The Attitude Era is considered one of the best periods in wrestling, especially where WWE is concerned, as the company reached new heights of popularity and profitability, making pro wrestling a big deal in pop culture again. Part of this apex is because of the talent at the top of the cards at the time -- including Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Shawn Michaels, and The Undertaker -- but also because of a focus on edgier content that made headlines and stirred controversy.
That said, there’s a lot of stuff that was acceptable in the Attitude Era that would not work today, especially when it comes to some of the gimmicks the wrestlers were working. So why don’t we take a look at 10 of Attitude Era gimmicks that would not fly today?
10 Key
You probably don’t remember Key, considering he only had two televised matches in 1999 and disappeared after a couple of months. Previously known as California indie wrestling standout Vic Grimes (and later of ECW and Wrestling Society X), Key was a drug dealer aligned with Droz for the purpose of supporting Road Warrior Hawk’s addiction -- which was a real-life thing -- just so Droz could take Hawk’s place in the Road Warriors. Insensitivity aside, the drug dealer shtick (even if he’s an obvious bad guy) isn’t the sort of thing WWE’s current PG-ish program would allow.
9 Goldust
Look, we know that the Goldust gimmick was resurrected and replicated loads of times after the Attitude Era, but modern Goldust revivals aren’t quite the same as the original iteration. The most recent version of Goldust was pretty sanitized, often just appearing as a weird guy in face paint and a bodysuit. The original Attitude Era version on the other hand was, like, a living Oscar statue that decided to wrestle as a sexually threatening cinephile drag queen -- and that’s not even an exaggeration, that’s just the basic premise. If WWE debuted that character today, they would get into SO much trouble.
8 Beaver Cleavage
Beaver Cleavage feels like some kind of fever dream, but it really happened -- Headbanger Thrash got injured, so WWF repackaged his tag team partner Headbanger Mosh as a Leave It To Beaver parody who appeared in black-and-white vignettes where he exchanged sexually suggestive dialogue with his on-screen mother, the busty Mrs. Cleavage.
It lasted about a month and one televised match before WWF dropped the gimmick (on-screen!) and Beaver Cleavage became Chaz. Besides the incestuous-innuendo and sexual content, it’s hard to imagine modern WWE audiences even knowing what Leave It To Beaver even is.
7 Kai En Tai
Let’s take a break from sexual characters to talk about racist characters! Kai En Tai originally began as a stable of Japanese wrestlers feuding with Taka Michinoku before targeting Val Venis (more on him later) in a feud that involved an attempt to sever his penis with a samurai sword, but soon evolved into a tag team consisting of Michinoku and Funaki that would cut promos where their mouth movements would be overdubbed with a cheesy voiceover, Godzilla movie style. So if you’re ever feeling down about how Shinsuke Nakamura and Akira Tozawa are glorified jobbers, just take a moment to watch “Funny Kai En Tai promo.”
6 The Oddities
Let’s take a break from racist content to talk about ablest content! Discussion question: are The Oddities the dirt worst thing WWE’s ever come up with? It’s wild that Vince McMahon -- he who loves hulking “special attraction” talent -- took all his weird-looking monster wrestlers like Kurrgan, Earthquake, and Giant Silva, and put them all in a freak show-themed stable with Luna Vachon. Add additional companions like the Insane Clown Posse and Howard Stern’s menagerie of outcasts and you have a melange of things that were bad about the late 1990s.
5 The Godfather
WWE’s PG era generally prevents them from highlighting The Godfather as one of their popular characters of The Attitude Era. If there’s one thing that’s not going to fly these days, it’s a wrestler who deals in sex trafficking and regularly shows up with his, uh, employees. And sure, The Godfather appears on WWE TV these days for the diminishing hit of nostalgia, but when he does the commentators take great care to not mention that the women accompanying him are likely prostitutes. The only clever part about the bit is that he’s billed from Las Vegas, where it’s legal.
4 P.M.S.
Let’s take a break from sexual content to talk about sexist content? In 1998, Terri Runnels, Jacqueline, and Ryan Shamrock were all involved in relationship drama (as Attitude Era women often were) so they were organized into a stabled called Pretty Mean Sisters -- or P.M.S, a crude pun that screams Vince Russo.
Eventually, they acquired Shawn Stasiak as a sex slave named Meat who came out in ring gear that looked like he was wearing nothing but briefs -- sorry, we said we were taking a break from sexual content but the Attitude Era makes it difficult.
3 Al Snow
Al Snow is one of those journeyman wrestlers whose entire Wikipedia could exist under the heading “Various Gimmicks’ if not for striking a certain amount of fool’s gold in the late 1990s. Basically, Snow’s lack of career direction caused a descent into madness that involved carrying around a mannequin head (named Head) as a companion. It was more fun than it had any right to be, but the main thrust of the gimmick was a kind of one-note joke about “getting/giving head” that you can’t put on lunchboxes these days, or ever.
2 Right To Censor
If there’s one thing WWE has always done well, it’s be publicly salty about the slightest bit of criticism. Complaints about WWF’s edgy content were common in the late 1990s, so they decided to poke fun at it with the stable Right to Censor, which took wrestlers like Val Venis and The Godfather and repackaged them into missionary types who made it their duty to purify WWE television. Clever stuff, but it’s a gimmick that only really works in the Attitude Era, when the show was actually full of objectionable content. What would a modern Right to Censor rail against? Three-hour Raws and endless promo parades?
1 Val Venis
Obviously. There’s nothing about Val Venis that would work today. His whole shtick is that he’s a porn star, and all of his storylines were about that fact. When he wasn’t trying to seduce Goldust and Yamaguchi-San’s wives, he was getting Ken Shamrock’s sister to star in one of his movies. They even involved real porn star Jenna Jameson in his hype videos! In an era where WWE claims to downplay Chyna because of her adult film career, it’s hard to see this character being a viable choice for the modern PG era. The storylines, however, are a different story -- WWE got really into cuckolding angles in 2019.