WrestlingPower

I know this is an old talking point, but they seriously still try to sell an option where you get a DVD? They openly skipped releasing like 10 shows in an effort to catch up & then after the restart are like 6 months behind on releasing shows. Not to mention that once the DVD is ready they rebill the customer for shipping costs on top of what they already paid. Or at least they did years ago when that 3-tiered payment thing started. There was much uproar at the time about that, people essentially thought they were holding the DVD hostage until you gave them more $ to ship it to you. At this point they really should just scrap the DVDs and offer mp4 downloads or something instead of being years behind on getting stuff out. I appreciate their desire to deliver a quality product with nice packaging etc. but product to market of 12+ months in a "what have you done for me lately" market is ridiculous.

I finished listening to this and I second all the love for this series and this podcast in particular. I started reading the sheets in 1988, I started with Torch and then found the Observer a year or so later. So I had missed the demise of UWF coverage. I guess it never really occurred to me that there was "more to the story" than presented in PWI, on TV etc. so I was really kind of amazed how much I didn't know about UWF that I learned on this show. I had no clue about the era where Jim Ross ran it and how the sale itself went down. There was so much TV wrestling to follow at that time that I guess I had forgotten just how haphazard & confusing following all those shows were. I distinctly remember all the changes to the FL and UWF TV after the takeover as HTS carried both & I remember attempting to watch them for months where they were just revoiced versions of the same matches etc. I seem to remember this continued for months. I guess at one point there were variations in the TV but they did eventually become the same but with different graphics packages and announcers. I was also glad to hear where Mighty Wilbur came from as I had always wondered that. I think I had heard before about the Starrcade dark match cards but had completely forgotten having heard that. I'm wondering if there was ever thought behind TWN trying to keep the different territories afloat and trying to manage 3 promotions under one umbrella. Clearly from a TV perspective they tried to but sounds like they didn't have the infrastructure to run 3 separate territories under one main office. That would be an interesting theoretical to discuss. Interesting to hear the hint about the Gilbert/Terry Justice stuff. I have a bunch of pdfs of Justice's newsletters that I've never had the time to really dig into. I'm really looking forward to hearing you carry this thru 1988.

About 30 min in to listening to this. Home Team Sports (Baltimore-based sports channel that carried Orioles games) was added to cable across the region by late 86. They carried the Central States "All-Star" TV in late 86 until I think it either went away or was replaced with the Florida. I remember seeing the setup for Dundee/Houston Starrcade '86 match on there. The Florida TV started running on there & they aired it at either 6 or 7pm on Saturday and Sunday. Luckily they replayed it on Sunday as I was dorkish enough to attempt to flip between the TBS show and the Florida so I was able to pretty much catch all the content between the 2 airings. Late 80s syndicated & cable TV wrestling was pretty crazy. I remember PWI used to routinely run comments from readers comparing how many different hours & promotions they got in their markets. That might be an interesting show. That and the thought behind PWTW TV being kind of an aggregator of the various groups.

A few more notes I thought of: 1) I didn't see a whole lot of TWA but I seem to remember their TV announcer being one of the best around at the time. Hell the idea of discussing indy announcers could be a show in & of itself. 2) I don't think you touched on the various Memphis groups. MCW & MPPW were both discussed a bit on the WC history of developmental podcast though it would have been interesting to hear Naylor's take. 3) I LOVED MLW. I happened to get Sunshine at the time as I had DirecTV and that was a highlight for sure. Such a good mix of guys and it was also fascinating to see the starts & stops of the promotion itself & how the talent changed each time. The Funk/Corino feud and the Wargames stack up against anything else going on at the time. MLW also did a nice companion piece to ROH's Punk/Raven feud at the same time.

Loved this show also. The Memphis run in 1985(?) was a complete blind spot to me. Was this concurrent with AWA? I guess I have more 80s Memphis gaps than I had thought. That Southeastern stuff is rare, I think it was buried in the middle of one of those "Goldmine" tapes RF was selling back in the day. I distinctly remember seeing the breakup & then the refusal to cut hair leading to a reunion on there & thinking it was EXACTLY the same as what they did in WCCW in 1988.

I too loved the show. To me the indy renaissance really spanned the late 90s into the early 2000s but I can see how THAT would have been an interminably long podcast. I was lucky enough to live within 4 hours between ECWA and OMEGA stuff and as most know I filmed a lot of that stuff. There was also Maryland Championship Wrestling that featured a lot of stuff with Joey, Christian, Julio etc. That late 90s time period with Lance Diamond, Ace Darling, Devon Storm, Reckless Youth really paved the way for the early 2000s stuff. To me once ROH took off it really kind of overtook interest in a lot of other indies. IWA Mid-South still maintained a following for a while as they were almost like a feeder to ROH. I'm rambling now but this show featured so many name drops & memories of guys I hadn't thought of in 10 years or more. Also liked the mini-discussion on just how much $, time & effort we all put in back in that era to acquire footage & trade it around. I've got a plenty of stuff from this era if anyone wants to do some comps spawning off this show. Looking forward to part 2.

Finished the show. I was thinking that RAWlternative might be a good avenue for SMV to try the "pay as much as you want" idea. Wasn't sure if you guys saw the Highspots response to Johnson's article. Their point was more toward why they don't do big shoot or documentary projects anymore rather than delivering live shows but that might be a topic for a future show. That and crowdsourcing/Kickstarter. I think Ellbow Productions is still using that model for their stuff that Highspots is a partner in.

A conspiracy theory I meant to mention earlier. In the early days of the NWA Legends conventions in Charlotte, Charles Robinson was known to come to the convention & walk around & look at vendor booths. Apparently one year he was specifically asking vendors why they thought they had the right to sell X,Y,Z on their tables. So in subsequent years we would have people on the lookout for him and conveniently move stuff out of sight during the times he was there. Whether he ever reported back to anyone in corporate & put the idea of monitoring conventions on their radar who knows. But Mania weekend is the only time we've heard of any policing of conventions.

I'm not aware what the wording of said Wrestlecon vendor contract would have said, but that general idea is not a new concept. There has been language alluding to at least absolving the promoter of any responsibility for the Charlotte conventions dating back years and the 2 WrestleReunion shows I did in LA had similar language. I think it's been kind of don't ask/don't tell all along as promoters are probably so busy running the shows that it's certainly not anything they police but they may not necessarily know what's going on either. I've always kind of taken that language in the contracts as the promoter covering themselves, but whether any have specifically stated "I as vendor promise not to sell unauthorized merch", I can't recall. I think it's no coincidence whatsoever though that DVD vendors at conventions have completely dried up. The past few years in Charlotte there have been MAYBE 1 vendor other than Highspots selling any DVDs at all. The convention landscape has kind of changed over the years. If you aren't bringing in vendor guests you are largely squeezed out. Merch-only vendors seemed be be getting less & less dollars spent at their booths over the years so how much was supply vs. demand and how much was being afraid to sell bootlegs, I don't know. Re: the WWE settlements over VHS, I'm aware of some that just straight up paid the fee so as not to rattle their cage & others that negotiated the price down. I THINK there were some that just agreed to take their site down instead of paying but it's been so long I can't recall. Mike King is the only guy I ever heard being sued and/or prosecuted over it and that was from RF rather than WWE from what I heard.

Re: the Wrestlecon bust thing I heard directly from a few of the parties involved soon after the incident. Luckily the "raiders" didn't go to that table first or it could have been worse. I guess it wasn't exactly a secret what was going down so Bill was able to get a heads up and may have been able to misplace some of the merch before they arrived at his table. His partner was able to be diverted from the table otherwise 2 vendors would have been busted instead of one. Apparently he was in the process of hiding stuff under the table as the raid occurred which made it more suspicious. Not going to name names, but selling that type of merchandise was nothing new at all at conventions. Pretty much since conventions have existed and VHS evolved into DVD, it was standard practice to see multiple vendors set up at conventions with largely "bootleg" merchandise. I heard some were smart enough not to bring WWE owned DVDs to Wrestlecon itself but I doubt there was much thought behind what inventory others brought. It was just standard practice to bring a large selection of your website based inventory to conventions. You'd be surprised how many people show up at these conventions who have ZERO idea that it's even possible to get season sets and stuff from the past like this. Very very few care that it's "unauthorized", in fact the only few that do would be in a case where the bootlegs are being sold for roughly the same price as the original somewhere else in the room. I agree with your talking point that valuing these discs at anything more than the $2-3 per that was probably the price point is ridiculous. I guess maybe they up the value based on the percieved offense of trademark infringement and the "how many others they may have sold already". Nearly 10 years ago when WWE was cracking down on trading websites, Bill and several others paid fines to WWE legal where the price point was set based on some combination of how much stuff they had on the site, how long the site had been up & running, and perceived traffic to the site. I'm aware of at least 5-6 vendors who paid the fine, took down/hid the content on their site, and moved on with their lives.

Dylan is not crazy, Dan Spivey was an uncle (I think) to someone in FCW at some point but don't know who. RE: PCW/ECWA. When I was doing my public access show in the late 90s here, we met Lance Diamond & actually filmed our show from the bar he worked at. We wanted to see him wrestles so hit up PCW in Reading in late 1996 I believe at the restaraunt you mentioned, Johnny. After the show at dinner I sat across from Reckless (who didn't work the show) and I was disappointed to still not have seen him work after all the Whoo & Jess McGrath hype. Soon thereafter the ECWA/PCW thing really started up as Lance I think put Kettner & Blaine in touch & Blaine drove out to a lot of ECWA shows at the time. This was most definitely during the Dory Funk/Tracks era of training guys in CT. I have several ECWA, PCW, and WWA (Kowalski) tapes from that time frame using dev. talent. ECWA put their belt on Christian Cage on his first night in. I think at that point they were just looking for a loose affiliation with anyone established & running shows to put their guys on within driving distance of CT. This led to Kettner interviewing for backstage jobs and the time frame where Kevin Kelly was booking ECWA while in WWF, but that's going off on a tangent.

Some more clarification regarding the various Memphis groups based on my memory and a tad bit of research. MPPW was the first one in 1999 to use developmental talent. That's where Baldo, Angle, O'Grady, etc. were. I think when Lawler's relationship with WWE soured over Stacy, as mentioned above, led them to move the talent to MCW, which was already up & running. Terry Golden ran that and Bobby Eaton was a very short-lived trainer there. Not sure the timing of all that but MCW was the primary one by early 2001 at least. The Hass Bros, Reckless Youth, Island Boys, Steve Bradley with Victoria, Mean Street Posse, etc. worked there at the time. The Regal/Danielson match in question was early 2001. Sometime soon thereafter Lawler mended fences with WWE and the same talent worked MPPW TV and MCW shows. I'm fuzzy on the details of whether those were kept separate promotions but soon there after they pulled the talent from Memphis completely as those same guys ended up in HWA with the WCW guys. Re: HWA, Les Thatcher hasn't owned it since 2003 per Cagematch.net.

Your point about guys analyzing others & referencing storylines is truly lost. Granted Dusty Rhodes took a lot of heat about this since he was the booker & center of attention but late 80s Crockett, guys referenced other storylines all the time. Guys weren't in a vaccuum. They acknowledged other storylines & fueds going on within the same TV show they were apart of. And get this novel concept, babyfaces stuck together & offered their support to others, "hey brother, I got your back should you ever need help with XXX".

Do you have any old wrestling figures? My 2-year-old is playing with my old LJNs and WCW early 90s figures. He knows Hulk Hogan & Terry Funk by name and for some odd reason Butch Reed. I have shown him video of Funk but I'm trying to keep him away from wrestling for the most part.