In 2001, The Invasion angle in WWE arguably had the potential to be one of the biggest angles in wrestling history. The angle never hit its potential heights and, Lance Storm a member of the invading WCW/ECW force has commented on why this was the case.
“No one was established as the home team babyface or heel like us coming in and invading had the rebellious outsider thing which is always kind of cool. And we weren’t painted strictly as heels, we weren’t painted as babyfaces and I remember one point in time, early on we were doing a segment and [Chris] Jericho even said to me, ‘who are the babyfaces here?’ – because when you’re constructing angles, matches and everything it’s like good to know what you’re supposed to do, like to get a certain specific reaction, and it’s like if we don’t know if the crowd is supposed to cheer this happening or not you change the way you do things so that confused issues.
I think the other thing too is once they couldn’t get us on a different separate show, once we’re all just showing up and wrestling on the same show, it doesn’t feel like outsiders anymore.
Yeah, but I think the big key and I sort of jokingly call it as the day that it [The Invasion] died was when it became Vince McMahon versus Shane [McMahon]. If Paul Heyman had remained – like when we did the Alliance with ECW which is a really cool angle, I thought that was the best angle done in the whole invasion that one moment where the guys that were in WWE that were actually former ECW guys turned and joined us WCW guys – If Paul Heyman had remained like when he jumped up from the announce desk and got in the ring. If he remained the spokesperson of the ECW crew, or if we had, Eric [Bischoff] or Ric Flair as the head instead of Shane McMahon, I think at that point, it could have been so much bigger, because it wasn’t at that point McMahon versus McMahon, it was actually WCW/ECW because no one’s more associated with the ECW brand as Paul Heyman, it was his baby. And as far as the Monday Night Wars go which is what anyone cared about at that point in time, Bischoff, it was his brainchild it was his thing. Or you could go with Flair because again I think when you think WCW, Flair is the most associated name as the greatest champion of that company. So, it’s like I think if you had either of those two and Paul feuding with Vince, then I think the invasion, even if we didn’t have a bunch more big-name stars which obviously would have helped, those would be the key things.”
Lance Storm was the first person from WCW who ‘invaded’ WWE. As he mentioned, the original plan was for WCW to remain on its own show on TNN. This failed to happen and as a result, both WWE and WCW stars remained on the same shows.
What do you think was the biggest thing that stopped The Invasion from being great? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Twitter and Facebook pages. And, you can keep up with all your wrestling news here on eWrestlingNews.
You can check out Lance Storm’s full interview on the It’s My House podcast, below:
