Mr. McMahon Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Mr. McMahon or as most people know him as Vince McMahon broke into the wrestling business with his father before it was known as sports entertainment. He learned the ropes if you will until he bought the company at the time from his father Vince McMahon Sr. He found a formula for paying the stars from regional wrestling organizations more than what they would have been paid if they stayed where they were. Some of these promoters weren’t happy about this, but this was the basic formula of how Vince McMahon formed the now defunct WWF (The World Wrestling Federation), now known as the WWE. A montage of men and women about to sit down n their chairs for this documentary pose a dark cloud towards this icon of the wrestling/sports entertainment industry.
One of the first major things he did was get a champion the country could get behind. That man was Terry Bollia aka Hulk Hogan. He became the bedrock that Vince could build around and do television deals, merchandise, and other lucrative things that helped the young company. Hulk Hogan had the Montrail drink your milk, take your vitamins and he used the American flag as his bag of honor. He represented the red white and blue like it was his blood. This worked perfectly for Vince and the direction he wanted to take the WWF.
The next step was to create a massive event that the whole country could watch and enjoy. A spectacle of entertainment for the whole family if you will. That was Wrestlemania in 1984. Celebrities and dignitaries came out to be a part of such a big event that took place in the mecca of entertainment Madison Square Garden. The McMahons wagered everything they had at the time on Wrestlemania. If it failed they were broke and out of business for good. If it succeeded it would usher in a new era for the wrestling business. Of course, we now know it exceeded, but at that time it was a risk.
Stars like Macho Man Randy Savage, Ricky the Dragon Steamboat, and the Ultimate Warrior helped McMahon keep the company very successful into the 90s. With success, there must come controversies. Lawsuits and court hearings started to crop up as the success was just too good to be True. Steroids and pain pills were the norm at this time and if you looked at the wrestlers you couldn’t help but notice they were all jacked up on roads. This became a major health issue as men started dying of various ailments attributed to the abuse of pain medications, sleeping pills, and steroids. The workload and schedule made it difficult for these men to have much downtime away from the business. They paid the toll with their bodies.
I’ve watched wrestling or sports entertainment as it’s called now for nearly 45 years and the business has changed quite a bit during that time. The most drastic change was during the 90s when Ted Turner decided he wanted to compete with the WWF/WWE. He put his fledgling show on at the exact time as McMahon’s show Monday Night Raw. He and his manager of production and talent at the Tim Eric Bischoff stole talent from WWF and created what we now know as the “Monday Night Wars”. This was a down period for the WWE.
The Monday Night War spawned a new era of wrestling. A more extreme style of wrestling which created new names like Stone Cold Steve Austin, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, Triple H, Sean Michaels & D-Generation X, would usher in the age of the additive era. There was much more violence and very suggestive behavior in the writing and stories. This is where Mr. McMahon character was born. We fans loved these stories because we felt like the characters did against our bosses and authority figures. It was a perfect storyline. I loved every minute of it. WWE was on top again.
The WWE has had a lot of ups and downs in his forty-year existence of the company, but in the 2000s Vince McMahon made a conscious effort to change the direction for what he saw as the better. Using sponsors and parental guidance guidelines as an excuse. Once he bought his competition he could do what he wanted with the company. He also used his son, Shane, and his daughter, Stephanie, as part of the creative storylines going forward. These storylines and creative direction didn’t sit well with fans. Causing McHenry to step away from the company, along with other personal reasons.
Most documentaries use a lot of similar techniques to get their story across to the viewers and this one is no different than the others. It uses quite a few talking heads Mark Kallis, The Undertaker, Tony Atlas, Trish Stratus, Cody Rhodes, Eric Bishoff, Bret Hart, and many others who worked or lived with McMahon during his forty-year reign as owner and CEO of WWE. The series also uses plenty of archival footage, photos, and interviews. There was plenty to pull from. All this stuff helped give context to the documentary. The main talking head was McMahon himself and he was quite candid in the interview portions of the documentary. I was pleasantly surprised by how forthcoming he was.
McMahon was a creature of his own making he had the drive to succeed at any cost which then gave him plausible deniability to do whatever he wanted. You didn’t have to like him, which most people did in fact like him, you just had to listen to him because he knew the business better than everybody else out there including his kids who found out the hard way. He is the end-all-be-all in this industry as far as what he truly believes. He even convinced his acolytes like Bruce Pritchard that this was the way things were. Eve Triple H Paul Lqvesque came on board with the plan.
Mr. McMahon is a no-holds-barred, no pun intended, docuseries that doesn’t hold back on the man the myth, the legend that is Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Through the testimonials of the people who worked for him, loved him, and knew him, this was a complete dissection of every fact of this man’s life, business practices, and everything in between. I rarely see films like this that go as in-depth as this one dies. The filmmaker Chris Smith makes an unflinching portrayal of this man with the man himself at the center of it. That’s hard to do more often than not because people under a microscope like this man are usually not that forthcoming with answers. This is the best documentary that pulls back the curtain on an industry and a man that has typically been pretty close to the vest. It’s that transparency the industry needs more of. This is a great film though. As a fan of the man it didn’t paint him in the best light though.
