WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2006 (PS2) Hidden Wrestlers (1/12): Hollywood Hulk Hogan gameplay

“BUT WHOSE SIDE IS HE ON?” – Bobby Heenan, proving that he was always right to distrust Hogan.

Bash at the Beach 1996. The date that wrestling changed forever. While it’s legend now and just sort of accepted, you really have to bury yourself in the context of that time to understand how and why it was so important.
Hogan was what I like to call an ultra-face; an impossibly, almost insufferably good person to the point that it made you nauseous, barely ever lost (especially clean), and in general was just way too powerful and won way too often. A lot like a classic shounen protagonist, come to think of it. This worked for a fair while, especially while kayfabe was more alive, but like everything people eventually got smart to it, and got bored and tired. When a sport is real, like boxing, there’s a real aura to an undefeated fighter or combatant. They almost feel like a real-life superhero, so impossibly above everyone else that they’re a bit terrifying to watch, but quite exciting too. Mike Tyson is probably the epitome of this, with most of his matches still being a hard watch simply because of how he would destroy opponents in the ring. That aura faded a bit however when he eventually lost to Buster Douglas, a spectacular fight to be sure but with a fighter who would never really go on to do much else that was all that noteworthy.

The unstoppable force wasn’t so unstoppable after all, and it’s never quite the same as a result. We always sort of want and love that superhero in a sport, and they’re usually what gravitivates a greater interest towards it as a result. The average person doesn’t really want a 12-round technical boxing match title fight (see: basically every Usyk fight, lol), they want to see some tough as nails guy go in and absolutely destroy their opponent. In football, the person everyone is interested in is the 30 goal-a-season striker or winger, not so much midfielders or defenders. It’s unfair in many ways, to be sure, but it’s what people want at the end of the day. The exceptional is always going to be the thing which piques peoples’ interests the most.
With that in mind of course, you can understand the popularity of a Sammartino, or a Hogan, as this all-conquering ultra-babyface, particularly in the latter stages of the Cold War when an all-American hero would be that bit more appealing.

Eventually though, the Cold War wound down, Hogan’s act got a bit old, and it just didn’t quite have the same appeal anymore, especially when it became obvious that Hogan was using his clout to hold other people back. After leaving to go back to more shows and movies in ’93, Hogan would eventually be convinced to go to WCW by Eric Bischoff, who hoped to bring him in to add some legitimacy to the promotion and hopefully have it get more attention from people as a result. While this certainly worked, there were two core issues. One, it was 1994, and Hogan was basically still doing the same act he’d been doing since 1984. It just felt old and outdated by this point, which wasn’t helped by how archaic Hogan looked in the ring, and how awful the storylines were.

The second part of course, is that WCW evolved from Southern Wrasslin’, whereas Hogan was the pinnacle of McMahon’s cartoonification of wrestling. Admittedly, wrestling had always been a bit silly, even in the South (the Lord Humongous gimmick as a example looked amazing but didn’t really make any sense), but the WWF had basically turned wrestling into a Saturday morning cartoon show of sorts. This helped to make it a global phenomenon, and it can’t be understated how beneficial it was to the popularity of wrestling on the whole. However, it also hugely homogenised the product and really hindered other types and styles of wrestling. So, you’re a WCW and former JCPromotions fan, you hate what the WWF has done to wrestling, and now your promotion has just brought in the figurehead of your main competition. How Bischoff expected him to get over, I’m still not sure.

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