Editorials

Ring Rust Review: Gimmick This, Give Me That

By Daniel Interlandi on November 19, 2009

On the eve of the Survivor Series I’m reminded of a time when I was younger. I worked at a comic book store (just humor me this is going somewhere), I loved comics as a kid (and still do) and you can certainly make comparisons to wrestlers with the curves and muscles and the flashy outfits, as well as the “soap opera” aspect of wrestling, but anyway, every once in awhile back in the day these special comics would come out, these books involve some kind of special event or milestone, a death or birth (or rebirth, ‘cause nobody dies in comics), or even an anniversary, these special books are usually highlighted by a special cover. These were cool because they were rare you knew that if you see a foil cover or whatnot that something special was going on, it’s a “must read”. So comic companies at one point decided, hey sales are down we need something to get these people to buy more comics, what can we do? Hey people like these fancy special foil enhanced covers so why don’t we just make more, people will buy them, maybe even multiple copies, it will be great, so they did and hey it worked at least for awhile, people were buying more, but then people realized that if every other book was a “milestone” and had a special cover (and jacked up price), then is it really that special? Do these stories really warrant this? People got the hint and stopped buying these books, and buying books in general, they were tired of the hype not living up to the event. Sound familiar?

When I was a kid I loved gimmick matches, you knew they were something special, you knew that if a certain feud got so bad the only way to end It was a steel cage, or a boot camp match, or whatever, if it got to that point it was special, a milestone if you will. Then someone thought hey people like these gimmick matches, we could center a whole event around something like this, something special maybe once a year type of thing, the rest is history, War Games, Survivor Series, Royal Rumble, the list goes on. I loved these events, they were special and out of the norm, the types of gimmicks got bolder with time, Hell In A Cell, Elimination Chamber, Monster’s Ball, but still these matches had an aura of being special and more important big buy rates, people would tune in to these matches, now lets fast forward to the present, sales are down, PPV buy rates are down, ratings are down, what can we do to raise ratings? See how I tied that together, nifty. Think about it, when you saw the first TLC match do you remember who the heels were, the faces, no who cares, what you remember was a great match an unusual match, where three teams put it all on the line, and gave us everything they had, good, bad, or whatever. You can’t reproduce that on a weekly or even monthly basis, the build up isn’t there, the “special” factor is gone. I will always have my favorites, the Rumble, King of the Ring, and yes Survivor Series, this year it will be a little more special because the actual concept has returned, and from what I understand we might get a visit from an old friend named War Games, wouldn’t that be cool, yes the concept of the gimmick match has lost it’s uniqueness, but in a world were we get “PPV” type matches on free TV maybe this is the way to go for now, maybe this will get people to watch, yeah maybe. Time will tell where this will go, that being said sometimes history tends to repeat itself, now if you’ll excuse me I got some comics to read. I hope everyone has a safe and Happy Thanksgiving and until next time….let’s watch.

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