WWE Smackdown vs Raw (PS2) Hidden Wrestlers (4/9): Bret Hart gameplay

Gameplay of the hidden character/wrestler Bret Hart in Yuke’s/THQ’s WWE Smackdown vs Raw.

So I recently read through Bret’s book, which I’ll be using as a basis for most of the future video descriptions on him. In effect pretty much the entire book can be summed up as:
• Everyone loved/admired him, always
• Vince kept backtracking on promises to him (which is true, but still)
• He was more popular than [insert name here] at their peak
• He continuously cheated on his wife and then seemed confused as to why their relationship was so strained
• He always got tail in the most apocryphal and unbelievable circumstances (“No one else can corroborate this but it definitely happened”)
• Bad News Brown/Vince/Dynamite/Shawn/Hunter/Yokozuna/Nash/His brothers/His sisters/Martha Hart were arseholes

That’s it, that’s it for 550 pages. It’s a good book to be sure but damn does it get formulaic after a while (just like wrestling, I guess). If you watch modern shoots with Bret, he has a very weird ego, in the sense that he was effectively on top of the world and universally beloved the majority of the time he was wrestling, and yet still seems to have this bizarre bitterness towards a lot of things. I’ve seen some rationales before that have said this is probably an alteration of his personality as a result of one too many knocks to the head, combined with numerous traumatic events in quick succession and his unfortunate stroke in 2001, and personally I think that those are probably the reason. I’ve read before that brain damage can cause a person’s personality to really change drastically as a result, and the bitterness Bret expresses now is probably a partly as a result of that I’d reckon (not that he doesn’t have a number of justified reasons to be bitter, of course).

It's a good book on the whole though, a good insight into the eras Bret wrestled in, albeit he tends to mix and match what he actually wants to focus on. One thing I never realised is that Vince never actually bought out Stampede Wrestling; he promised he would but never did, leading to Bruce Hart attempting to revive it. A somewhat foolish endeavour, but it did lead to guys like Brian Pillman and Chris Benoit getting their first steps in wrestling, amongst others. Bret, Davey, Dynamite and Jim all went to the WWF from '84 onwards, with pretty mixed results. The British Bulldogs were quite big early on, but you'd be forgiven for forgetting that because by early '87 (ya, before Wrestlemania III had even happened) they were pretty already done as a result of Dynamite suffering some horrendous injuries, which even led to them having to drop the tag belts, which Dynamite refused to drop to anyone except for the Hart Foundation. It also led to a really weird scenario where the Bulldogs were the tag champs but Dynamite couldn't wrestle, which meant Davey had to defend the tag belts with a variety of stand-ins, including Junk Yard Dog at one point for some reason. The Hart Foundation as a tag-team also took ages to really develop properly, not least because Bret wasn't very good on the mic for a fair while there (though would get better, obviously), and trying to make the team "work" per se was a bit difficult.

It also didn't really help that Neidhart was very much the Janetty of the two, which led to Vince as early as '87 and '88 contemplating a singles run for Bret, which he soon backtracked on, something which would basically always characterise Bret's relationship with Vince really. I really want to like the Hart Foundation as a tag-team, but I feel as if they just took a little too long to hit their stride, and while they were certainly better than many of the tag-teams of that era (Dream-team, Can-Am Connection, Islanders, take your pick really), they still felt a bit undefined for much of their run. Hell, they only even got a tag-belt run because of Dynamite bothering to be a decent person for once, so there you go. Despite this, there's one point in Bret's book, in...'88, I want to say, where Bret says he was getting more fan mail than Hogan at that point. Which, yeah, I dunno; even as a Bret mark have to be a bit sceptical about a lot of the claims he makes, especially on his early years. Luckily, Bret would go on to have an incredibly successful singles run, but I'll talk about that more in the next video on Bret.

Up next, one half of the Dream Team. Joy.