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Sound familiar? It should, because you can say the same thing about professional wrestling. In fact, the more time I spent watching, the more things I saw as absolute truths in both worlds and I found some pretty incredible parallels. Here's just a few things that make me believe that Hercules/Xena and professional wrestling really aren't all that different.
It makes perfect sense to stand right in front of someone who wants to destroy you and exchange one-liners.
Whenever you watch an episode of Hercules or Xena, there's a pretty good chance that they're going to come face to face with the villain sometime before the end of the episode. Most of the time they'll actually meet several times before the climactic battle, and usually both of them know that they're going to have to fight eventually, yet they stand there trading verbal jabs time and again instead of Herc or Xena just walking in, laying the dude out, and being done with it.
Do I even need to tell you how this relates to wrestling? How many times have John Cena, Randy Orton, and everyone on the TNA roster stood there for ten minutes yammering back and forth with the guy who just stole their title, slashed their tires, and set their house on fire? Discretion may be the better part of valor, but I think in the case of both shows, everyone has relatively little to lose by dispensing with the dialogue and just going at it. Which brings me to my next point...
every episode is 90% talking and 10% action.
Nearly every episode of Hercules and Xena starts with them beating the crap out of somebody (or usually a bunch of somebodies), then doing nothing but talking and talking and talking until the very end of the episode when they beat up another bunch of people. Raw usually flips the formula and both begins and ends the show with a bunch of talking, usually with some wrestling in the middle. Some episodes of Impact you're lucky to get 15 minutes of wrestling in the entire two hours.
The difference between the two on this one is that usually, Hercules and Xena do interesting stuff in between the opening fight and the main event. When they're not trading cute zings with the top heel, they're usually out adventuring to get to whatever temple, abandoned castle, or cave where they fight the heel at the end. So I think that if WWE and TNA want to include as much talking as they do, I want to see John Cena climbing more giant mountains and James Storm dodging arrows as he crosses a rickety rope bridge.
The babyfaces have a real bad habit of letting bad guys live.
I think being a good babyface means having a mentality that you don't want to sink to the heel's level. The downside to this desire to take the high road is that the villains always live to fight another day, and they always do. While it is generally considered the upstanding thing to do, nobody ever seems to consider the consequences of letting such dastardly evildoers off the hook so easily. Obviously, we see many of the same recurring villains in Hercules and Xena, who are always satisfied with merely delivering the evildoers to the local authorities and then moving on, but this unfortunate sense of honor extends itself to wrestling as well with sometimes dire consequences.
Take Magnum TA and Tully Blanchard, for example. Their feud culminated in the legendary I Quit match at Starrcade 85, and after Tully submitted, Magnum was standing over him with the sharp piece of wood in his hand and had the opportunity to permanently rid the world of his hated enemy, but chose instead to throw down the wood and let Tully go because he wanted to be the bigger man. Now, flash forward a year or two later: Magnum's career was ended and he was basically unable to defend himself due to the injuries he suffered in the accident, so Tully saw how vulnerable his longtime rival had become and used the opportunity to come in and knock his lights out in one of the most shocking things to ever happen in wrestling.
Now for a good example of someone who knows how to do it right: there's an episode of Xena where her long lost dad finally returned and began traveling with Xena and Gabrielle. They're attacked by a guy trying to kill them with a blowgun, and Xena catches the guy but lets him go. The would-be assassin barely gets five steps before running into Xena's dad, who brings the guy with the blowgun to his knees and, even though the assassin is completely unable to defend himself, Xena's dad runs him through with his sword as Gabrielle looks on in utter shock at the coldblooded way he took this guy's life.
What Gabrielle failed to understand is that Xena's dad had been around the block a few times and knew what to expect from people like this. He was a survivor, and wasn't going to let this guy run free so he could come back and try to kill them again, which he almost certainly would have. You can see the difference between his story and Magnum's story, so the moral to take away from this is that when you have your enemy in a compromising spot: KILL HIM.
Both shows know the easiest way to appeal to their target demographic.
Watch any episode of Hercules or Xena, any episode, and you're guaranteed to see tons of hot women in revealing clothing, and there's at least a 50% chance they'll be cavorting in pools in their underwear and feeding each other grapes. They're very rarely a significant cog in any storyline other than being rescued by Herc or Xena, and you can see a similar philosophy at play in WWE and TNA. Anyone else been watching TNA the last few weeks as the Knockouts have been featured washing cars in bikinis and catfighting in the pool? Can anyone think of any other reason Kelly Kelly has a job in WWE? Here's a hint: it's got nothing to do with her side hobbies of archeology, internet routing, and nuclear fission.
Sure, you have a few women in both companies who are actually very good wrestlers as well as looking good, but if you think wrestling is the main reason any of these girls have jobs in either company, you might be a slight bit off track.
Every superstar needs a sidekick.
Hercules has Iolaus and Xena has Gabrielle, much like Flair had Arn, Hogan had Beefcake, and now Cena has Ryder. They're all there to stand by their best bud, and you can bet that when adversity comes knocking, they'll be there until the bitter end. The unfortunate fine print in the sidekick contract, however, is that while you may make a great team with the hero, anytime you ever try and go accomplish something on your own, you will lose badly and need your big tough friend to come bail you out. For Iolaus or Gabrielle, this means getting locked up in a dungeon and possibly used as bait or blackmail, but in wrestling, this phenomenon usually manifests itself as the sidekick getting beaten and laid out by the guy who's wrestling their friend on the next PPV.
The people with the power are either completely ineffective or staggeringly evil.
In Hercules and Xena, you basically have two types of rulers (kings, chiefs, etc): either they're evil warlords bent on conquest of all their weak, peace loving neighbors, or they're truly good and compassionate leaders who might as well not even be there since they're completely unable to effectively govern their lands and are constantly undermined by their shifty servants, who all aspire to become evil warlords.
Do I even need to follow that up by going into how many unscrupulous, self serving, vindictive, sadistic General Managers, Commissioners, and other authority figures we've had in wrestling over the last decade? On the flipside, the few authority figures we've gotten who are actually decent people just trying to do their job such as Mick Foley or Triple H are quickly undermined by their clearly evil subordinates and lose their jobs before you can blink. I'm frankly surprised Sting has stayed in his spot for two months without some heel trying to steal his job, because you know it's coming.
The more outlandish the character, the more likely they are to get TV time.
Do you see Hercules and Xena spending entire episodes going back and forth with roving bands of highwaymen terrorizing the people of Greece with their looting ways? No, of course you don't. Those people all get their butts kicked in the first five minutes and then Herc and Xena spend the rest of the episode fighting hydras, ogres, trolls, Cerberus, the undead, big manta rays that can burrow under the sand and snatch you when you walk over them, Arachne, titans, giant killer trees, cyclops, Medusa, and every other crazy mythological creature you can think of, and even a few you probably couldn't.
As strange as all that seems, consider the wacky list of characters we've seen come through wrestling circles over the years: the Undertaker, Kane, the Boogeyman, the Yeti (and everyone else in the Dungeon of Doom for that matter), Hornswoggle, Zodiac, ten million different Samoans, Kamala, Giant Gonzalez, wrestling penises, Jason and Freddy, Zeus, Mideon, Viscera, and even the damn Christmas Creature. When you actually line them up against one another, I think wrestling may have somehow out-weirded even Hercules and Xena with the types of creatures that pop up.
With the WWE launching their own network later this year, there's been talk about how they'd mainly feature WWE material but are interested in finding other programming to sign up and turn it into a lifestyle channel similar to History and Discovery. Looking back over everything I just wrote, it seems to me like Hercules and Xena would fit the bill quite nicely. I'm sure the cable rerun rights wouldn't bee too expensive, and just think about the crossover potential. Kevin Sorbo as the new Raw GM? I'd watch that!w
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