Luke Owen looks at Monday Night War on the WWE Network…
One of the first shows announced when the WWE Network was first revealed, The Monday Night War is a look back at the ratings battle between WWE (then WWF) and their rivals World Championship Wrestling as they competed for fans to tune into their shows during the late 90s. The show promises to give a full recap of the most famous battle in professional wrestling that will likely never happen again.
The first problem with the show comes to the forefront when those who have seen The Monday Night Wars DVD that WWE released back in 2004 and the Rise and Fall of WCW DVD they put out in five years later start to feel a level of familiarity. Not just in the same stories being told (the fall of Crockett Promotions, bringing Hulk Hogan into WCW etc), but they rehash a lot of the same interviews from the likes of Eric Bischoff (from The Monday Night Wars) and Vince McMahon (Rise and Fall of WCW). Even the interviews with Hulk Hogan are from different documentaries and the Ted Turner stuff looks like it was produced for a WCW production as it was filmed in 1998. This becomes annoying when you have Eric Bischoff talking about how Sting went to bat to get Lex Luger into WCW and they don’t have any comments from Sting himself, even though you know they’ve filmed some interview stuff with him recently as he was on the Ultimate Warrior documentary. There are some new(er) looking interviews with the likes of Michael Hayes, Kevin Nash, Luger, Sean Waltman and current WWE superstars like The Miz, but The Monday Night War feels like a Frankenstein creation of a show.
This has been an issue with all of the WWE Network output saved for the specials like the Ultimate Warrior documentary or the recent SHIELD piece, as the shows feel like a mishmash of stuff recorded over the last few years while they were trying to get content together for the Network launch. Watch an episode of the Countdown show and watch as Daniel Bryan gives one interview with his short hair and then another interview (in the same segment no less) with his long hair and beard. It’s hilarious really. It’s even funnier when you see Cody Rhodes’ interviews and he has that moustache…
But back to The Monday Night War and while the stories are nothing new, this is an interesting piece of wrestling history and because of that, The Monday Night War is well worth a watch. It has that lovely bit of revisionist history that WWE likes to add into their documentaries, but that’s all part of the fun. With this being an ongoing documentary series, it also means they can spend more time talking about certain topics. For example, this first hour-long episode looks at WWF’s rise after WrestleMania to their lull in the early 90s while mirroring that against the fall of Jim Crockett Promotions and the rise of Ted Turner’s WCW and the invention of Nitro. The next episode will be about the rise of the nWo and how that swung the war so perhaps we’ll also get an episode on Stone Cold Steve Austin’s impact, a revisionist look at the InVasion PPV, or an hour-long look at Vince Russo booking WCW into oblivion. Again, it’s stuff we’ve all seen before, but they can give us more than what we’ve had. The 2004 Monday Night Wars documentary cut off at around 1997, so perhaps this new series can delve deeper into this fascinating part of pro wrestling history.
Perhaps…
The Monday Night War has some issues in that it feels lazy and it doesn’t really offer anything new, but as wrestling fans we still like to see and watch wrestlers talk about this infamous battle of ratings and the show does feature some great nostalgic footage of the early days of RAW and Nitro. We’ll see how far they go down the rabbit hole but one hopes they don’t sweep a lot of the failings of both companies under the rug. No doubt the New World Order stuff in the next episode will be rehashed from the dozen of nWo documentaries they’ve made since 2002 and future episodes will be cobbled together from other DVDs, but it should still be fun to watch.
Luke Owen is the Deputy Editor of Flickering Myth and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published August 27, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
