During a recent edition of Edge & Christian’s “E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness” podcast, the former WWF Tag Team Champions discussed the end of the Attitude Era and the WCW Invasion storyline. Below are the highlights:
Edge: Now here’s a question. What do you think ended the Attitude Era? And when did it end?
Christian: Umm maybe the Invasion? WCW Invasion? Was kinda end of it?
Edge: I think the massively dropped ball that was the Invasion. I think was the death knell. And I’ll tell you what I would always gauge people’s reactions you know when I would meet them or talk to them. I used to love wrestling and then that whole Invasion thing. I cannot tell you how much over the years I heard that, to the point where people still haven’t gone back and I think there’s there’s multiple things for that I think the explosion in the UFC. I think as much as people don’t want to admit that, I think that took the college crowd, you know, they took what used to be that kind of crowd.
Christian: I mean when you had two entities that were constantly battling for the same spot which was to be the number one wrestling show on cable television – that’s water-cooler talk, right? Maybe this person is gonna show up on this show or this is you know and then at this point we were starting to get big with the internet sites and getting the backstage scoop and people became just as interested in the stuff that was happening backstage as what they were seeing on screen.
So they were well – “This guy’s, you know, about heat here and this guy is not happy and he’s jump in here” and like they’re so there was a lot of water cooler talk and when that happened, when WWF bought WCW and merged them and there was no longer that friction to put out there. It took a lot of the buzz of the industry away when that happened.
Edge: Well, I’ve always said it’s never healthy for an industry when there’s only one player in the industry. As much as that should sound the opposite, any time that something has a complete monopoly …it’s just….where’s the interest?