read a spoilers page that takes no more than 1 or 2 minutes to read instead of watching a 3 hour show (and yes, the same can be said for a 2 hour or 1 hour show), or maybe because those people find the show to be so predictable and unexciting (it happens with all the wrestling shows sometimes these days, when your knowledgeable about the sport, your guesses are accurate to reality) doesn't mean the show is bad or unappealing.
Oh, and this PG excuse is really getting on my nerves. If you guys have ever watched a PG program that isn't WWE (excluding 1997-1999 Raw and 1999-2007 SmackDown) you can easily see WWE doesn't even use half of the PG ratings limits. And yes, WWE's limitations to me are a little too much, but I honestly see why they do it, even if I don't agree with it sometimes.[/quote]No I'm saying that their individual characters might benefit more from being able to mix it up a bit with the cursing, edgy hand signals and such - Austin sold a hell of a lot of merchandise over the years and a lot of the shirts had that edgy sarcasm in them - so in basic terms they're missing out on massive potential by limiting themselves to all these silly guidelines. I'm not comparing ratings, my opinions generally get consisted from the crowds, the Ruthless Aggression era was my personal favourite over any other time - I thought it was a fantastic direction story-line wise and I think we might be getting a bit of that back now what with the Wyatt Family ( fantastic characters and setup ), CM Punk & Daniel Bryan.
Attitude era wasn't as amazing as people make it out to be, but there is a very distinct comparison available from then to now.
