"McMahon" DVD Review

Vincent Kennedy McMahon. The man, the myth, some would even say the legend. When it comes to Mr. McMahon though it's hard to distinguish whether he's a legend in his own mind or really as great as he's made out to be. You won't hear World Wrestling Entertainment say it, but many of Vince McMahon's failures have been just as legendary as his triumphs, and I'm talking about both professional AND personal failure. These days his company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars (and on occasion a billion when the stock market peaks) and he is a household name everywhere, but that wasn't always the case. In fact there were many in the business who thought he would never surpass the legend of his own father, who had successfully promoted the World Wide Wrestling Federation up to the early 1980's and had made legends out of men like Bruno Sammartino and Superstar Billy Graham along the way. The younger McMahon had a lot to live up to, and in the years since he achieved success beyond his wildest dreams he's had a lot to live DOWN as well. That's why for better or worse the idea of a two-disc "McMahon" DVD set is quite frankly fascinating. A full recounting of his life's story would have to include both the calculated risks that became a tremendous success as well as the projects driven by his own hubris that nearly became his undoing. Can WWE do an honest biography on a "McMahon" DVD without overglorifying his triumphs and overshadowing his big mistakes?

This DVD like every other WWE release opens with a slew of commercials promoting their other home videos - the only two memorable ones were for "Wrestling's Greatest Managers" and WrestleMania 22. There's also the "please don't try this at home" warning which makes me miss having a VCR. Sure it's an antiquated technology but at least when you hit a button on the remote to skip ahead the tape deck never gave you an on screen warning reading "THIS OPERATION CAN NOT BE PERFORMED." Somebody PLEASE invent a DVD player that doesn't tell me what +I+ need to watch. Praise Cthulhu for all wrestlers and performers who put their bodies on the line for our entertainment, but I've never been stupid enough to jump off a twenty foot ladder and never will be - WWE sure as hell doesn't need to explain to me not to try this at home on every single product I buy. The main menu opens with Vince's "No Chance in Hell" theme music and a simple menu reading "Play/Chapters/Extras." The obvious choice is to just push play, but I'm actually dreading this a little bit. Would I enjoy listening to Jeff Jarrett or Gabe Sapolsky glorify their own accomplishments for two hours? Nonetheless it's time to take the plunge. CLICK.

"The power is back" package opens, and then we hear the voice of Jim Ross introducing us to the boss, while Mr. McMahon describes himself as a "handsome virile man." Ew. The voiceover announcer asks us to consider whether Vince is a patriot or a scoundrel, whether he's a loving family man or sadistic egomaniac, et cetera. I assumed they would wait at least five or ten minutes into the DVD before revisionist history would begin, but the narrator completely glosses over his unstable upbringing in North Carolina and instead jumps right to a young Vincent going to work for his biological father Vincent J. McMahon in the Northeastern territory then known as the World Wide Wrestling Federation. It's a shame really because one of the things that might have actually humanized Mr. McMahon and made him more likeable was an honest admission of how much his childhood sucked and how he wasn't actually born into priveledge with a silver spoon in his mouth. The DVD jumps right to his tenure as an interviewer and commentator for his dad's promotion which again ignores a huge chunk of history from the 1970's where the younger McMahon tried his own hand at promoting events, many unsuccessfully - the kind of mistakes I might add which he learned from that made him such a great promoter later on in the glory days of the 1980's. Despite that it's fascinating to see the early footage of a very young and unwrinkled Mr. McMahon in cheap suits that looked like a knockoff of the old Monday Night Football announce team struggling but generally doing a decent job as the man on the mic. In fact growing up as a kid watching WWF this was the only Vince McMahon I knew, because kayfabe hadn't totally fallen apart yet and I had no idea he owned the company he just happened to be doing ringside commentary for.

Quicker than a hiccup we're already at the point in Vince's career where he incorporated Titan Sports, bought out his father and the elder McMahon's partners (which thankfully resulted in Gorilla Monsoon being given a job for life with the company), and started expanding the rechristened WWF into a national wrestling juggernaut. This is a little less glossed over than everything else up to this point, with Greg Gagne pointing out that when they were in discussions with Vince about selling their territory he famously uttered the words "I DON'T NEGOTIATE" and took Hulk Hogan out of the AWA territory, the start of their inevitable decline. That's the tip of the iceberg of all the devious and admittedly crafty things McMahon did to not only get WWF syndicated in every market around the country but to basically drive all the regional territories out of business, but the worst Greg Gagne will say about McMahon was that it was "bad" that he put his father out of business. Sergeant Slaughter however is a little more forthcoming when he outright says "Vince McMahon screwed everybody, that was part of his wanting to be the best there is."

Without going into great detail in this review the single biggest portion of revisionist history thus far is Shane McMahon's account of what happened with WTBS and Georgia Championship Wrestling. Quite simply Shane's account that World Wrestling Federation programming on WTBS replacing the programming of GCW's show, which was at the time called World Championship Wrestling, was "a ratings success" is BS and it only goes downhill from there. Don't take their word for it here, there's plenty of information online and in print which contradicts their version of events. The only part they get right here was that Ted Turner, the owner of WTBS, was unhappy and wanted out of their deal. Since this DVD loves to gloss over huge portions of the actual McMahon story it's little wonder that it immediately spins these events into the Monday Night War of the mid to late 1990's between WCW and WWF. Never mind it took over a decade between the WTBS debacle before the eventual launch of WCW Nitro on Monday nights, nor the fact that WCW struggled mightily to compete against the WWF empire Vince McMahon built up during that time despite the deep pockets Ted Turner had to finance his promotion. Eventually though WCW caught up to WWF and as we all know beat them pretty handily in the TV ratings for a couple of years, which prompts those commenting on the DVD to say that WWF had to "do something drastic" to get back to the top.

As you might have expected this leads to a recap of the Montreal Screwjob. Everybody on the DVD refers to this as "the night Mr. McMahon was born." Well yes - the incident and the aftermath that followed including the "Bret screwed Bret" line did turn him into a monster of a heel persona on TV. Some would argue this was just the real Vincent Kennedy McMahon finally being shown to the world, but that would oversimplify things just as much as this DVD itself does. It's fair to say that this turned out to be a happy accident, something which Bruce Prichard actually admits to on the DVD. Many of Bret's fans really did feel he got screwed, and unintentionally Vince became such a magnet for hate people would tune in just hoping he would get his ass kicked. Due to good timing with the rising popularity of Stone Cold Steve Austin, a natural rivalry built up which made for great TV every week. Ironically it's during this part of the DVD which builds up their feud that McMahon admits to being born in North Carolina, claiming to be something of a "rebellious redneck" himself. This DVD would have been so much better had they built up his upbringing at the beginning instead of letting it go as a casual throwaway reference in the middle. Nonetheless this is the most enjoyable part of the whole presentation simply because it focuses on the Austin v. McMahon rivalry. They actually did this as a DVD of its own years ago, but because it uses the "WWF Attitude" logo you'll probably have a hard time finding it in stores today, and the extra comments from guys like William Regal and Triple H add a new dimension to the events which took place. It's particularly amusing hearing Hunter say that Vince actually wishes he had been Ric Flair all along, getting to heel it up as the limousine-ridin' jet-flyin' SOB. It might be even funnier to hear John Cena run down Vince's wrestling ability and say that he has no catch-as-catch-can and "a one move repertoire."

Focus shifts at this point to Vince McMahon taking the then-WWF company public on the stock market, which made him immensely rich but according to the narrator also enabled him to pursue his philanthrophic interests. We even get a few words from the recently departed Kurt Angle saying that "celebrity equals responsibility." We hear about Americares, the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and the Special Olympics among others. For everything negative that gets said about Vince McMahon I have to give him credit where credit is due for his charitable contributions, although it's often been said that the best kind of charity is unassuming and need no recognition of its own. Putting his charitable works in front of the public eye says to some small degree that Vince feels the need to improve his image by saying "look at all the good things I've done" instead of simply doing good for its own sake.

For the first time on this DVD we really get a glimpse at Vince failing instead of succeeding. Even though there were a lot of things Vince failed at before the XFL, the XFL was certainly a monumental failure both as a TV experiment and business endeavor. We also get to see clips from the infamous HBO interview with Bob Costas where he lost his cool and virtually turned into the foaming at the mouth Mr. McMahon character right before our eyes. Surprisingly they also mention the Katie Vick debacle, which is something I honestly thought WWE would never want to revisit, but sadly now that Joey Styles is a paid mouthpiece of the company he actually has to try and spin this as being "so over the top it became comedy." Listen Joey, I saw it live that night on TV, and there was nothing funny about it to me at all. That incident brought me as close as I have ever come to not watching any more wrestling again ever, although The Hurricane making fun of Vince the very next week softened the blow. Certain storylines involving the late Eddie Guerrero's memory being fought over by his family have come really close since - although generally they just make me not want to watch any Smackdown as opposed to wrestling on the whole.

For those who still felt that WWE was kayfabing the storyline between Hunter and Stephanie, the few vestiges of that are thrown out the window in the next section of this disc. Of course they confuse things that were already confusing enough by talking about their relationship in the present tense AFTER they got married while simultaneously showing the TV footage of them together from BEFORE they got married. In fact as a man who hated Triple H for years one of the few times before 2006 that I genuinely popped for anything he did was the night he called Stephanie a lying bitch on live TV and left her at the altar which had been set up in the ring for their fake wedding; I believe it was over a year later before a real wedding took place yet because of the storyline that had played out on TV they had to still pretend to hate each other's guts and have nothing to do with each other. Things only get more confusing as we see the McMahon family members slapping each other around in WWE footage and yet we hear the comments that Vince would spend every last penny to protect any of them if someone hurt or injured them. The dichotomy here is a little too bizarre even for this DVD to explain properly, but I have to admit I'd be mad at Vince if he hadn't let his own son Shane take some of the bumps he has over the years - Shane-O-Mac has given us many great memorable moments. Stephanie? Less so. Linda? Well I don't need to see her on TV ever, and everytime they put her on camera I can feel the ratings dying right in front of my eyes, but they keep doing it. For what it's worth though it is amusing to hear the whole "genetic jackhammer" promo again that Vince cut while The Rock was looking on.

As uncomfortable as many of the segments on this DVD involving Vince one of the most outrageous is having to watch Mr. McMahon make out with almost every diva that's been part of the WWE roster in the last six years, the blondes in particular, Trish Stratus even more in particular. Even Shane McMahon admits that seeing Vince tongue Trish right in front of his own mother on camera was a gruesome and nasty thing to see. Thankfully the DVD doesn't linger too long on this chapter before moving on to Vince McMahon buying WCW, although in the storyline they portrayed Shane as the one who got control of Vince's biggest wrestling rival. What's really odd though is seeing all of the people who work for Vince now, including Dusty Rhodes himself (WHO HAS THE WORST LOOKING MAKEUP JOB OF ALL TIME) proclaiming what a sad thing it is that Vince bought his competition and has none left any more. Yes that's right - Dusty Rhodes, who not that long ago in the TNA storyline was the Director of Authority, is now PRETENDING that there is no competition at all for WWE. Let's not kid ourselves that TNA has even made a dent on WWE's business thus far, but let's also not kid ourselves that they don't exist and that they don't have a free weekly TV show and monthly PPV. Competition? Where do they think Jeff Hardy went the last two years? What company do they think Christian ended up with when he left WWE? They're obviously not going to mention TNA on a WWE product and put them over in any way but it's at times like this the DVD becomes absurd and unbelievable simply because they refuse to acknowledge anything that doesn't fit with the picture they want to present of Vince McMahon and/or his WWE company.

Not surprisingly for both entertainment purposes and to satiate Vince McMahon's own ego we get to see the "Kiss My Ass Club" including all of the people who have joined it - although the first and by far greatest of all of them was and still is William Regal just because he sold it so well. That might have been a success, but it's been safe to say "brand extension" hasn't been nearly successful as even to the most casual of observers it's turned the live Raw program into the "A" show with all of the stars and the taped Smackdown program into the "B" show where anybody who develops into a marketable personality gets "drafted" to Raw. There are certainly enough wrestlers to go around to have two seperate brands but it's not hard to see that everytime the two brands are put against each other to "compete" the Raw stars get to humiliate the Smackdown ones, something we saw just as recently as SummerSlam 2006. Thankfully we don't linger on how "successful" this brand extension was because Vince apparently still has an axe to grind about Stone Cold walking out of the company in 2002 and we get a chapter of the DVD devoted to it, followed by another chapter devoted to how he shocked wrestling fans around the world when he brought in Eric Bischoff to be the General Manager of Raw. It's interesting in general how this DVD skipped so much of McMahon's life to get all the way up to the 21st century and then slows down to almost a grinding halt as all these events from the last six years are drawn out in painful detail. I suppose in a way that's necessary given the fact Mr. McMahon has become the best TV character in the last ten years but it's still a shame that more of the back story of the man Vince McMahon before it happened wasn't told.

To be honest I don't need to relive the Hogan v. McMahon rivalry from 2003 all over again. It was mildly interesting at the time but it was also clearly a poor substitute for the much more interesting Austin v. McMahon rivalry both from an athletic and a personality standpoint. I also have to admit I didn't get much out of seeing him beat the hell out of the one-legged Zach Gowen, even though the DVD tries to offset how ignomious this was by accepting induction into the Madison Squre Garden "Walk of Fame." Stephanie tells us how much she admires what her dad has done and how proud her grandfather would be, which is of course for the McMahon DVD a segue into his feud with Stephanie when she was GM of Smackdown, the only McMahon feud I can think of that I want to relive again even less than the one with Hulk Hogan. It's interesting at least to hear the side comments Stephanie and Triple H make at this point, as they admit that Vince would have actually put their wedding on a PPV broadcast if he had let them, and how Stephanie was actually approached about having a storyline where it would turn out the father of her baby (the recently born Aurora Rose) would turn out to be daddy dearest. She's saying this with a smile on her face and laughing about it, but quite frankly it's a little disturbing that Vince thought that would make for good TV let alone that there could be any kind of payoff for it in a wrestling storyline people would want to see. Imagine Hunter wrestling Vince on PPV for custody of the child. Oh wait, we've already done that with Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio - the only difference is that the incest angle would make WWE stoop EVEN LOWER. Thank God Stephanie found that "gross" and "revolting" in her own words and said no, and that when he proposed Shane be the dad she also said no.

We also get to relive Vince McMahon tearing both of his quads simultaneously at the Royal Rumble. Aww poor Vince - well that's what happens when a 60 year old man takes an unnatural amount of steroids and then tries to be a performer in the ring to boot. What's even worse is we have to watch a promo package of Vince McMahon rehabbing and working out in the gym, where even Triple H admits Vince tried to come back way quicker from tearing two quads than he did from one. For better or worse this transitions to footage of Mr. McMahon "firing" people on TV. The amusing part of this is seeing both Kurt Angle and Mick Foley being "fired" in the storylines when they've both just been "fired" again in the last two weeks alone, only one was for a storyline and one - Angle of course - seems like it's actually the real deal although we all know Vince McMahon could rehire him again at a moment's notice. Even Vince himself has to admit he has a hard time being able to tell whether it's him or his character talking when he says "YOU'RE FIRED" which just goes to show how screwed up your head has got to be when you become a performer in the same wrestling company you own and run day to day. As an aside I have to ask an uncomfortable question - did Sergeant Slaughter have a stroke recently? His speech seems slurred and a little unclear during this segment of the DVD, although him admitting that Vince fired him just for requesting six weeks paid vacation and a car to drive himself from town to town for events is not at all surprising - either that the man who plays Sarge would stand up to Vince or that McMahon would respond by saying "your services are no longer required" and give him the real life boot in the ass on his way out the door. It's a little bizarre to also see all the stars admitting the various reasons they got fired, from Matt Hardy saying he should have kept his mouth shut about Edge and Lita to HBK admitting he and Marty shouldn't have gone out to party knowing that if a story got back to Vince about it true or not they would get shitcanned.

The presentation tries to end on a positive note to make Vince McMahon look like a somewhat decent human being. We get the footage of him bringing WWE overseas to entertain the troops, trips he went on personally because there wasn't any risk they wouldn't take he wouldn't take himself. Of course just to bring things full circle again we have him feuding with with Shawn Michaels leading all the way up to WrestleMania 22. It's still a little odd to this day watching the footage, because if I freeze frame Shawn planting the "Muscle & Fitness" magazine cover right over Vince's head I can see myself sitting in the sixth row wearing a WrestleMania jersey and a F4W ~! baseball cap right in the corner of the screen. I guess that's a fitting way to sum up this DVD really - whether you love Vince or you hate him, he still has a way of convincing us all to spend our hard-earned money not only to watch his programming but to watch him get his ass kicked on PPV. I have to admit after all of the sacrilegeous things he said and did and the number of times he humiliated Shawn Michaels in storyline on TV leading up to that match there were few things more enjoyable that night in Chicago than seeing Shawn beat the sweet holy love of life right out of Vince, and to Vince's own credit he took that beating because we had paid to see it and he gave each and every one of us what we wanted that night. Bravo.

It's interesting to see Wrestling Weekly co-host and trainer/promoter Les Thatcher appearing during this segment saying he was uncomfortable with all of the "God stuff" Vince was doing around this time, but if you were going to pick anybody to be a counterpoint to some of the absurd stuff Vince does from time to time Les is the man as he's actually worked with Vince in the past. The bottom line though is that the "McMahon" DVD does no better job seperating the character from the man himself than what we see of him on TV and in public already does, which is probably the way it actually should be. If we could all figure out when it was really Vince and when he was just putting us all on by making an ass of himself for our entertainment, would we watch any more? We close with more footage of Vince being driven to succeed, how much he takes pride in his family's accomplishments as well as his own, and a lot of past present and future WWE legends talking about Mr. McMahon the man. Bryan Alvarez is fond of saying "There's only one Vince and it will be a sad day when he dies, because there will never be another one like him." I don't know if I needed to buy this DVD to be reminded of that but I can say for sure after watching it that there's never been a truer statement.

Before closing it should be noted that since this is a two-disc set there are a shitload of extra features included. There aren't that many on the first disc since most of it is taken up by the biography of Vince himself warts and all, but notably the "Stand Back" music video and the match between Mr. McMahon and Stone Cold Steve Austin from April 13th, 1998 are on disc one. If I reviewed every single extra on disc two from start to finish this review would take two more hours to finish, but suffice it to say that for the price you'll pay for this two disc set they at least go out of their way to give you your money's worth. This disc is entirely matches featuring Mr. McMahon, including the legendary St. Valentine's Day Massacre versus Stone Cold, the No Holds Barred match with Triple H, the Street Fight with Ric Flair and the Buried Alive match with Undertaker among others. Am I wholeheartedly unapologetically recommending this DVD set to everyone becaucse it's a "good value" as such? Hell no. There may be way more of Vince McMahon in this two disc set than any one man can stomach, including yours truly, and the revisionist history that tends to permeate the set is anywhere from upsetting to flat-out revolting, but I can't deny that watching "McMahon" wasn't fascinating entertainment on a whole variety of different levels. It's not an unqualified thumbs up or thumbs down but if you want a look at how McMahon wants to see himself and/or thinks the world sees him, it's at least a thumbs in the middle leading slightly up, or on a five star scale it's at least ** 1/2 to ***. It would at least be worth renting once whether or not you want to own it.