Rehash.It's a dirty word amongst longtime, smarter fans, and yet it's this mantra, a way of doing business amongst wrestling bookers. If it weren't the desired business model, then DX wouldn't be an anchor teaming in the WWE, and TNA would be staging a full-fledged nWo reunion if just the terminology weren't owned by those bastards up North that they can't seem to stop referencing. It seems like there are two irreconcilable forces at work, a part of the fanbase that at times drives the trends in the business that always wants the companies to push the next thing and be original and the bookers who seem to want to fall back on the same things that got over in the past. As always, the answer is somewhere in between those two opposing forces. But where?
As much as the jaded, hyperactively-progressive fans will never admit, rehashing does work to an extent. For example, Evolution was a rehash. O rly, you might ask? What other stable in history was called Evolution? Well, no other stable to tell the truth, but what Evolution was was a vague rehash of the Four Horsemen, a stable as a vehicle to collect gold and serve as the elite force in the wrestling company at the time. You had the leader in Triple H (Ric Flair), the enforcer in Batista (Arn Anderson), the crafty technical wrestler in Flair (Tully Blanchard) and well, there was the fourth member in Randy Orton who really didn't fit any of the other archetypes in the group, but then again, the fourth member of the Horsement rotated a lot, from Ole Anderson to Barry Windham to Lex Luger, He Who Shall Not Be Named, Steve McMichael.
You could argue that Evolution wasn't that successful a stable, but I'd say it was only because of the short life of it. In the kiss-kiss, bang-bang, ADHD-addled nature of the big two companies today, Evolution wasn't given enough time before it exploded upon the group turning on Orton. But in the short time that it was active, it was an effective stable. Even if it was effectively the Horsemen rebranded, it felt new because the trappings, the details, the specifics were changed.
Compare that to probably the most rehashed group in recent history, the nWo. When it first came out, man, was there a stable that was better? It was fresh, it blurred the lines between the WWF and WCW, and the first six-to-nine months of it were some of the greatest moments in wrestling television. It managed to last a few years before it really petered out, but then WCW had this idea to bring it back again after the flame finally flickered out. They branded Bret Hart, Jeff Jarrett, Scott Steiner and Kevin Nash as nWo Silver, and the reaction was okay for it, but really, it wasn't as great as it was even in the days of the nWo Wolfpac vs. nWo Hollywood. It died a quick death after Bret Hart's career ended by the sloppy foot of Goldberg, and that's all we'd see of it, right? Well, no, Vince McMahon thought it'd be a good idea to bring it back to "kill" the WWF after his ingrate children turned it and his prize acquisitions of WCW and ECW into a joke in his eyes. That version went over so great that it died an even quicker death. And now, TNA is doing its best to rehash it again, and you can see how well it's doing for them with their negligible growth in audience thus far.
The problem? Everything was so specific, right down to the detail. There was nothing fresh about it, no new details added. It's the same problem with their rehashing of Montreal a few weeks ago. It was done down to the letter. Nothing fresh was added. It was just reading from a script. And because of that, because they had gone to the well too many times, the law of diminishing returns started to establish itself, and the pops aren't as hot as they wanted or foolishly expected.
Yeah, there are exceptions. The law of dimininishing returns certainly doesn't apply as starkly to the many reformations of Degeneration X, but then again, you could argue that each reformation has been slightly different. The way I see it though, DX is the exception that, to us haters, annoyingly proves the rule. But the rule is there. The more specific you try to do a rehash, the worse it's going to turn out.
I mean, let's face it. Wrestling has hardly been a business driven by innovation or being on the cutting-edge. The only reason it found itself on that edge in the late '90s was because the industry as a whole was lucky enough to see two companies catch lightning in a bottle around the same time, WCW with the nWo and the WWF with Stone Cold Steve Austin. Before then, it was traditionally a business that recycled storylines all the time; the difference was that the bookers recycling those storylines had the common sense to change a few things here and there to be tailored to the wrestlers in them. That, and well, wrestling has always been a business driven more by personalities rather than the stories they were entrenched in.
Still, you rehash something so blatantly and you run the risk of alienating a portion of that audience, especially when you don't have the personalities to back it up. I guess a big reason why DX's diminishing returns aren't as steep as other blatant rehashes is that Trips and HBK both have more clout with the crowds than AJ Styles, Kurt Angle and broken down, non-wrestler Hogan have multiplied by a hundred. While personalities are the key though, smart booking can go a long way, just as stupid, lazy booking can go a long way to turning fans off.
So rehashing isn't a dirty word. It's actually a good tool if you apply care and don't act ham-handedly enough that you're lifting an entire stable or storyline verbatim from when it happened before. I.E., don't rehash shit like TNA rehashes it. It'll just fail harder than Sean Waltman taking a drug test.
