The wrestlers tended to overstate their height by a few inches. Andre was a true giant, around 7 feet tall (not the 7'5" or whatever he was billed at). Hulk Hogan was around 6'5" but obviously combine that with the amount of muscle on him and his natural build and he was an enormous dude.
Those guys did enormous damage to themselves with the stunts they pulled.
I liked those characters like the Iron Sheikh, Hercules Hernandez, Rick Rude. Even Hulk Hogan refused to wrestle Rick Rude, who was an arm wrestling champion as well and immensely strong and a bit psycho.
This is my favourite pic of Andre:
Holy crap, he literally takes up 2 seats.
But you know, he was basically undefeated for a number of matches up until Hulk Hogan defeated him for the champion title iirc.
I watched during the Attitude Era. It was one of the main reasons we got satellite TV, so we could watch it on....was it on Fox Sports? I can't remember. Then Smackdown became a thing soon after but that was on a channel in another pay TV package.
I tried to get back into it for a while in 2014 and subscribed to the WWE Network, but I got caught up in all the non-kayfabe stuff (bookers, jobbers, all the ones I hate getting pushed etc) and got frustrated.
Same, that was when I started getting into wrestling. The attitude era was what got me hooked on the first place, also bare in mind during that time, they were in competition with the then WCW in terms of ratings up until WCW was failing and crashing and then was later bought back by WWE.
The attitude era was started by what was known as the Montreal screwjob which you should check up which unfortunately Bret Hart was screwed over in a match against Shawn Michaels.
I think I've stopped watching from around 2005, I also tried watching it around 2015, yep, almost the same problem but watched it through YouTube. I didn't see the point subscribing to the WWE network.