Differences in the Booking Calendar

[Woof]

So I've been bouncing around a lot lately in my viewing, hitting various promotions and time periods for stretches at a time, and one thing that has struck me is not only the stylistic difference in the wrestling and/or booking, but the difference in structural booking, by which I mean, what they're booking to. There seem to be as many variations on the "booking calendar" (if we want to call it that) as there are in wrestling styles. I've also seen this reinforced a little bit in the 1983 Project that's going on over in armchair booking.

 

You've got the weekly episodic style, probably most famous in Memphis, where they booked week-to-week, the TV setting up the Monday Coliseum show. There was almost no long term build going on, as a match would get set up on the TV, then the match would occur on Monday, followed by fallout and follow-up match. The plus side was that the angles were white hot because they were constantly moving forward and you never knew what was going to happen, but it seems to me there was very little in the way of big match anticipation. (Oddly enough I fele like TNA is kind of doing this now, except there's no Coliseum show, they just blow it off in the second hour of the show.)

 

The old school WWF style was more of showcase booking, where the TV was there to just promote the wrestlers as personalities, with an occasional angle thrown out there just to hype a program that they were going to run across all the house shows. But for the most part the building of future match-ups took place in the specific arenas (MSG being the prime one). Once they added the big 4 PPV's that changed slightly, but there will still plenty of matches on those early mega cards that had little-to-no build. TV was purely there as an ad for the house show and to build anticipation for featured match-ups.

 

The current WWF PPV model is sort of between the two, where the TV is episodic, with one week building off of the previous, but the payoff is almost always only going to come at the PPV. NXT uses the same model, just stretched out more between big shows (although as a result they use a form of showcase booking mixed in).

 

Then you get the current indy DVD model where each show is more or less equal, with each one just building to the next and angles and feuds getting blown off sporadically along the way as needed. Sure, some of the bigger indies are now at the point where they have "mega shows", but the other events still aren't treated as meaningless. I kind of feel like ECW popularized this style (just that they had TV to show highlights and promos as they went). They never really had TV tapings as such until the very end when they went on TNN.

 

Honestly, I have no idea how the various Japan or Mexico promotions work, since I mostly only ever watch one-off matches or mega events (and the lack of understanding commentary doesn't help me get how/what they're building), so if anybody has anything to add there, fill me in.

 

Anyway, I'm curious what people think about the various styles and which ones you prefer. Some feel like they're better set up to deliver big matches, while other styles feel like they're more about storytelling. Do you have a preference? Or is the variety part of the appeal of watching different promotions?

[goc]

I don't think it's really far to say there was "no long term booking" in Memphis because they would run long rivalries and guys would have a series of matches leading to a blow off. But yes they also did a lot of hot shot "set it up on Saturday, blow if off on Monday" type stuff also.

 

As far as my favorite style I would go with Southeastern/Continental. Almost everyone on the roster was involved in some kind of feud or story and they weren't all independent of each other. You would get a mingling of stuff with the babyfaces all looking out for each other and stuff like that. They wanted to sell you into the arena every Monday night at the Boutwell Auditorium but they would have have really long running feuds and eventually you would get a pay off after 3-6 months of the same feud running. Usually in the form of a loser leaves town. In the Continental days you could watch this unfold right on TV with the Rip Rogers/Adrian Street feud that I watched from 1986 being the best example.

 

I asked Rip about that on twitter and he said those two wrestled each other non stop for pretty much 120 days straight. So that was a 6 month feud where they did a lot of different stuff to keep people interested and keep the story moving and at the end of it Adrian Street won a Loser Leaves Town match and Rip Rogers left. Kind of a perfect feud to look at for "weekly episodic booking" of a long running feud. So I guess that would fit more in the storytelling category than the big match category but you would eventually get a big match at the end of it.

 

I've tried to copy that style, especially with trying to give everyone on roster something to do and every match on the arena card a purpose, with what I'm doing in the 1983 project. While also adding in a little of the "hot shot an angle on TV and blow it off at the arena" stuff from Memphis.

[Woof]

Point taken about Memphis, but I was more talking about how there was rarely (always an exception of course) a lot of long term build-up to a particular match-up. The feud may have a long build, but in terms of making you wait to see two guys FINALLY clash, that wasn't something they usually did.

[Migs]

ECW's style I think was a bit different than you describe, because the center really was that TV show. It's probably the best promotion of any to just binge watch the TV, because it operates like a TV show, and rarely builds to anything not shown on TV (even the PPVs are extensively detailed in highlight shows). The modern indy promotion afterwards is much more focused on selling a DVD of a show, and there's little to none of the backstage aspect that made ECW different.

 

I also think that while a lot of the older territories used a version of that WWF model (TV is angles to set up the frequent shows), there was a real range in how much was given away on TV. Look at Crockett in '86-'88 - they showed a ton on TV, with the intent of being exciting but still wanting to sell "the big match" that would occur at the arena. That gives the TV a very different feel than the WWF TV at the time, even if they are attempting to do the same thing.

[Woof]

ECW TV in the mid 90's didn't show a LOT of feature matches. When the Gangstas debuted and feuded with the Public Enemy for example, none of their arena matches made TV. Plus a lot of the other main event matches were clipped to holy hell on the show. I agree that they're fun to binge watch, but you end up missing a lot of the payoffs.

I really liked the original ROH model where they booked DVD to DVD, because they often added a lot of backstage promos and whatnot to flesh out the stories. The problem was those promos were often pretty terrible and the shows were just too f'n long to sit through in a single setting. If they had adapted the ECW style and cut each show into 3 or 4 one hour blocks for TV, they probably would have been my favorite promotion of all time.

 

You're dead on about the territories though. That's kind of what got me started on this subject. All of the territories were using TV to hype their house show circuit, but they all did it in wildly different ways.

[Laz]

I really liked the original ROH model where they booked DVD to DVD, because they often added a lot of backstage promos and whatnot to flesh out the stories. The problem was those promos were often pretty terrible and the shows were just too f'n long to sit through in a single setting. If they had adapted the ECW style and cut each show into 3 or 4 one hour blocks for TV, they probably would have been my favorite promotion of all time.

Agreed. I can pinpoint ROH really becoming a shell of its peak self to the HDNet start (Gabe may have shown a lot of burnout post-ROH/CZW feud but it got worse when they got TV). That way you sell the DVD to the hardcore fan by promising full and unedited matches but clip them down and highlight the characters/stories for the hour weekly episodes.

 

It's likely a product of my age and exposure at the dawn of my teenage years, but I loved the ECW format. Clipping matches to show highlights but offering full videos of the events let viewers stay in the loop with the condensed version of events but also let them see the whole story unfold if they chose, and the FanCam stuff for "lesser" shows in the event of a great match/angle occurring, which would then be shown on TV, made it so that you felt it absolutely necessary to buy a ticket when they were coming around, even in the dying days. It was, and still is, quite a unique presentation (not even including the different camera angles or editing tricks) that helped cement the company's personality.

[Sean Liska]

Great idea for a thread. Earlier this year WWE ran EC and and MITB within two weeks of each other and people really liked it because each Raw had a sense of immediacy with not much time for filler. Memphis and Alabama are easily my favorite TV shows of the 80s, which makes me lean towards the weekly big shows. You don't get the Sting-Hogan long builds, but there's never any time for filler and I have a short attention span. But does that really mean that I love weekly shows or that I love the guys booking those territories?

 

CMLL is an interesting example nowadays. There's only a few matches a year that they really build to. The nature of running Mexico City three times a week makes it tough. Would they be better or worse if they were like AAA and building towards bi-monthly big shows?

[Woof]

The more I think about it, the more I favor the NXT model. A weekly one hour show that is a breeze to sit through and where every match and segment has some form of long-term meaning. The quarterly specials give them something big to build to, but they do little mini blow-offs along the way for stuff that isn't as crucial (Rhyno vs Joe being a recent example). I'm generally excited about the big specials because they're far enough apart and I'm not burnt out on the product, so I give NXT my full attention when I watch the weekly show.