YMMV / Wendi Richter

• Critical Dissonance: Her famous MTV match with Moolah was actually voted Worst Worked Match of 1984 by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It earned a 9.0 in the Nielsen ratings department, giving MTV its highest ratings ever.
• Funny Moments: She remarks that she had a run-in with Cab Calloway at the airport before the first WrestleMania. He walked by her putting make-up on and joked "you're not doing that for me, are you?" Wendi being a down-to-earth country girl had no idea who he was. When Cab asked "do you know who I am?", Wendi responded "do you know who I am?"
• Girl-Show Ghetto: An example that broke out of it. Wendi's partnership with Cyndi Lauper was one of the things that kickstarted the Rock n' Wrestling Era and was regarded as enough of a main event on its own. Out of all the matches at The Brawl to End It All, hers was the only one to air on TV. Then again, she was still criminally underpaid compared to her other colleagues, so she didn't completely escape this.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Her 2010 Hall of Fame induction was followed by one of the worst women's matches in WrestleMania history, where the Divas were given a 10-Diva tag match that only lasted three minutes and ended with Vickie Guerrero pinning Kelly Kelly with a botched frog splash.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Watch the first WrestleMania and listen to how the crowd explodes as soon as "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" hits and Wendi makes her entrance with Cyndi Lauper and David Wolfe. It's an incredible moment that still feels special to this day.
  • After being inducted into the Hall of Fame, she has this line.
    Wendi Richter: There's a place where you can touch a woman that will drive her wild. Do you know where that is? It's her heart, and you've touched mine tonight.
  • And the very next night, she appears on the stage with the other inductees and shouts "Girls just wanna have fun!" to the fans.
• Iron Woobie: Hearing her talk about the horror stories regarding her training - Moolah never training the women herself and getting her other trainees to do it, taking a percentage of their booking fee, treating them like dogs - and the sexist treatment she received from the office paints quite a different picture than the happy-go-lucky Action Girl you saw on TV.
• Narm Charm: Some of her matches and promos may look cheesy (it was the 80s afterall) but there is still something very awesome and empowering about Wendi's whole character while she was in WWE.
• Once Original, Now Overdone: Wendi's matches haven't aged well, but she was a superstar back in the day. Don't forget that women's wrestling was seen entirely as a novelty or a bit of flavouring. Wendi being paired with Cyndi Lauper put WWF into the mainstream. And let's not forget that the Action Girl was hardly mainstream during the 80s either. To give you an idea of how big she was at the time, she had a legitimate claim to being the most popular wrestler not named Hulk Hogan at one point, and it would take nearly a decade with the emergence of Lita for a woman to achieve even a fraction of the same in the wrestling world.