page_title: Monday Night Wars
section_title: 1997–1999: Attitude Era
hierarchical_section_title: Monday Night Wars / History / The Monday Night Wars / 1997–1999: Attitude Era
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Stone Cold Steve Austin at en:WrestleMania XIX. en:Safeco Field, en:Seattle, WA, on March 30, 2003.
context_page_description: The Monday Night Wars were a period of mainstream televised American professional wrestling where the World Wrestling Federation's Monday Night Raw and World Championship Wrestling's Monday Nitro were broadcast opposite each other in a battle for Nielsen ratings each week. The ratings war lasted from September 4, 1995, to March 26, 2001.
  The rating war was part of a larger overall struggle between the two companies, originating in personal animosity between WWF owner Vince McMahon and WCW owner Ted Turner. The rivalry between the companies steadily escalated throughout the 1990s to include the use of cutthroat tactics and the defections of employees between the two companies. Throughout the wars, the WWF and WCW would both adopt different concepts and narrative techniques innovated by ECW; meanwhile, both companies would establish both formal and informal partnerships with the company, with ECW performers either appearing on WWF and WCW shows while still under contract, or outright leaving ECW to work for one of the other two promotions.
context_section_description: Throughout 1997, Raw Is War began to become more and more controversial, and despite the company not getting any rating victories, the WWF received significant critical acclaim. Storyline elements included racist graffiti targeted at the Nation of Domination (a stable loosely based on the Nation of Islam), drinking beer on camera by Stone Cold Steve Austin, and emphasizing the sexuality of valets Sunny, Sable, and Marlena. These women began appearing on-camera in increasingly revealing clothing and in swimsuit and lingerie-oriented spreads in the WWF's Raw magazine, a lad mag designed as an alternative to the family-friendly WWF Magazine and a competitor to the likewise family-friendly WCW Magazine. Although these elements helped to garner the WWF more attention than it had enjoyed in the wake of the nWo storyline, the injury of Steve Austin at the SummerSlam pay-per-view, which put him out of action for three months, proved to be a severe blow to Raw Is War's popularity.
  Despite losing to Nitro week after week, Raw Is War rallied in the ratings when it introduced its new "WWF Attitude" concept, in which the family-friendly and clear-cut face vs. heel dynamic of the 1980s to mid 1990s was jettisoned in favor of morally ambiguous wrestlers and adult-oriented, often heavily sexualized storylines. The concept was spearheaded by McMahon along with head WWF writer Vince Russo, who changed the way wrestling television was written and constructed. Russo's booking style was often referred to as "Crash TV": Matches were shortened in favor of story-building backstage vignettes, with an emphasis on shock factor. Like WCW's nWo storyline, the WWF began to blur the line between real life and kayfabe: Vince McMahon, taking advantage of fans' genuine dislike for him following the Montreal Screwjob, recast himself as the evil Mr. McMahon, a corrupt businessman who despised his own fans and valued sycophancy over talent. This presentation both mimicked Nitro's "Anything can happen" atmosphere, and acknowledged the growing phenomenon of "smarks," wrestling fans who used the Internet to gain a wide base of knowledge on the real-life, backstage workings of the industry.
  Stone Cold Steve Austin would start to become extremely popular with the WWF's fan base during 1997, and would often receive the best fan response of the night; despite playing a heel character, many fans would start to see him as more of an anti-hero. During this time, many wrestlers' personas were retooled, and wrestlers who had been growing in popularity were given pushes, often with dark or morally ambiguous alterations to their characters: The Rock, who had failed as a babyface character named Rocky Maivia—a naive young athlete trying to live up to the athletic legacies of his grandfather and father—was recast as an arrogant jock who spouted catch phrases. Shawn Michaels, Triple H, and Chyna formed D-Generation X (DX), a rule-breaking, frat boy-themed stable of wrestlers who laced their vignettes with sexual innuendo and lewd gestures. Although an injury would cause Michaels to take a four-year hiatus from wrestling, the stable soared in popularity under the leadership of Triple H, who added the New Age Outlaws and Sean Waltman to the group's ranks. Waltman, who was a member of the nWo, had recently left WCW after wrestling there for a year and a half as Syxx (having been fired while recovering from an injury), and returned to the WWF as X-Pac. The Undertaker, then one of the company's longest-serving performers, had his gimmick changed for the first time in his career with the company during the Attitude Era: Having performed from 1990-1998 as a revenant, his persona was first changed to a Pseudo-Satanic cult leader in 1999, then to a "bad ass" biker persona in 2000, and then to a hybrid character called "Big Evil" in early 2002, which was a mixture of his "bad ass" and revenant characters. One of the few performers to have his gimmick changed to a lighter, sympathetic, more traditional face persona was Mick Foley, who had been wrestling as the psychotic heel Mankind. 
caption: Stone Cold Steve Austin became a breakout WWF star of the 1990s
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