Monday Night War

While WCW was the dominant promotion for much of the mid-1990s, a variety of factors coalesced to turn the tide in the WWF's favor at the end of the decade, including a radical rebranding of their formerly family-friendly product into highly sexualized and violent shows geared towards older teens and adults.

WCW ultimately ran into financial difficulties as a result of the amount of money they had promised wrestlers during a hiring binge in the early and middle part of the decade, which had been aimed at acquiring large portions of the WWF's talent roster.

The Monday Night War largely sprang from a rivalry between WWF owner Vince McMahon and WCW owner Ted Turner, dating back to an incident in the 1980s known as Black Saturday, when McMahon acquired a monopoly on all nationally televised wrestling broadcasts by purchasing a stake in Georgia Championship Wrestling (GCW), whose flagship show aired on WTBS, Turner's own superstation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

WCW dominated the ratings through much of the mid-1990s, as Turner's financial resources allowed the company to purchase the services of numerous high-profile WWF performers, including Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage.

Fans also responded negatively to several gimmicks intended to reinvigorate interest in the promotion, including the introduction of actor David Arquette as WCW World Heavyweight Champion.

However, a controversial backstage decision to end his winning streak, followed quickly by an anticlimactic match involving Kevin Nash and Hollywood Hogan – now known as the Fingerpoke of Doom – effectively killed WCW's credibility in the eyes of many fans, and the company was never able to recreate the initial level of popularity that it had enjoyed in the middle of the decade.

In May 1985, McMahon sold the WTBS time slot to another Southern-based and NWA-affiliated wrestling company, Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP), under heavy pressure from station owner Ted Turner, who was unhappy with the declining ratings.

During Bischoff's first year at the top of WCW, bookers Ole Anderson and Dusty Rhodes concocted cartoonish, unbelievable and poorly built-up storylines that were poorly received by fans, such as "Lost in Cleveland," a storyline in which Cactus Jack developed amnesia and disappeared in Cleveland, Ohio; the White Castle of Fear, a match between Sting and Vader themed around B movies meant to promote SuperBrawl III; and tongue-in-cheek, short beach-party movies used as promotional videos for Beach Blast.

A Flair for Gold would eventually play host to one of the most infamous incidents of 1990s wrestling: On a live Clash of the Champions XXIV building up the Fall Brawl pay-per-view, WCW decided to introduce a "mystery partner" for the babyfaces, a masked man known as The Shockmaster.

The Disney tapings would ultimately prove disastrous to the company's reputation, largely due to WCW's underestimation of growing internet culture: because the events were recorded weeks, and sometimes months, in advance, fans in attendance had time to disseminate the results not only to wrestling magazines but also online.

The decision was largely made out of necessity: The company had intended to place heavy emphasis on Sid Vicious, but he was involved in a legitimate altercation with fellow wrestler Arn Anderson while on tour in England.

Notably, the men negotiated total creative control over their characters, in addition to multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts at a time when many top wrestlers were only receiving around $1 million a year.

Gordon and Heyman planned to have Shane Douglas, who was scheduled to face 2 Cold Scorpio in the tournament finals, throw down the NWA World Heavyweight Championship upon winning it as an act of defiance.

Prior to their departure, the men had been part of The Kliq, a tight-knit affiliation of wrestlers in the WWF whose backstage influence allowed them to wield an enormous amount of power over the direction of the company.

The incident marked one of the first times that pro wrestlers had so flagrantly broken character in front of an audience, and forced both the WWF and WCW to begin acknowledging fans' growing awareness of the backstage happenings of their respective companies.

The Curtain Call would go on to influence the narrative course both companies took by encouraging WCW, and later the WWF, to blur the lines of fantasy and reality in wrestling, incorporating wrestlers' real names and details of their lives into their character's stories.

The ensuing storyline, in which the nWo waged a campaign of anarchy against WCW, blurred the lines between reality and scripted entertainment, a unique presentation that acknowledged fans' growing awareness of backstage wrestling politics and kayfabe.

Into the early 1990s, the WWF had continued the creative formula that had given the company success in the 1980s: clear-cut face vs. heel storylines, colorful wrestlers with themed gimmicks, and alluring female valets who nonetheless maintained a "PG-13" level of sex appeal.

Although the formula had been popular during the MTV-fueled "rock n' Wrestling" era of the 1980s, fans in the 1990s began to gravitate towards more morally ambiguous characters, wrestlers whose personas were more grounded in reality, and metafiction storylines that acknowledged their awareness of backstage politics via the use of the Internet.

As many of the cruiserweights incorporated elements of lucha libre into their performances, the division also helped WCW take advantage of the popularity of wrestling amongst Hispanic, Latin American, and Asian fans.

Although these elements helped to garner the WWF more attention than it had enjoyed in the wake of the nWo storyline, the injury of Steve Austin at the SummerSlam pay-per-view, which put him out of action for three months, proved to be a severe blow to Raw Is War's popularity.

This presentation both mimicked Nitro's "Anything can happen" atmosphere, and acknowledged the growing phenomenon of "smarks," wrestling fans who used the Internet to gain a wide base of knowledge on the real-life, backstage workings of the industry.

[22] Shaun Assael and Mike Mooneyham's book Sex, Lies Headlocks:The Real Story of Vince McMahon and World Wrestling Entertainment stated that "the terrain shifted completely under everyone's feet" following Diller's purchase of the USA Network, which began in October 1997.

Shawn Michaels, Triple H, and Chyna formed D-Generation X (DX), a rule-breaking, frat boy-themed stable of wrestlers who laced their vignettes with sexual innuendo and lewd gestures.

Although an injury would cause Michaels to take a four-year hiatus from wrestling, the stable soared in popularity under the leadership of Triple H, who added the New Age Outlaws and Sean Waltman to the group's ranks.

Over several weeks, Foley engaged in a series of out-of-character shoot interviews documenting his career, the toll it had taken on his body and his marriage, and his youthful ambitions of being a popular wrestler with a hippie persona named Dude Love.

In the second of three hours, Eric Bischoff, who had learned of the results of the taped Raw Is War that was set to air that night, ordered commentator Tony Schiavone to make the following statement: Fans, if you're even thinking about changing the channel to our competition, do not.

In 2000, WCW lost US$62 million, due to guaranteed contracts of their older performers, plummeting advertising revenues, dropping house show attendance, declining attendance of tapings for Thunder (which moved its tapings to immediately after Nitro beginning on October 9 of that year), controversial booking decisions (like Arquette and Russo winning the WCW World Heavyweight Championship), and expensive stunts to boost the dismal ratings and pay-per-view buyrates.

He sustained an arm injury during a backstage vignette taping that kept him off television for six months; upon his return, the decision was made to try to shake up the status quo by having him turn heel at The Great American Bash, despite being the most popular wrestler in WCW.

McMahon opened the last-ever episode of WCW Monday Nitro with a simulcast with WWF Raw Is War, which aired from Cleveland, Ohio, with a self-praising speech consistent with his on-screen persona.