Guys who didn't fit in at the time

Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Cornette screwed the pooch on that then. I'm not sold by the "Mastadon" name but something easier off the tongue would have come through in the final production

The thing is, Vader wasn't really a name. He was a headline act in a company that struggled to draw a few hundred people, and drew so poorly that they cut house shows entirely, which is unprecedented. WWF, by contrast, was doing a few thousand still on average. Pretty much 10-15x more. It's like what I say about the Invasion storyline. Reality is that none of those WCW guys could have drawn and that they were years removed from having drawn money. Only exceptions were the few brands like Flair or Hogan who had their audience regardless of promotion. Same deal with Flair in 1991. The elephant in the room is that Flair was pulling barely more than a thousand a show when he left WCW. WWF was doing 6x that number. Even their B shows were outdrawing Flair 3 to 1.

One temptation that exists in that industry is to think that promoters can manufacture lost interest in talent. That just never happens. Most WWF fans watch the company to see a WWF product, which involves that 60 second character work in coming to the ring, an easily digestible format that's homogeneous to all the acts involved, the face spots to galvanize the audience, etc. It's Disney. A lot of good, competent pro wrestlers can't transition to Disney readily. Some do. Then you get people like Sabu who has his fans but wouldn't interest most casuals. The smark audience simply isn't that big

By the time WCW business somewhat turned around in 1995, Vader got beat clean by an aged Hulk Hogan. It's not that that killed his career. If fans like you, they'll forgive that kind of stuff. But he did have to be repackaged on WWF terms. Whether Vader would have succeeded in that is anyone's guess. Maybe, maybe not. But you have to be glam to get over with the WWF audience. People who look more like pro wrestlers just don't get over there. Not that Vader did, but his act was something that more worked for Japan

On that note, I think Warrior would have been HUGE in Japan. Meltzer once wrote that he had "sources" tell him that the audience laughed when he was throwing tables in the ring at a Japan show. I refuse to believe that and watched it myself. Japan has "work rate," except that's a shallow interpretation of what they actually do. They like freaks and making psychology about the warrior pagan spirit that's unique to Japanese culture. Warrior would have gotten over huge there.

What's funny about smark favorites like Kenny Omega is how anthropologically stupid people like him are. He really thinks that Japanese wrestling can translate to an American audience. Americans are too literal to get something nuanced like that, and even culturally gluttonous. They don't like challenges in culture.

What hurt WWE in the last 20 years were "dream matches" that supplanted standard morality tales that New York always told. Dream matches appeal to smarks. Casuals never think of dream matches as a draw since they don't think wrestling is a real sport. It's a silly mental exercise to be like "Who would win in a real fight? Wolverine or Cyclops?" Casuals don't watch wrestling the same way that they watch football where they'll hoot and holler over a reversal. Casuals don't think "Nice move by the Blue Blazer. He really pwned that tough guy Outlaw Ron Boss. I wonder how he would do against Ravishing Rick Rude." Reaction is different than if an NBA nobody outplayed Michael Jordan, which would have gotten a huge reaction. Casuals think wrestling is just popcorn entertainment, then get into their favorite main acts, convinced that they're more legit than the rest of the undercard. That has been true for a hundred years (at least)

Not that any of that mattered to Vince anyway. Dude became a billionaire, so it's not like he had to care. Lazy booking still got him "good enough" numbers in ways that booking carefully never got him before. His meal ticket was Wall Street and making new revenue streams that impressed his real audience: media heads