Let's play a game, was it planned or WCW shenanigans?
 

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I remember seeing this as a kid and thinking, no more Sting, no more Hogan, no more Nash, no more Goldberg... why would I watch WCW? With the purchanse of WCW starting, do you think this was planned by the wrestlers so they could wait out their contracts or was this another ridiculous WCW 2001 storyline?

Pretty crazy seeing Chris Kanyon coming out of the coffin...just bizarre.

god WCW sucked after 2000

Was going to say it was just another dumb Russo idea that only he would have thought of it being epic but apparently according to Wikipedia he was out of WCW for the final 6 months and didn't have much of a say with this storyline.

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Bret hart has shit for Business sense.

They even made him Champion, and he still doesn't cut WCW any slack.

I could of sworn I read somewhere that supposedly there was going to be a relaunch for WCW when Bischoff's group was gonna take it over. At that time all of the "Mega" WCW stars would return and lead to hopefully a new rise in popularity

I refuse to believe WCW in late 2000/early 2001 had any idea what it was doing 20 minutes in advance, let alone some sort of mega complicated storyline

Bret Hart is horribly over-rated.

Alright, this sentence is fairly irresponsible though. They made him champion far far after anybody really cared all that much. They didn't strike while the iron was hot on Hart because all of the talent backstage was scared shitless that they'd have to give up their main event spots. Pair that with the fact that a couple of the top guys in WCW at the time were defunct Kliq members... Not saying Hart would've set the WCW world on fire or anything but they honestly tried their hardest for to cut the cord on Hart before he even showed up.

You are correct.
Goldberg was out due to him having to win 176 matches in a row or retire and ended up losing to Luger of all people. He would have been back
Hogan was gone because Russo cut a worked shoot on him that went to far. Hogan wasn't coming back.
Sting was "injured" by Steiner in late 2000. He wrestled on the last Nitro and may have came back.
Nash lost a retirement match against Steiner. Probably would have came back too.

Problem with all these wrestlers is, they were very highly paid and with WCW in debt at the time, they may have chosen to just sit it out. Bischoff was planning to reboot WCW with DDP as his biggest face and Steiner as his biggest heel

WCW didn't honestly think it was going out of business, hence the creation of the Cruiserweight Tag Team Title which was like a month before they went out of business.

Oh and ROH blows.

So if Russo was gone, who was booking WCW? Eric Bischoff? I read that John Laurinaitis got Animal his job back in WCW, was he booking?

Back then I was a mark for it all, but damn this title was so pointless.

Well, Bret had some reason for it. While Bret was in WCW, there was a lot of political pull surrounding the World title (i.e. Hogan, Nash, etc.), so they gave Bret the next best thing, the U.S. title.

After Russo left, Johnny Ace was the booker. And when he was the booker, the matches had emphasis on clean finishes, a thing he learned from Baba.

Good 'ol Baba. :D