WWE recently hit the jackpot of desperate TV networks, scoring an astonishing billion-dollar deal for “SmackDown” on top of renewing “RAW” for a rumored deal that’s even bigger. CM Punk used to joke that Vince was a millionaire who should be a billionaire, but now he’s very comfortably onto the billionaire side of things. Meanwhile, CM Punk might lose everything on a lawsuit with his former doctor. Life is funny.
However, everything didn’t used to be coming up money-spewing roses for Vince McMahon and WWE.
In fact, back in 2008, ratings for “RAW” were not doing great, especially after the Chris Benoit tragedy really dropped their stock in the public eye. In fact, it got to the point where McMahon was feeling pressure from the USA Network to come up with some really big ratings stunts for sweeps, with what I can only presume was a sentence that ended with “…or else.”
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After tremendous ideas like having Hornswoggle as McMahon's illegitimate child failed to ignite the ratings, Vince went with the logical next step in the sweeps desperation ladder: Actually trying to pay people to watch the show.
Now, I mean, from a financial standpoint, if you’re investing millions of dollars to entice people to watch your wrestling show, why not just cut out the middleman and send the money directly to the viewers?
Unfortunately, that’s not we got.
Instead, it was time for Million Dollar Mania, where fans could enter into a draw for a million dollars a week — out of Vince’s personal bank account! Hey, still a better investment than the XFL.
KEITH: Speaking on the XFL…
The deal was that you’d have to watch “RAW” and pay attention to a special password given at the beginning, and then wait until the end of the show for a possible phone call from Vince McMahon himself. (He lost me at “watch RAW” if we’re going to be totally honest here.)
The fact that the ratings-grabbing stunt was basically introduced by McMahon in the first show of June as a way to “attract new viewers” should have been a clue as to how desperate they really were. I mean, if you’re literally going on TV and announcing that your ratings are terrible and you want to give away money to make people watch … well, you’re treading some pretty dangerous ground on the sleaze-mongering scale. Even by McMahon's own low standards.
So the first week of the giveaway started and the password was given out at the beginning of the show, leading to our first moment of unintentional comedic gold of money: Crazy old man Vince McMahon channeling Mr. Burns and needing his glasses in order to dial a telephone. Of course, he still couldn’t do that properly, even with his “cheaters," and ended up dialing the wrong number.
Hey, to be fair, McMahon likely pays an underling to dial the phone for him in his day-to-day business. I tend to picture Vince struggling to text someone and using all caps like a typical grandparent. Given what Chris Jericho has related about interacting with McMahon, it’s probably not far from the truth.
After managing to successfully dial the phone — like everyone else had figured out how to do since Alexander Graham Bell was a thing — McMahon had his second disastrous encounter with modern technology of the evening: he got Rick Rolled. McMahon of course had no idea what was happening to him. I mean, he’s not some kind of computer-savvy genius like the kids these days! It’s difficult enough dialing a phone!
Amazingly, they dedicated several segments per show to this disaster as ratings actually fell, despite the train-wreck appeal of a crazy old man fighting with high-tech equipment like “telephones." Also, in a classic wrestling bait-and-switch, it turned out that McMahon didn’t give anyone a million dollars. Some people were given as little as $16 because Vince was messing with them. One guy passed up a shot at $50,000 and Vince left a vindictive message on his voicemail live on-air, chastising him for giving up the money when all he had to do was watch “RAW." The guy later said he was OK with the decision he made.
KEITH: Remembering another time Vince McMahon failed
Finally, after three weeks of struggling to figure out this new-fangled “telephone” thing — even going as far as hiring Great Khali to dial it for him, which still managed to go wrong because he forgot to let Khali dial it — the “Million Dollar Mania” ratings ploy came to a close.
How else could it end but with an even bigger ratings ploy?
That’s right, we got a cliffhanger where Vince’s set collapsed on him to end the whole storyline and he might have been dead or whatever.
Later on, even WWE admitted in a YouTube video that this was one of their biggest mistakes ever. Hopefully whoever made that video for WWE also took the time to tell McMahon how to dial a phone and let him know who Rick Astley is.
