made for practice

1. The Legacy of World Wrestling
Entertainment
Rayaan Ibtesham Chowdhury

2. Valued at 1.65 Billion
Dollars, World Wrestling
Entertainment (WWE) is the biggest
sports entertainment brand in the
world.
Owned by Vince McMahon, WWE
defeated long time rivals, Ted
Turner’s World Championship
Wrestling (WCW) in the famous
Monday Night Wars TV Ratings
Fight and ultimately bought WCW in
2001.

3. Founded as Capitol
Wrestling by Jess
McMahon
Jess’ son James
renames the
company to
World Wrestling
Federation (WWF)
Vincent K McMahon
purchases the
company from his
father and gains
complete control
The first WrestleMania is
held which starts the
WWE’s Flagship
Megashow, one that runs
till today
The Attitude Era begins. With stars like
Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock,
WWF gains incredible mainstream
success and records regular TV ratings
of 6 million plus for its weekly
Monday Night Raw
The company changed its
name to World Wrestling
Entertainment (WWE) after
legal disputes with the World
Wildlife Fund

4. Capitol Wrestling became highly successful in the 70’s,
Especially after the rise of Bruno
Sammartino
However, they were just one of many promotions
in the country

5. In 1982,
Vincent K McMahon
Purchased the company from
his father and started on his
journey towards making the
WWF a national sensation
Vincent Kennedy
McMahon
Wrestling’s Greatest Innovator

6. The late 80’s saw a Golden Era as the WWF rode on the
back of Hulk Hogan to sell out stadiums and
gain prime time TV slots.
Vince McMahon aggressively raided other companies for
top talent and made many enemies in his path of making
his company the industry leader

7. Features of Wrestling in this Period
Super Hero-esque Good Guys
The “Good Guy” characters were created
to be straight out, idealistic good guys,
much like Super Man without any
known human flaws
Hulk Hogan was the best known
example of this
Stereotypical Villains
The villain characters were also
basically written villains with very
simple motivations for being evil.
The Cold War themes played a part
and foreigner characters were often
cast as villains e.g. The Iron Shiek,
who played an Iraqi Sympathizer
By and large, wrestling was very black and white in terms of writing

8. Within a decade, McMahon had transformed the WWF
into a national sensation.
He showed a keen knowledge of marketing and established
individuals like Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, The
Ultimate Warrior and a bit further down the road,
Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart and Shawn Michaels as
national icons.
The WWF was going strong.

9. In the 90’s, Texan billionaire Ted Turner got behind a struggling
company known as World Championship Wrestling and
everything started to change.

10. Funded by Turner’s millions and the creative genius
of Eric Bischoff, WCW started to overtake
WWF.
For starters, they lured away all of the WWF’s
biggest stars including Hulk Hogan with lucrative
contracts,
After that, they took wrestling down a whole new
creative direction.

11. WCW brought in realism
and edginess to their
product. Gone were the black
and white good guys/bad
guys. Now wrestlers
were characters with
grey personalities Good
guys did bad, bad guys did
good.
Lifelong superhero Hulk Hogan
turned into a degenerate!

12. WCW’s new creative direction yielded great
results and for a large part of the mid 90’s,
WCW beat WWF in the ratings, to the point
where WWF was facing potential
bankruptcy.
Faced with the possibility of going out of
business, McMahon was desperate…….

14. WWF adopted WCW’s ideas but
did so with far more intensity.
WWF’s Attitude Era gave a whole new
meaning to wrestling as the storylines
became far more violent, content
became a lot more sexualand the
product was elevated to truly meet the
tastes of the era.
The Attitude Begins

15. By 1998, WWF had
overtaken WCW again and were
consistently beating them in the
ratings.
WWF was back as the
industry leader but was
now a global brand,

16. The success of the Attitude Era allowed
WWE to purchase WCW in 2001. Since
then, no wrestling company has managed
to come anywhere close to competing with
Vince McMahon’s juggernaut.
Their success as a brand is evident in how they are now synonymous
with wrestling. In terms of market monopoly, dominance of this nature
has rarely been seen.
Future wise, WWE is extremely secure financially and is only going strength to strength