It used to only be on local TV when I was a kid. There’d be a fearsome audience of about 20 people screaming at characters like Haystack Calhoun and Jackie Fargo. It was impossible to watch even then.
Yeah, there was a good deal of centralization in the 80s, and Vince McMahon eventually won out…
I just ordered a copy of this book:
I vaguely remember that… Also, it strikes me that the Freebirds would not go over well today:
But they were generally speaking heels…
Absolutely. One of their feuds was with “Dark Journey” who was the biracial manager of “The Missing Link”. They absolutely played that angle.
On the Netflix show GLOW they explore that aspect of pro wrestling a bit, in how they leaned into racial and ethnic stereotypes in the 70s and 80s. One of the characters, who is an older black woman trying to break into acting plays a heel called “Welfare Queen”, which when she shows up on her sons college campus and a fan spots her and starts talking about her character doesn’t go over well. They also did a a short story line about one of the girls who was from Cambodia (having escaped the genocide there) playing a heel called “Fortune Cookie” who literally breaks out of a fortune cookie at the start of each match…
The original GLOW was certainly that over the top, but so could other less campy wrestling associations. There were tons of evil Soviets or “mad Arab” types from the 80s that I remember.
I was in High School when GLOW was airing, so I didn’t watch it much unless my sister refused to change the channel. Her favorites were Mt. Fiji and Little? Fiji. Although I do recall making the time to watch Ashley Cartier and Babe the Farmer’s Daughter…
While it was over the top, I certainly don’t recall a character that was as blatantly racist as the one you are describing on the fictional Netflix show. My sister and I actually discussed it a few months ago, and she says the Netflix show is so far over-the-top, to the point of upsetting her, that I should probably avoid watching it.
I think a lot of people forget that these shows are kind of a crude, occasionally misguided, modern morality play. Thus the whole Heel/Face dichotomy. Typical human behavior, with “the other” filled in for with a caricature of what society as a whole fears or is currently having a moral panic over.
I’m also not sure we haven’t lost something by having the cartoonish bad behavior to laugh about. The “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase literally carrying around a red white and blue bag of money is kind of a perfect metaphor for our troubles.
I think they show they put on in the show was indeed “over the top”… which is kind of the point. I think it’s a good show… An example of the characters on the original GLOW that is kind of racist, Big Bad Mama (a voodoo priestess):
This does some one on one comparisons… the most problematic are Big Bad Mama and Palestina for sure…
I’d also recommend the documentary about the real GLOW, which was informative and interesting.
But isn’t the problem with the cartoonish is that it leads us to over look the more… complicated nature of morality in general? For the most part, there isn’t a Ted DiBiase running around evilly laughing with his money bags. It sure is a great metaphor for our current world, but I do wonder if the flattening of such things can also lead us to believe that when we see real evil in the world that we’ll recognize it immediately. It doesn’t seem like we have been able to do that…
To be fair, I think this is probably a bigger problem with serious Hollywood films than with pro Wrestling, which is often so over the top. When Hollywood makes a prestige film about something like the holocaust which seriously flattens how the nazis were in real life, it probably leads some people to believe that something like that can never happen again, or that we can easily root out such hatred. It’s easy to turn nazis into monsters (sometimes literally) rather than be able to see them as people who did monstrous things and that other people can also end up doing monstrous things.
The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it, is a pretty well-trodden subject by now. The point I was trying to make is that most people, even the unsophisticated, realize that evil isn’t clear-cut and easily defined.
Having a shorthand villain, if you will, allows them an escape from worrying about situations over which they have no control. Ted DiBiase using his money to cheat and gain advantage as a stand in for the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a wealthy few who use it for their own aggrandizement and the creation of a new super-wealthy class who are beyond the law.
As for how to identify the baddies in a Hollywood movie about Nazis? Simple. Listen for the guy whose accent sounds as though he should be doing announcements on BBC World News. Posh RP? There’s our villain.
I’m not really convinced that’s true though… given our current political environment. Or maybe there is just no agreement on what “evil” means in our culture.
Agreed. But it’s worth asking whether or not that also serves to make the more banal nature of evil less obvious.
It’s not a problem of identification, though. We tend to know who the bad guys are… it just serves to simplify the realities of life.
One of humanity’s greatest failings is the 20/20 ability to recognize the failings of others, but not their own fallibilities. That is no less true now than it ever was. Most people just aren’t that observant or introspective and it’s easier to rant about the other guy than it is to look inward.
Its not a new phenomena either, as witnessed by the Bible verse about removing the beam from your own eye before worrying about the mote in your brother’s eye.
I certainly don’t think so. But it’s almost a moot point to argue about whether most of our hypothetical wrestling fans fully grok the deeper undercurrents that have influenced the storylines they are watching, since they have no ability to do anything about them anyway. That’s why I called it an escape.
It also provides certain English actors quite a bit of money. 
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