A docuseries like Mr. McMahon is hard to watch because a lot of the people being interviewed are pretty horrible people. I can imagine filmmaker Chris Smith watching the 2024 Republican National Convention in July and jumping up and down as Hulk Hogan did his foolish shirt tear trademark as he supporting Donald Trump. You can’t buy publicity like that.
Trump is only shown in archival footage in Smith’s six-part docuseries Mr. McMahon but Hogan and the man himself, Vince McMahon, are interviewed at length throughout the Netflix program. There is a disclaimer before each episode the interviews were conducted before allegations of McMahon on sex trafficking were made. You kind of wonder did Smith and his production look at what they have and decide to go with it as they intended or did they have to tweak stuff around. I’m sure the legal team at Netflix watched every minute of it over and over to make sure nothing being said could result in a lawsuit.
That being said, McMahon, Hogan and many others give off an arrogant vibe that leaves us to wonder if there was much difference in the ring than in real life. McMahon pretty much revolutionized wrestling, taking it out of the musky high school gym and no-frills civic centers in podunk towns were it was held for years and decades. He put it in bigger arenas like other sports. But there was always the entertainment value of it.
One of the smartest moves, McMahon did was partnering with NBC and former Saturday Night Live producer Dick Ebersol for the Saturday Night Main Event, which was able to hook newer viewers who were expecting to see Saturday Night Live. Main Event was broadcast instead of a rerun of SNL. The sets looked like they had been salvaged from porn sets and there was an outrageous atmosphere of overacting and goofiness.
Whether or not wrestling was fake or not has been something heavily debated. And Smith doesn’t shy away from the footage of journalist John Stossel being hit in the side of the head by wrestler David Schultz. We also see Hogan putting actor/comic Richard Belzer in a head-lock to which he actually passed out. Yet, Hogan and Mr. T, who were guests on his talk show Hot Properties, thought it was a pratfall. This resulted in Belzer hitting his head on the studio floor having a concussion and leaving a spot of blood there.
Most of the wrestlers actually did do physical stuff but it was usually predetermined before hand who would win and who wouldn’t. It was the same as roller derby in the 1970s and 1980s, which is one of the reasons people couldn’t bet on them the way they did other sports. But in the ring, Hogan and others say they just went with it mostly in how things happened. I remember reading an interview in which Roddy “Rowdy” Piper before he passed he said with all the hits he took, it wasn’t fake. And a lot of wrestlers suffered serious injuries.
Of course, some wrestlers are MIA for obvious reasons. Jesse Ventura is only shown in one archive scene. It’s later released that Hogan went behind his back and told McMahon how Ventura was getting the wrestlers to unionize. And CM Punk has went on the record talking about how they were prescribed Z-pack antibiotics instead of the right medication they needed for their conditions. This caused him to have diarrhea during a wrestling match.
Is McMahon a bastard? Yes. Is he a shrewd businessman? Of course. But he sold a product that America and the world bought. McMahon in his interviews seems to offer no worries about what he did or what he should’ve done. His childhood was a turbulent one as he suffered child abuse at the hands of his stepfather, before realizing he was the son of wrestling promoter Vince J. McMahon and wanting to spend more time with him in his teens.
While wrestling was mostly regional and many organizations didn’t step over their boundaries, McMahon was ready to change it all up even going against what his father did and wanted to continue to do. In the 1980s, McMahon almost monopolized the product. That was before Ted Turner started the World Championship Wrestling. Because of his bad health, Turner isn’t interviewed even though also shown in archival footage, Eric Bischoff is interviewed. Bischoff, who was appointed to oversee WCW, moved away from the outrageous comic-book like characters in the World Wrestling Federation (now called World Wrestling Entertainment.)
And as the 1990s began, more people were wanting to see WCW wrestlers who dressed in leather, drove motorcycles around arenas. And there was also the pryotechnics that made every weekly broadcast look the biggest concert in town everyone wanted to be at. And it’s no wonder that McMahon would steal what WCW did on TNT and do the same thing finally admitting it was all a put-on.
It’s revealed the reason WCW went defunct so fast in 2001 is because Turner Broadcasting System, which was over, merged with AOL Time Warner. Therefore, the new business daddy didn’t want to be associated with wrestling selling it off for only $4.3 million. Apparently, wrestlers might be strong and buff, but money talks and stockholders delivered a bigger smackdown.
But for the most part, the docuseries still comes up short. Most of the interviews have been sitting around for months if not over a year than when they were made. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely Smith would’ve been able to call anyone in for an updated interview. Also, McMahon isn’t really a very likeable person and the allegations are hard to see past. It’s very likely he did tell one wrestler to put Stossel in his place and Schultz decided to be that person.
This is a documentary that feels undone, mostly because Smith and Netflix were rushed to put something together before the Nov. 5 election. Speaking of which, if you’ve heard the news, Trump has nominated Linda McMahon to be the secretary of the Education Department. Sadly, this isn’t fake news.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 