The nWo
Hulk Hogan in black and white, dropping the leg on Macho Man and declaring war on the company from inside its own ring. The New World Order turned WCW's Monday Nitro into appointment television and made a black-and-white t-shirt the coolest thing in wrestling.
It started as an invasion. On the May 27, 1996 episode of WCW Monday Nitro, Scott Hall — fresh from the WWF, where he'd been Razor Ramon — walked out of the crowd and asked, 'You want a war?' Kevin Nash, the former Diesel, joined him soon after, and the pair were dubbed The Outsiders. The angle teased a mysterious 'third man,' and at Bash at the Beach on July 7, 1996, wrestling got its most famous heel turn: Hulk Hogan — the eat-your-vitamins hero of the 80s — strolled to the ring as if to save the day, then dropped his leg across Randy Savage. Announcer Tony Schiavone told him he could 'go to hell... straight to hell.' Hogan grabbed the mic and declared the three of them the 'new world order of wrestling.'
The nWo, decked in black and white and acting like a hostile takeover rather than a wrestling faction, blurred the line between show and shoot in a way TV wrestling hadn't seen. It worked: beginning in June 1996, Nitro surpassed the WWF's Monday Night Raw in the ratings for 83 consecutive weeks by WWE's own later count — the high-water mark of the Monday Night Wars.
The group eventually splintered into warring factions — nWo Hollywood, the Wolfpac, nWo Elite, even a B-Team — and the angle that made WCW unmissable slowly helped bury it in bloat. The WWF regained the ratings lead in the late 90s and bought WCW outright in 2001, ending the war on March 26 of that year. A brief nWo revival in WWE in 2002 lasted five months. The black-and-white shirt, though, never really left arenas.
Similar items
WWE Attitude Era
When the World Wrestling Federation traded superhero theatrics for raunchy, anything-goes storylines and boundary-pushing characters, it conquered Monday night television. Stone Cold Steve Austin's catchphrase "Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!" and The Rock's trash-talk became playground gospel, and a glass-shatter entrance sound defined a generation's ritual.
Zubaz
Zebra-striped, radically baggy, elastic everywhere — the workout pants pro wrestling's Road Warriors helped dream up for guys too big for regular jeans, which somehow ended up on NFL sidelines, in JCPenney, and on your uncle at every 1991 barbecue.
Celebrity Deathmatch
MTV's gleefully violent claymation series, in which caricatures of real celebrities beat each other to a pulp in a wrestling ring. Premiering on May 14, 1998, it staged absurd stop-motion grudge matches — pop stars, actors, and politicians torn limb from clay limb — narrated by ringside commentators Nick Diamond and Johnny Gomez. Gory, silly, and weirdly beloved, it signed off each fight with the same line: "Good fight, good night."
Nacho Libre
Jack Black in stretchy pants: a monastery cook who moonlights as a luchador to buy the orphans better food. Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follow-up gave the 2000s an entire dialect of quotes delivered in one gloriously unplaceable accent.