I've been off and on watching through The Invasion all year. We all know how much of a disaster it was and everyone knows or at least think they know how they could have made it work, but I don't really want to get into fantasy booking shyt that comes up with every discussion about The Invasion. I want to list the positives and negatives of the angle, because there are quite a few of both.
+ Steve Austin. His run in 2001 is amazing. In ring it's for sure the best year of his WWF run. He was busting his ass in every match, working way more than he worked in 1997-1999, with a far more bump heavy style and longer matches. This was going on before and after the Invasion angle. As a character, he makes absolutely everything he does work. He's able to bounce from full blown comedy to the most vicious son of a bytch to top tier 80s chickenshyt heel to king alpha who talks and walks down 20 men at a time, sometimes all in one segment. It's a shame he seems to have internalized the precipitous drop off in business with his heel turn being a failure, because this is really some of the best work of his career even if it's surrounded by a lot of trash.
+ Kurt Angle. Similar to Austin, Kurt was on FIRE in 2001. This arguably might be his physical prime before the injuries started piling up. He was a fukking thoroughbred. His match with Shane at KOTR is still one of the craziest matches in WWE history, and his match with Austin at Summerslam is neck and neck with Austin/Rock at WM 17 as being not only match of the year but a top WWE main event period.
- Kurt Angle's booking. Because he was so good at everything, and because the whole angle was booked week to week with little to no forethought, Kurt is used as the ultimate utility player and as a result his character is so inconsistent. He goes from full blown comedy heel at the start to super bad ass face during the feud with Austin then goes back and forth from comedy to super intense bad ass from segment to segment and being a totally different guy in the ring for a few weeks before turning heel in the last 3 weeks of the program where he again goes back to full comedy stuff then goes back to intense guy but all along it was a ruse so he turns face again on the last night but he was technically a face the whole time in disguise....but then turns heel for real almost immediately after the angle ends anyway. It's honestly about the most inconsistent character arc this side of Kane/Big Show. I believe at the time he was publicly talking about how difficult it was to build momentum when his character would change so frequently.
+ The Rock/Jericho feud. Really this has very little to do with the Invasion itself, and it's definitely the best thing going on in the last month of it. They had excellent chemistry and Jericho was much better as a tweener to full blown heel than just kind of there face who really wasn't doing much. Their No Mercy match was excellent, but their Raw rematch was a big disappointment in comparison. It really says a lot about the whole angle where a feud between two WWF guys was the best part of the WWF vs WCW feud in the end stretch. There's so much more tension and energy between Rock and Jericho feuding over the WCW Championship than any WWF guy and WCW guy feuding for company supremacy.
+ The Rock in general. He, Kurt, and Jericho were the only WWF guys willing to make the Alliance guys look like threats. He might have destroyed them on the mic, and he might win the matches, but he would always bump like death for them. Rock was working his ass off to make this stuff work. He was arguably at the coolest he'd ever been, his ring work was probably the best he ever got as well. Even in 3 minute matches with Lance Storm, he made Lance look like a top level talent. To be honest, Rock was the best WCW Champion in like 3 years
+ The actual start of the Alliance when ECW joined the fight. That moment and the Paul E. promo is still awesome. However...
- Stephanie McMahon being named the owner of ECW. For obvious reasons. Immediately deflated how cool the ECW reveal was, and even the WCW/ECW alliance would have been fine but the very first night it was turned into McMahon family drama and set the tone for the rest of the angle.
- Shane and Stephanie in general. These two were fukking terrible. Every week they'd both get so much promo time but never really say anything or move the story along because there really wasn't much of a story or an arc. Since Vince decided to just not be involved for the majority of the angle, both shows every week was just full of them doing long Alliance promos with Austin, then doing their own little side feuds with Rock and Jericho, and a backstage segment after every damn match. They never got better, either. I can't believe there was a time when people wanted Shane back. Unless he's doing crazy stunts
For Stephanie, there are so many shows where she comes out to tell the crowd how stupid they are, then Jericho comes out and makes fun of her fake boobs, and that's the segment. It happens on one or both shows for months. It has nothing to do with the Invasion.
- The Paul E./JR commentary team. I used to like it and did at the time, now I find it extremely grating as their shtick was getting tired before the Invasion even started. In a lot of ways it's kind of the template for some of the worst heel announcing in WWE in the 2 decades since, where Paul's directive was clearly to just try to piss JR off as much as possible and constantly yell to get your point across. It borders on Heel Cole and current Corey Graves at times and I actually find Taz/Cole and even Heyman/Cole to be better teams because that dynamic was turned down a bit.
+ William Regal. Goes without saying his character work is superb. He works perfectly as the face WWF commissioner for months, especially when he'd get fired up, give an Alliance guy the what's what, then get in the ring and handle business. Then he turned heel and of course played the corrupt, devious, vicious heel authority figure/heavy perfectly as well. Match wise he didn't really do much, but he was for sure in the best shape of his career at this time as well.
+ Lance Storm. Not that he had a bunch of great matches or anything, but I'm just impressed at how well he fit into anything he was asked to do. He could do the straight promos he was known for, then do basically the same promos but as ironic humor. He could do the straight matches as a singles guy, straight tags, but could also do reluctant comedy stuff with Hurricane or just be a warm body to take someone's finish in a segment. I'm impressed at how well he immediately fit into the WWE system, arguably more than he ever did in WCW.
- The Undertaker. fukk The Undertaker. He went out of his way to make every Alliance guy look like shyt the entire run of the angle. There was not a single Alliance talent that came out better off working with Taker during the Invasion. He essentially went out of his way to destroy the careers of DDP, Kanyon, and Mike Awesome.
- The general treatment of DDP. This dude accepted a buy out of his Time Warner contract for pennies on the dollar and then took a substantial pay cut to join the WWF because he really wanted to work for Vince and do something good. Vince's response was to completely assassinate his character, strip him of everything that made him popular, and bury the shyt out of him for the entire duration of the angle. Starting with the stalker bullshyt which then had him get the shyt kicked out of him by Taker and Mrs. Taker for two months straight leading to an outright squash at Summerslam that was so bad he was off TV entirely for two months, which saw him come back as a comedy character that was buried repeatedly by announcers and then when he finally got back in front of live crowds he got the shyt kicked out of him for 2-3 weeks and then was fired. This shyt was cold fukking blooded from Vince.
+ RVD. Of all the Alliance guys, he was really the only guy to get to keep his personality and keep doing what he was doing. He was instantly over, at times overwhelmingly over to what I'm sure was a detriment to Vince because it forced him to make changes. Besides Rhyno for the first month or so, he's the only Alliance guy that felt special and on the level and better than a lot of WWF guys.
- RVD's booking. A lot like Angle's, it's so inconsistent. He's super over as a face, plays full face frequently, has all this stuff standing up to Austin/Shane/Steph, then when he was getting too popular he'd interfere in a random match or join in on beat downs or do a random clean job. For every big match when he had over top talents (he has wins over Austin, Angle, Rock, and Taker during all this), all of them had plenty of interference or otherwise bullshyt finishes and he would lose to them clean in rematches. At one point when he was about at his hottest, they put him in a WCW title match with Rock and had Rock beat him clean with no angle before or follow up after. And all of his big wins were in service of someone else's angles and feuds and really had little to do with him at all.
+ Over all match quality is pretty high, especially compared to the prime Attitude Era years and last year and a half of WCW. Outside of the hour main events, matches are pretty short, but they're solid from a performance stand point. Smackdown was usually booked the day of and therefore had longer matches, and Raw main events were rarely under 10 minutes, with SD main events sometimes going closer to 20 regularly.
- Damn near every main event has bullshyt finishes and interference. Shane and/or Stephanie get involved in so many finishes you'll literally lose count if you tried to keep up with it. And if it's not one of them, it's Regal. And if it's not him it's Booker. And if it's not him...etc etc. Frequently it's a run in from a WCW guy then a WWF guy making the save and then the finish. All kinds of ref fukkery the entire duration. Rock/Jericho have this great match at No Mercy and then at the last minute Stephanie gets involved and accidentally helps Jericho win the title, which made Jericho look like a punk for not being able to win the big one clean, and then he had I think one defense before losing it back to Rock anyway. The same night as the Rock/Jericho match has Vince come out and interfere in Austin/Angle/RVD.
+ The Hurricane. Probably the only Alliance guy besides RVD to get over in an organic way. Much like Shane Helms was a highlight of WCW at the end, he was a fun part of the Invasion once he picked up the Hurricane gimmick, which came from a random ad lib from Austin and turned into his career making character. For a dude not at all known for good speaking skills, he really ran with the ball when he was given it and was genuinely entertaining in everything he was doing.
+ The over all energy of the shows. Despite the dramatic drop off in business immediately following WM17 (the recent Observer Rewinds have been revelatory, I wasn't aware business fell off so hard during this period) and the nonsensical, disappointing storylines, crowds still look and sound full and are always engaged. The shows move at a pretty steady clip and even the promo heavy shows don't really drag like modern shows.
+ Paul Heyman's promo on Vince on the Smackdown before Survivor Series. This might be Paul's single best promo, where he stood in Vince's ring and ripped Vince a new a$$hole on killing the business, stealing his ideas, and putting out a shytty product because he was past his prime and needed to go, all while talking up verboten talent like Bruno, Superstar Graham, Bret Hart, and Hulk Hogan. This was in 2001. Paul Heyman was put in control of Raw in 2019
- Edge. He's painfully uncool, which is weird because they try to act like he's the coolest dude possible. He's always given lines that are supposed to be funny like he's The Rock, but his delivery is just terrible. Christian outshines him in every interaction they have, promo and match wise. They have this thing with Edge where his way of cutting down an opponent was to bury their gimmick or character to show how cool and above it all he was. I hate it.
- The Dudley Boys. There is not a single act more stale in 2001 than the Dudleys. Not even X-Pac is as stale and there are multiple segments and multiple wrestlers who dunk on X-Pac for being stale and lame over the duration of the angle. What makes it worse is that they were the only team with any legitimacy in the Alliance so when the higher card WWF guys needed to be in a tag match, it was against the Dudleys. Every match is exactly the same and because they were trusted and respected, their matches were often the longest of the night and were just such a fukking bore.
- Rematches. The WWF already had a whole tier of guys that might as well have been exclusive to Heat/Jakked/Metal, then they got 20 new talents added on top of that and ended up using less guys than they were before the Invasion started. I really lost count at how many times there was some type of Jericho vs RVD, or RVD vs Angle, or Dudleys vs Kane/Taker/Hardys match.
+ The Rock/Austin promo before Survivor Series. It didn't really make a lot of sense that on the eve of one group going out of business forever, with their history even just in 2001, that they'd spend 20 minutes singing songs and clearly trying to make each other break character and laugh, but man that's a magical segment. All of the singing seems to be cut out on the Network presumably for copyright reasons but I've seen a 720p version on youtube that had to be from the Network so it had to be on there at some point.
+ Steve Austin. His run in 2001 is amazing. In ring it's for sure the best year of his WWF run. He was busting his ass in every match, working way more than he worked in 1997-1999, with a far more bump heavy style and longer matches. This was going on before and after the Invasion angle. As a character, he makes absolutely everything he does work. He's able to bounce from full blown comedy to the most vicious son of a bytch to top tier 80s chickenshyt heel to king alpha who talks and walks down 20 men at a time, sometimes all in one segment. It's a shame he seems to have internalized the precipitous drop off in business with his heel turn being a failure, because this is really some of the best work of his career even if it's surrounded by a lot of trash.
+ Kurt Angle. Similar to Austin, Kurt was on FIRE in 2001. This arguably might be his physical prime before the injuries started piling up. He was a fukking thoroughbred. His match with Shane at KOTR is still one of the craziest matches in WWE history, and his match with Austin at Summerslam is neck and neck with Austin/Rock at WM 17 as being not only match of the year but a top WWE main event period.
- Kurt Angle's booking. Because he was so good at everything, and because the whole angle was booked week to week with little to no forethought, Kurt is used as the ultimate utility player and as a result his character is so inconsistent. He goes from full blown comedy heel at the start to super bad ass face during the feud with Austin then goes back and forth from comedy to super intense bad ass from segment to segment and being a totally different guy in the ring for a few weeks before turning heel in the last 3 weeks of the program where he again goes back to full comedy stuff then goes back to intense guy but all along it was a ruse so he turns face again on the last night but he was technically a face the whole time in disguise....but then turns heel for real almost immediately after the angle ends anyway. It's honestly about the most inconsistent character arc this side of Kane/Big Show. I believe at the time he was publicly talking about how difficult it was to build momentum when his character would change so frequently.
+ The Rock/Jericho feud. Really this has very little to do with the Invasion itself, and it's definitely the best thing going on in the last month of it. They had excellent chemistry and Jericho was much better as a tweener to full blown heel than just kind of there face who really wasn't doing much. Their No Mercy match was excellent, but their Raw rematch was a big disappointment in comparison. It really says a lot about the whole angle where a feud between two WWF guys was the best part of the WWF vs WCW feud in the end stretch. There's so much more tension and energy between Rock and Jericho feuding over the WCW Championship than any WWF guy and WCW guy feuding for company supremacy.
+ The Rock in general. He, Kurt, and Jericho were the only WWF guys willing to make the Alliance guys look like threats. He might have destroyed them on the mic, and he might win the matches, but he would always bump like death for them. Rock was working his ass off to make this stuff work. He was arguably at the coolest he'd ever been, his ring work was probably the best he ever got as well. Even in 3 minute matches with Lance Storm, he made Lance look like a top level talent. To be honest, Rock was the best WCW Champion in like 3 years
+ The actual start of the Alliance when ECW joined the fight. That moment and the Paul E. promo is still awesome. However...
- Stephanie McMahon being named the owner of ECW. For obvious reasons. Immediately deflated how cool the ECW reveal was, and even the WCW/ECW alliance would have been fine but the very first night it was turned into McMahon family drama and set the tone for the rest of the angle.
- Shane and Stephanie in general. These two were fukking terrible. Every week they'd both get so much promo time but never really say anything or move the story along because there really wasn't much of a story or an arc. Since Vince decided to just not be involved for the majority of the angle, both shows every week was just full of them doing long Alliance promos with Austin, then doing their own little side feuds with Rock and Jericho, and a backstage segment after every damn match. They never got better, either. I can't believe there was a time when people wanted Shane back. Unless he's doing crazy stunts
For Stephanie, there are so many shows where she comes out to tell the crowd how stupid they are, then Jericho comes out and makes fun of her fake boobs, and that's the segment. It happens on one or both shows for months. It has nothing to do with the Invasion. - The Paul E./JR commentary team. I used to like it and did at the time, now I find it extremely grating as their shtick was getting tired before the Invasion even started. In a lot of ways it's kind of the template for some of the worst heel announcing in WWE in the 2 decades since, where Paul's directive was clearly to just try to piss JR off as much as possible and constantly yell to get your point across. It borders on Heel Cole and current Corey Graves at times and I actually find Taz/Cole and even Heyman/Cole to be better teams because that dynamic was turned down a bit.
+ William Regal. Goes without saying his character work is superb. He works perfectly as the face WWF commissioner for months, especially when he'd get fired up, give an Alliance guy the what's what, then get in the ring and handle business. Then he turned heel and of course played the corrupt, devious, vicious heel authority figure/heavy perfectly as well. Match wise he didn't really do much, but he was for sure in the best shape of his career at this time as well.
+ Lance Storm. Not that he had a bunch of great matches or anything, but I'm just impressed at how well he fit into anything he was asked to do. He could do the straight promos he was known for, then do basically the same promos but as ironic humor. He could do the straight matches as a singles guy, straight tags, but could also do reluctant comedy stuff with Hurricane or just be a warm body to take someone's finish in a segment. I'm impressed at how well he immediately fit into the WWE system, arguably more than he ever did in WCW.
- The Undertaker. fukk The Undertaker. He went out of his way to make every Alliance guy look like shyt the entire run of the angle. There was not a single Alliance talent that came out better off working with Taker during the Invasion. He essentially went out of his way to destroy the careers of DDP, Kanyon, and Mike Awesome.
- The general treatment of DDP. This dude accepted a buy out of his Time Warner contract for pennies on the dollar and then took a substantial pay cut to join the WWF because he really wanted to work for Vince and do something good. Vince's response was to completely assassinate his character, strip him of everything that made him popular, and bury the shyt out of him for the entire duration of the angle. Starting with the stalker bullshyt which then had him get the shyt kicked out of him by Taker and Mrs. Taker for two months straight leading to an outright squash at Summerslam that was so bad he was off TV entirely for two months, which saw him come back as a comedy character that was buried repeatedly by announcers and then when he finally got back in front of live crowds he got the shyt kicked out of him for 2-3 weeks and then was fired. This shyt was cold fukking blooded from Vince.
+ RVD. Of all the Alliance guys, he was really the only guy to get to keep his personality and keep doing what he was doing. He was instantly over, at times overwhelmingly over to what I'm sure was a detriment to Vince because it forced him to make changes. Besides Rhyno for the first month or so, he's the only Alliance guy that felt special and on the level and better than a lot of WWF guys.
- RVD's booking. A lot like Angle's, it's so inconsistent. He's super over as a face, plays full face frequently, has all this stuff standing up to Austin/Shane/Steph, then when he was getting too popular he'd interfere in a random match or join in on beat downs or do a random clean job. For every big match when he had over top talents (he has wins over Austin, Angle, Rock, and Taker during all this), all of them had plenty of interference or otherwise bullshyt finishes and he would lose to them clean in rematches. At one point when he was about at his hottest, they put him in a WCW title match with Rock and had Rock beat him clean with no angle before or follow up after. And all of his big wins were in service of someone else's angles and feuds and really had little to do with him at all.
+ Over all match quality is pretty high, especially compared to the prime Attitude Era years and last year and a half of WCW. Outside of the hour main events, matches are pretty short, but they're solid from a performance stand point. Smackdown was usually booked the day of and therefore had longer matches, and Raw main events were rarely under 10 minutes, with SD main events sometimes going closer to 20 regularly.
- Damn near every main event has bullshyt finishes and interference. Shane and/or Stephanie get involved in so many finishes you'll literally lose count if you tried to keep up with it. And if it's not one of them, it's Regal. And if it's not him it's Booker. And if it's not him...etc etc. Frequently it's a run in from a WCW guy then a WWF guy making the save and then the finish. All kinds of ref fukkery the entire duration. Rock/Jericho have this great match at No Mercy and then at the last minute Stephanie gets involved and accidentally helps Jericho win the title, which made Jericho look like a punk for not being able to win the big one clean, and then he had I think one defense before losing it back to Rock anyway. The same night as the Rock/Jericho match has Vince come out and interfere in Austin/Angle/RVD.
+ The Hurricane. Probably the only Alliance guy besides RVD to get over in an organic way. Much like Shane Helms was a highlight of WCW at the end, he was a fun part of the Invasion once he picked up the Hurricane gimmick, which came from a random ad lib from Austin and turned into his career making character. For a dude not at all known for good speaking skills, he really ran with the ball when he was given it and was genuinely entertaining in everything he was doing.
+ The over all energy of the shows. Despite the dramatic drop off in business immediately following WM17 (the recent Observer Rewinds have been revelatory, I wasn't aware business fell off so hard during this period) and the nonsensical, disappointing storylines, crowds still look and sound full and are always engaged. The shows move at a pretty steady clip and even the promo heavy shows don't really drag like modern shows.
+ Paul Heyman's promo on Vince on the Smackdown before Survivor Series. This might be Paul's single best promo, where he stood in Vince's ring and ripped Vince a new a$$hole on killing the business, stealing his ideas, and putting out a shytty product because he was past his prime and needed to go, all while talking up verboten talent like Bruno, Superstar Graham, Bret Hart, and Hulk Hogan. This was in 2001. Paul Heyman was put in control of Raw in 2019
- Edge. He's painfully uncool, which is weird because they try to act like he's the coolest dude possible. He's always given lines that are supposed to be funny like he's The Rock, but his delivery is just terrible. Christian outshines him in every interaction they have, promo and match wise. They have this thing with Edge where his way of cutting down an opponent was to bury their gimmick or character to show how cool and above it all he was. I hate it.
- The Dudley Boys. There is not a single act more stale in 2001 than the Dudleys. Not even X-Pac is as stale and there are multiple segments and multiple wrestlers who dunk on X-Pac for being stale and lame over the duration of the angle. What makes it worse is that they were the only team with any legitimacy in the Alliance so when the higher card WWF guys needed to be in a tag match, it was against the Dudleys. Every match is exactly the same and because they were trusted and respected, their matches were often the longest of the night and were just such a fukking bore.
- Rematches. The WWF already had a whole tier of guys that might as well have been exclusive to Heat/Jakked/Metal, then they got 20 new talents added on top of that and ended up using less guys than they were before the Invasion started. I really lost count at how many times there was some type of Jericho vs RVD, or RVD vs Angle, or Dudleys vs Kane/Taker/Hardys match.
+ The Rock/Austin promo before Survivor Series. It didn't really make a lot of sense that on the eve of one group going out of business forever, with their history even just in 2001, that they'd spend 20 minutes singing songs and clearly trying to make each other break character and laugh, but man that's a magical segment. All of the singing seems to be cut out on the Network presumably for copyright reasons but I've seen a 720p version on youtube that had to be from the Network so it had to be on there at some point.
It showcased how trash WCW wrestlers were minus Booker T
moment for me. it was well done, and unexpected.
Ric Flair returning the night after they beat the Alliance