wrestling / Columns
The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 WWE-Produced Documentaries
One of the most fortuitous turns in my wrestling fanship is the fact that I graduated from college and started my first full-time job right in the sweet spot of WWE producing polished documentaries to celebrate wrestling history and its top stars of the day. WWE has steadily continued to shoot documentaries for both the DVD market and now the WWE Network.
This week, I’m flipping through my collection and ranking my picks for the top seven WWE-produced documentaries.
#7. The History of WWE: 50 Years of Sports Entertainment
Even if you’re not a fan of professional wrestling, I would argue that WWE’s story is a fascinating one: as an exploration of pop culture and as the success story of a small(er) business turned multi-billion-dollar international corporation. This documentary did a nice job of providing a story for audiences of each of those stories and catering to their primary consumers, the wrestling fans.
The History of WWE is particularly good for how sprawling it is, starting in the days of Buddy Rogers and Bruno Sammartino, continuing into Hulkamania, then the New Generation, The Attitude Era, and John Cena’s contemporary PG landscape. Better yet, the documentary drills down into a handful of topics it hasn’t given much exposure to before such as the early 1990s steroid trial and the death of Owen Hart.
Hardcore fans will always want more from a project like this. After all, we’ve seen and read so many accounts about the Attitude Era, that we would probably just as soon skip that period and learn more about the times immediately before and after it. Furthermore, there are stories that remain untold about the underrealized Invasion angle, WWE’s handling of the Chris Benoit tragedy, and major clustermucks like the Plane Ride from Hell.That said, for a relatively casual audience, this is a pretty thorough and not-too-excessively white-washed retelling of WWE history that I found both entertaining and informative.
#6. The Bret Hart Story: The Best There Is, the Best There Was, the Best There Ever Will Be
Admittedly, I’m a mark for Bret Hart, so when he mended fences with WWE and accepted induction to the Hall of Fame it was a landmark moment for me as a fan. Better yet, I was thrilled to take in this DVD set—not just a compilation of some of his top matches, but also an over-two-hour documentary that extended from his childhood through his wrestling career.
The film delivers. Hart was a territory wrestler who went on to travel the globe and enjoy a lengthy tenure with WWE, spanning the Hogan era into the early days of the Austin era, including his fair share of high profile angles—most notably a multifaceted rivalry with Shawn Michaels. The documentary spends a little longer on Hart’s family history than I’d prefer—an aspect of his story that I don’t wish to undercut, but just the same, as a modern wrestling fan, I would have been interested to have seen that time redistributed to dedicate more coverage to other elements of his in-ring career such as his mid-nineties run in Memphis as a bizarro heel opposite Jerry Lawler, or more time dedicated to the details of his time with WCW.
Thus the documentary isn’t perfect, but it is very good, and an excellent companion piece to Hart’s superior memoir, Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling and the later two-hour shoot interview with Hart and Michaels, moderated by Jim Ross.
#5. The Shawn Michaels Story: Heartbreak and Triumph
There are many commonalities between the Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart DVD sets. Though I prefer Hart as a personality and character, I give HBK’s documentary the nod in this case because, for better or worse, Michaels’s time in wrestling tended to produce more controversies and complications, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about those situations from his perspective, including running with The Kliq, his steroid suspension, the time when he was beaten up in a Syracuse parking lot, the initial formation of DX, The Montreal Screwjob, and the point at which he left wrestling and found Jesus.
Michaels was a great performer and a wrestling icon. While the story gets filtered through a PG WWE lens, and could probably be all the more interesting were it more down and dirty, this is nonetheless a documentary worthy of HBK’s loftly legacy.
#4. The Tragedy and Triumph of World Class Championship Wrestling
As I’ve recounted a number of times in these columns, I have a soft spot for WCCW, on account of early childhood memories watching the promotion’s shows in the afternoons after school on ESPN. I caught enough of WCCW to be enthralled by the ambitious character work and solid in-ring action, and the promotion remains a sentimental favorite, too, out of a sense of loss and wonder because, at the peak of my investment, my mother decided I was watching too much wrestling and made me choose between continuing to watch WCCW and getting to watch WWF on the weekends. I just couldn’t pick against the Hulkster at the time.
Tragedy and Triumph does a brilliant job of recapturing so much of the spirit of WCCW through deft use of archival footage, combined with slick WWE production and access to all of the surviving big names from the company’s peak periods. Moreover, it arfully communicates the tragic story of the Von Erich family and its many losses.
Lots of hardcore fans give this documentary a hard time because they feel it doesn’t live up to Heroes of World Class–a grittier production that predated the WWE release. I put the sets on more or less equal footing, and actually find them wonderfully complementary for their differences.
#3. The True Story of WrestleMania
Like many of us, I’m fascinated with WrestleMania—the most watched show of the year that started as a financial gamble, and has offered a stage for many of WWE’s biggest storyline moments and great matches. Thus, when I heard of The True Story of WrestleMania I considered it an immediate must-buy DVD.
Like most entries on this countdown, the documentary was not perfect. It was probably too ambitious to cover twenty-six years of the show’s history in a two-hour piece—a Monday Night War-like series of documentaries that covered one to three ‘Manias per episode would probably be more apropos. But despite unbalanced allotment of time and attention between shows and, in my opinion, the error of breaking into covering WrestleManias based on geographic links (e.g., Toronto) or links to celebrities (e.g., Donald Trump) rather than sticking to chronological order, this remains one of my most re-watched wrestling documentaries. For all of the apocryphal details, the behind-the-scenes story of the first few years of WrestleMania is still captivating to me, and as a child who grew up with WrestleMania, I’ve openly imbibed the WWE Kool Aid regarding how important this show is, and, accordingly, still get goosebumps at every mention of “the showcase of the immortals.”
Perhaps best of all, this is one of WWE’s most accessible DVDs. By pushing through the history of the company, it welcomes casual viewers to hop onto the eras they remember best (particularly for Rock ‘N’ Wrestling and Attitude Era fans); for younger fans, it provides a compact history lesson, and for those who won’t necessarily learn a lot from the documentary, it remains a good synopsis to remind us of the bouts we most want to revisit leading up to a new WrestleMania.
#2. CM Punk: Best in the World
CM Punk made his name in the pro wrestling world off of representing counterculture—undersized, outspoken. It’s fitting then, that WWE’s most uliikely bona fide superstar would be featured in what was arguably the company’s most off-beat documentary. CM Punk: Best in the World features more punk rock music than generic Jim Johnson riffs, and includes not only Punk’s colleagues and family, but a bevy of wrestling personalities who never made it to (or never had more than a cup of coffee in) WWE, including folks like Colt Cabana, Chris Hero, and Samoa Joe. Moreover, the documentary includes footage from not only the WWE developmental system, but also ROH, and rarer yet footage from Punk’s earlier indy efforts. On top of all of this, there’s Punk’s honesty. We don’t see his parents beaming about how he always dreamed of being a wrestler and went on to live his every aspiration. We hear Punk talk directly about his alcoholic father and the fact that his brother stole money from him and thus he hasn’t talked to him for years.
Punk purportedly had a lot of direct input on this documenarty project, and it shows in a final product that is far less white-washed than the typical WWE release. It’s a distinctive portrait of a distinctive personality, for which Punk’s appearance on Cabana’s Art of Wrestling podcast may have been the perfect coda to sum up his wrestling story.
#1. The Rise and Fall of ECW
This one came out in the early days of WWE’s documentary enterprises and proved one of the company’s most earnest, authentic, and comprehensive releases—long before there was a well-defined template for such films, and when you can sense a palpable interest in not just cashing in on the ECW legacy and recently acquired tape library, but also in actively celebrating the promotion and it’s brief history. It’s a brilliant recap of a number of ECW’s best storylines, an unselfish rendering of just how committed the ECW fanbase was, and perhaps most compellingly a portrait of Paul Heyman as a wrestling genius with business acumen that wasn’t up to the task of seeing an extreme vision through to its fullest potential (though some will argue that Spike TV and cable companies’ business practices were more to blame for the company’s demise, or that the little promotion had both a ceiling and a shelf life from the beginning).
The Rise and Fall of ECW features the best qualities of WWE documentaries—access to so much footage, the clout to get premier talking heads, the production capabilities to churn out professional grade films, and skilled direction to assemble cohesive narratives around interviews and clips that aren’t necessarily, themselves, the most linear or sensical. While the over-exposure and abuse of the ECW brand and its off shoots may have mitigated the original ECW mystique, this documentary remains an excellent tribute to a special institution in the history of pro wrestling.
What are your favorite WWE documentaries? Ones featuring Paul Heyman, the AWA, WCW, or Triple H? They were certainly among my runners up. Let us know what you think in the comments section. See you in seven.
Read stories and miscellaneous criticism from Mike Chin at his website and his thoughts on a cappella music at The A Cappella Blog. Follow him on Twitter @miketchin.
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