Bix

WWE made a claim of having 75,000 hours years ago, before a few of the library purchases. Last official number was 80,000 or 85,000, IIRC. Keep in mind that probably includes tons stuff like raw footage (of basically everything, look at the section about the Mr. Perfct skits in the Hennig doc) and auditions (they kept Bischoff's from 1990 and showed a clip on Confidential), in addition to all sorts of different international TV shows (recap or otherwise) when it comes to (W)WWF/E alone. And that's not even scratching the surface, since they've occasionally made montages that used short clips of house shows that weren't from one of the recognizable regularly taped arenas. Then you add the WCW/TBS wrestling library which, at a minimum, includes all JCP TV from late '81 to the buyout and all WCW TV, possibly a ton of raw footage (based on the Horsemen DVD and something a friend procured), the last couple years of GCW and maybe all CWG, and maybe some odds and ends. AWA and Florida nobody's really sure about, but they seemingly have a ton of arena films from the latter, as it's their go to source for guys they don't have footage of in other territories, and it included previously unseen stuff like Terry Bollea being trained by Pat Patterson and Bob Roop stretching some guy. WCCW/Dallas and Stampede appear to have tons from the late '70s on and a decent amount of older footage. For the Kowalski HOF content on COD, they used multiple matches from the '50s "Texas Rasslin" syndicated show at the Sportatorium. They've just scratched the surface, but it's easy to believe, if just because people keep unearthing more and more weird international WWF TV with stuff like Bob Bradley doing a fake Tiger Mask gimmick in '85 on Australian TV and Tenryu showing up on Swedish TV in '93. There were a lot more variations than just language and local promos for a while there

For a company with a subscription based web video service, the lack of support for it on anything other than a Windows PC is baffling. They badly need to rethink that model and start supporting Roku boxes and whatnot. I would say that maybe they need to think outside the box by licensing large blocks of old shows to Netflix, but so much of their content needs to be re-edited to fix music and trademark rights issues that it would take a very long time or only be made up of stuff previously shown on the two Classics services. That is presumably why they've been less productive than they we would like. Of course, they've also edited out music that they owned at times, so who knows what they're thinking...

This is one of those things that you would think would be remembered as a classic segment but isn't for whatever reason. Heenan literally tripping over himself with glee and doing an amazing job putting Cornette over, the huge pop from the group of heel fans freaking out, the heel comradery hug, the great Cornette promo, and of course JAMES E. CORNETTE SHOWING UP IN THE WWF WITH NO WARNING.

Not sure about any in-match bear deaths but some wrestlers lost fingers when they accidentally got inside the muzzle and Dave McKigney's wife was killed by his bear when she was menstruating.

So how did this fit into the Knoxville timeline you gave?

That one tape with so much Troy T. Tyler stuff was recorded off a station in Hazard, KY. Wasn't that a Knoxville loop town? It's a lot closer to there than Birmingham.

I was actually gonna mention that and then totally forgot. I thought Fuller picked Knoxville back up not long after Flair and Mulligan pulled out. What towns did SECW cover from '80-'84?

- According to people who researched the subject, in cities in the Watts territory where there were major sports franchises, attendance wasn't going doing and in many cases went up. But no, there's no consensus. - I have never heard the cereal story before but in the WWF cookies available around that time, The Rockers were the only tag team and they were a single cookie, not separate Shawn and Marty cookies. Maybe between that and and other stuff like shirts, one was sick of getting half the share of merchandise money that singles wrestlers at the same level were getting but the other thought he would get lost in the shuffle as a singles? - I'm pretty sure that they were still sending out the syndicated shows on tape back then, and who knows how far in advance they were sent out. The match was set to air one or two days (depending on the market) after he died. I would think they sent a weekend syndicated show tape before Friday, and I'm not even sure he was found the day he died. The real issue is that they should have explained it had nothing to do with the Piper match when discussing his death on TV. I'm not sure if they did or not, but they should have.

There was also the Trans World Wrestling promotion...that was Inoki too, right? I always forget the specifics of which was when and how Frank Tunney and Eddie Quinn were involved.

The Texas history stuff in the comments that don't warrant a thread...thread got me wondering about this. The history of how wrestling evolved in Texas over the years is a pretty big deal, but because just about everything available on video is from after the splits, people think of Houston as being a St. Louis/Toronto-esque "one big city" promotion that favored certain offices at times as opposed to part of a full-time territory, whether it was Fritz's, Blanchard's, or Watts's. They don't realize that Boesch and Blanchard with his (San Antonio-centered cities that became the main part of the Southwest Championship Wrestling territory) had just been associate promoters/NWA associates booking wrestlers from Fritz. Same goes for how previously Houston was the home of the booking office that got usurped by Fritz, who was just part-owner of Dallas with Ed McLemore. So...what else is relatively important but gets forgotten/goes unmentioned? - Sort of related, but on the flip side, it's not always made clear that St. Louis wasn't a territory, just a town that booked all-star shows with some Kansas City guys on the undercard. - The stories about the demise of the UWA in Mexico tends to gloss over that it lasted well into 1994 (and maybe even further) while working with AAA. - Inoki's attempts at opposing the JWA are something that I don't remember hearing about until Dave Meltzer started writing about them semi-regularly over the last several years in history pieces. - The Georgia satellite (pun not intended) circuit in Chattanooga would be completely forgotten if Cornette didn't constantly talk about it. This was a badly executed radical change to a major territory that completely bombed, but you don't hear much about it from anyone other than Cornette. Yeah, it was short-lived, but still... - Similarly, with all the talk about Crockett's issues and the wrestlers' morale in '87, until Cornette mentioned it in his MX book, I had no idea that thanks to the increased number of TV tapings under the Crockett banner led to more shows being paid as TV ($25 or $50) instead of as house shows (paid out of an allotted percentage of the gate scaled to the match's positioning). - Georgia and Southwest working together and sharing talent in '83. Since this is when Southwest was on USA, they had to be attempting to monopolize cable for a potential expansion. This is as Vince was moving the pieces into place for his expansion (beyond the Northeast and California, which nobody minded him moving into), but I never hear anyone talk about it. Also, nobody ever really talks about Southwest trying to use the USA slot to run shows outside Texas in addition to getting local TV in Dallas to run local shows against WCCW. Whaddya got?

So, what're the odds he ever even contacted the name judges who weren't there? Honestly I'm shocked he delivered Race and Nakata, though.

I don't know if this is some kind of change over the last decade and a half but when I was a HS senior I knew plenty of big Beatles fans. And when I was in 8th grade there were a bunch of Smiths fans.

On 1Wrestlingtalk way back when, there was a UFO office rep who posted there. IIRC he defended Ogawa and Inoki to some degree and said that Hashimoto was given a small amount of notice that some kind of shooting was going down. No idea of any of this is on Archive.org.

Technically speaking, is that even legal? I know their rules are supposed to ban all outside cameras in some kind of draconian fashion, but does the law seriously allow them to steal people's private property like that? You're right, that doesn't make sense, their policy has always been to allow consumer still cameras and nothing is more consumer than a disposable camera.

Thanks. Most of that is from Gary Hart's book, which covers Texas wrestling history really in depth. The pre-split setup is one of those relatively major things that seems largely left out of wrestling history for some reason. Meltzer mentions it occasionally but not in detail.

1. Houston ran out of the Sam Houston Coliseum. Like with the other major cities in the territory, the weekly major house show was the weekly TV taping. Houston TV was from the Coliseum. Dallas/Ft. Worth TV was just matches from the Ft. Worth house show aired on KTVT (eventually a TV Title defended in 2/3 falls matches was added so they could have a dark match main event). San Antonio TV was just the weekly house show. When Boesch hooked up with Blanchard, the show became a mix of the regular Southwest show (which eventually stopped being the house show footage) and Houston house show matches. Same with Mid-South/UWF and the WWF, which is why they taped all of those Houston shows in '87. 2 & 3. As Gary Hart explained in his book, there were two types of promoters: Those who had booking offices (think Vince McMahon, Bill Watts, Jim Barnett, Eddie Graham) and those who had towns. Boesch went from having a booking office to having a town and Fritz did the opposite. Boesch after 1966 was just a more involved version of people like the Murnicks and Henry Marcus in Crockett's territory, Fred Ward in Georgia, etc. They were the local promoters in their towns. Boesch was obviously more visible as the announcer and whatnot, plus he liked booking outside talent on his shows. Later on, when he had issues with a booking office, he'd switch. Eventually, the Tunneys also did this in Toronto which wasn't really a full time territory, just Maple Leaf Gardens, Buffalo NY,and the TV tapings in Brantford. After the Whipper Watson era, they used The Sheik's crew, then a mix, then Crockett with some WWF and AWA stars from time to time, then just Crockett and the and Canadian crew which included Bret Hart as Buddy Hart at the end, then the WWF.

This requires a lot of background: Through the mid to late '60s, the booking office for the NWA Texas territory (which included all of the the towns that weren't part of of the Doc Sarpolis/Dory Funk Sr. west Texas territory based out of the Amarillo Booking Office) was Morris Sigel's Texas Wrestling Agency in Houston, which was booked by Paul Boesch. In 1966, Dallas promoter Ed McLemore broke away to form the Dallas Booking Office, taking some of the Houston talent with him. This was the second time he broke away. In December 1952, he broke away, but things didn't go well, as among other things, Sigel had booker Jack Pfefer threatened and someone set fire to the Sportatorium. He went back with Sigel in 1954. In 1966, things worked out better because Fritz Von Erich was his partner and they got the KTVT contract in their name. KTVT had a huge reach so that scared the Funks in Amarillo and Leroy McGuirk in Oklahoma into not getting involved. Fritz was close with Sam Muchnick and Jim Barnett, so he had the political power to keep them in the NWA. So the NWA had two competing offices for a few months. McLemore had signed a contract saying only Houston wrestlers could appear at the Sportatorium, so the Dallas office moved to the Bronco Bowl while the Houston office was in the Sportatorium. Sigel died three months into the war and Boesch bought out his wife. Not long after that, he gave in, became just the promoter in Houston, and the Dallas office became the official booking office for non-west Texas. From this point on, Houston was not its own promotion, just a major city promoted by a guy who gave great payoffs, and getting on the Houston card was key to making money in Texas. In October 1978, Joe Blanchard of south Texas pulled out of the booking office to form Southwest Championship Wrestling (a non-NWA promotion), with some guys, mainly those who lived locally, moving over to work for him full time. In December 1980, after 14 years of being annoyed by having the office he felt he was due being taken over from him, Boesch switched to using SWCW as his booking office and lost the ability to book the NWA champion. At this point, his TV show was no longer just Houston footage (Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas/Fort Worth all had separate TV shows before the splits) and aired a mix of Blanchard's TV and Houston matches (this became the format with other offices as well later on). Meanwhile, the Dallas office competed with Blanchard in south Texas and when the Amarillo Booking Office closed, they took over there and became the Texas booking office. In 1982, Boesch switched to using Mid-South as his booking office. It was officially a non-NWA promotion but he was on better terms with the NWA and did end up using Flair as you're probably aware of. At first, Boesch still booked Bockwinkel as world champion, presumably because Bockwinkel was tight with him and had points in the office. Watts ended up making a deal with Fritz to share some talent, with World Class guys coming into Mid-South from time to time, especially on major shows and in Houston, and Mid-South guys coming into Dallas for exposure on the syndicated WCCW show and the wide-reaching local KTVT show. In 1986, looking to take over Texas as part of expanding nationally as the UWF, Watts took Fritz's booker Ken Mantell and much of his roster. In the Fall, B-show Power Pro Wrestling, which had usually consisted of Jim Ross in a studio throwing to various matches (old and new house show matches, old TV matches, exclusive matches from TV tapings, matches from other territories with new wrestlers coming in, etc) was changed to a similar format as the main UWF show (taped in Tulsa every other week) and taped at the Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Wort (Fritz's old building before crowds increased to the point he moved into the larger Will Rogers Coliseum with the Tarrant County Convention Center used for bigger shows) every other week. After a year of a failed expansion, Watts sells to Crockett. He didn't tell Boesch, who was so angry he switched to using the WWF as his booking office. It didn't work out well and he retired a few months later. In 1988, he wasn't the official promoter but he helped Crockett out when JCP came to Houston, and they got some Houston Wrestling specials on local TV. A year later, Boesch was dead.

At least officially, Jumbo had Hep B. Steroids (and HGH IIRC) can cause elevated liver enzymes and were believed to be the cause of Lashley, Khali, and Super Crazy's issues. I'm sure there are a lot more guys with Hep C than we're aware of (including from needle sharing at some points, as Dr. Zahorian testified during the McMahon trial that he started including needles with each batch of injectable drugs when a wrestler mentioned sharing needles) and it seems like WWE is being diligent about it, so I dunno how much of an issue it would be there.

Anyone remember an interview Chris Candido did where he talked about how he'd rather be Doug Somers than Hulk Hogan? I thought he said it in his interview with Larry Goodman but that wasn't it and I can't find the interview where he said it.

Seattle was a Don Owen town.

LA started to die out when they lost English language TV and stopped bringing in as many established name guys and stopped bringing in more expensive talent. That was in the early to mid 70s. They had ups and downs after that and totally collapsed around '79, but stayed open until '82. I'd have to dig into the WON back issues for the Shire bio to remember all of the SF details, but the first big problem was when Shire, burnt out, brought in Bob Roop as booker. Roop popped the territory with his crew, featuring himself vs Kevin Sullivan on top in a feud that actually drew as well as Ray Stevens vs Pepper Gomez. Roop got backers and tried to steal the territory out from under Shire, but Shire found out about it, leading to Roop and his crew leaving. Then he brought in Buddy Rose, eventually switching to the Portland crew, using their syndicated TV show, and running less towns. There was a dispute and Rose went on a planned rant at a Cow Palace show on the house mic slamming Shire and talking about false advertising and why some other wrestlers had left. Shire then switched to the Kansas City crew for some reason before switching to the Florida crew (it may have been the other way around). The AWA invaded at some point during all this with Stevens and sometimes Patterson on top. He decided not to lose too much of his fortune and quit. McMahon came in eventually.

Wow, that was something. Now I'm even more pumped for the Christian-Henry feud, too. (Also, I wanna be the guy to point out that his bone thickness and muscle density is such that he'd be just under 300 pounds if he had 0% body fat.)

How much of the Memphis-specific stuff is available? I have Trent's set, and the following three discs that I got from Mortimer when he quit trading Memphis TV 05.30.87, Memphis TV 06.06.87, Memphis TV 06.13.87 & 06.20.87, all which he got from yourself. Is there anything else? I have 2 comps from Steve F. in ok quality, one comp in pretty bad quality, and a few more eps I got later in ok quality.

Wasn't the dress code stuff part of the BS being fed to them by Matt Hardy when he was out to bury Punk in the sheets? Yes. See also: The "relationship" with Lita.

Funk was an evil bastard who broke Flair's neck and ridiculed him on TV for months. Arn was Flair's best friend, who set up the match by not helping him cheat and talking about wanting to prove himself. Now, once Pillman comes in and you get "the world's gentlest cage match" on Nitro, I agree with you.