MAKING THE ANGLES #4 - By Dave Callaghan
Hey, I'm back. In my last article I said that my friend would be writing about how to add humor into your fed. But he is a little short on time at the moment so I am going to wait on that one. For this new one I am going to go over different ways to spice up an old feud.

In my last article I mentioned the time when every single night was The Rock vs. HHH for at least four months. The WWF writers did try to spice up the shows but it did not work all too well. To make sure that your fed. never has the same old thing every single time there are a couple of things you can do to make your audience want to watch the match.

The easiest, and most obvious way, to make the same old feud new is to add stipulations. The one problem that I see happening is that when many feds try to make up stipulations they only think about the same old things, ladder matches, first blood, table match, ect. Now all of these are all right but the only thing is that they happen too often. When you are thinking about stipulations make them different from what everyone else is doing. You could also think up old stipulations but make a little twist on it; however if you do something like that do not just combine them and make a super stipulation match where you have to bust open your opponent, then put him through a table, then climb the ladder to reach the belt. You can also think up of old stipulations that were only done once or twice, although they were done so seldom for a reason. For instance, Shamrock and Blackman had a long feud and with it they had a lot of stipulations. One was the Ring of Cars, one was the Lions Den, and another was the straitjacket match. Personally the latter stipulation was the best one, it put Shamrock in a strait jacket while he fought against Blackman, although he may have fought someone else.

Another way to make an old feud seem fresh is to add new characters into it. Not nessicaraly a new wrestler, which was how The Rock and HHH feud was helped out, but maybe a manager to one of the wrestlers, or a valet. You can also take a page from the Al Snow book and bring in a new friend like pepper, the dog that Big Boss man ended up feeding to Snow, to make the storylines more interesting.

And yet another way to make feuds fresh is to add other feuds into yours, have the two storylines sorta get tangled up. For example, a classic example of this is to take your top feud (wrestler A vs. wrestler B) and bring in the second best feud, (wrestler C vs. wrestler D) and put the four into a tag team. There is two different ways to do this and you most certainly should try both. The first would be to have wrestler A and C face off against wrestler B and D. This way you still have the people in the feud fighting each other but still new faces. The one thing in this match is that you have to make sure that the wrestlers also fight the other person who is not in there feud, “A” fights “D” and “B” fights “C”. If “A” only fights “B” then you ruined the whole point of adding the new guys.

The other way to do it is to have the two enemies team up. “A” and “B” fight “C” and “D”. This will add much more heat to the feuds and it will allow there to be different wrestlers fighting each other. The one thing that must be done in order for this to work is to make sure the teams don’t work together, and make sure the “tags” are much more powerful than a “tag”. For the latter example just think of how The Rock and Y2J worked for there little tag team stint.

That’ll just about wrap it up for now. Next time I plan on writing about making groups. Also if there are any questions out there just e-mail me at Spikededmen@hotmail.com.


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