NXT 2.0 – Return of Gimmicks
By Scott Keith on 22nd September 2021
Hi Scott,
Completely disagree with your NXT 2.0 rant but I get its not everyone's cup of tea.
I grew up on 1980s WWF squash matches so I prefer the fast pace. Never cared for the Meltzer 5-star match approach as those were non-existent. What drew me to wrestling was the out over the top characters. A guy carrying a snake to a ring, a dude so intense
he calls himself the Macho Man, and the super patriotic good guy that Hulk Hogan was.
Gimmicks have been absent from wrestling for a long time but I see a lot of them in the new NXT. We have someone with ties to the mafia, a super woke heel, and a college professor. I'd love to see a lot more of these.
Give me gimmicks over generic wrestling guy any day.
They but they didn't introduce 19 of those gimmicks ON ONE SHOW. Why is Andre Chase a university professor? Who even is he? Why was Joe Gacy a hardcore brawler in that tournament and now he's suddenly just a women's rights advocate with no explanation? You can't just mix and match names and gimmicks and throw them on TV and expect people to care. Vince didn't do that in the 80s, either. “The guy with the snake” spent years honing the other more important aspects of the character in other territories before he ever got the snake. Why was he “The Snake”? Because he's a sneaky heel who was out for himself. We don't know anything about any of these guys in NXT, except that one guy is Rick Steiner's son, but we're not allowed to talk about that. These aren't classic 80s gimmicks, they're TL Hopper and Freddie Joe Floyd from the 90s, generic professions tossed onto throwaway wrestlers. It was lame then, it's lame now.