Video: WWE Looks Back At Million Dollar Mania

I didn’t know we could talk about this. Things weren’t going very well for WWE back in 2008. The stories were stale, almost nothing was going anywhere and the show was just boring to watch. Therefore, WWE needed a big idea to pump things up and they went with something that has worked for a long time: cash. Yes they decided to try and pay the fans who were watching at home and….well it didn’t quite work.

This was so bad.

The time Mr. McMahon gave away a million dollars

WWE has put up a video looking at the company’s Million Dollar Mania, which took place over three weeks in the summer of 2008. The idea was a little more complicated than you might thing. At the beginning of the show, a password would be shown. Later in the night, Vince McMahon himself would call a phone number and if the fan knew the password, they would win part of a million dollars (often over $100,000 at a time). This didn’t go well as McMahon dialed wrong numbers, got Rick Rolled, and couldn’t get anything to go right. At the end, the set fell on him in a story that never went anywhere, just to hammer the failure home.

Opinion: This is one of those things that I try to block out of my memory and I thought WWE had done the exact same thing. This was just so bad and a big waste of time and annoying to the fans who had been watching the entire time and still liking the product. Now we have to sit around and watch McMahon do these phone calls and the whole nonsense that came with it, plus the angle that never went anywhere. It was a huge mess and that’s the only way to put it, aside from in the ground forever.

What did you think of this idea? What is as bad as it seemed to be? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his Amazon author page with 27 wrestling books. His latest book is the NXT: The Full Sail Years Volume III: From Dallas To New Orleans.

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