Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?

[David Mantell]

Geographic yes, population not so much, only about a 5:1 ratio for both the UK and France to America. Population density is MUCH higher in both those two countries than America, especially in the American South where most of these now dead American wrestling territories were operating.

Market share even less if you consider there were only 2-4 channels in the UK and 1-3 in France (plus a subscription channel towards the end which carried WWF) during the time period concerned and the signals could be picked up in neighbouring countries (once on holiday in the Hague, Netherlands in 1984 I got a perfect signal for ITV and World of Sport. There was am battle royal on, btw) although a bit trickier with France and the SECAM colour signal which was non compatible with PAL TVs.

Again with market reach, you would have to factor in vast overseas sales of kinescope prints.to third world  countries. As well as being moneyspinners for promoters, they meant the boys were already draws - and celebs - when they went to these places (Giant Haystacks was made an honorary citizen of Zimbabwe by Mugabe).

If we factor in the CWA's core territority of Austria and the former GFR, we're talking a total population of 2/3 that of the USA.

[ohtani's jacket]

Where is the proof of these vast overseas sales of kinescope prints to third world countries? If there were so many prints sold, where are they today? I'd sure like to get my hands on some of them. 

[David Mantell]

1 hour ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Where is the proof of these vast overseas sales of kinescope prints to third world countries? If there were so many prints sold, where are they today? I'd sure like to get my hands on some of them. 

Pat Roach says in Simon Garfield's book that he was shown a document that he was not supposed to see, listing all the countries that Joint Promotions was getting payments for as a result of overseas sales.

We know that (O)RTF was up to something similar because a lot of the 50s and early 60s kinescope prints on Matt D's YouTube channel have captions in Arabic at the start and/or finish, indicating they were intended for overseas sale (most likely to parts of North Africa such as Algeria which France annexed at one point as well as Libya and Tunisia, and also to Syria and Lebanon which were French Mandates after the First World War.)

Also, apart from that one lucky surviving tape from Jan '69, the videos on Matt D's channel go colour in 1975 when the INA was set up and could record stuff off air for itself.  Anything earlier than that except that one bout is b/w 16mm film so is obviously going to be overseas sales because the only reason a Western TV station broadcasting in colour would make b/w film prints of its early 70s output would be for more backward countries which didn't have colour and/or videotape capabilities yet (famous case in point, Jon Pertwee episodes of Doctor Who).  See also the 1972 Vic Faulkner vs Mick McMichael bout on rather grotty b/w film. (ITV later on made colour kinescopes of some mid 70s matches - one print which previously belonged to an airline for inflight films turned up on Ebay a few years ago.)

[David Mantell]

Also, Granada's famous locked away stock of 1960s ITV bouts is on 16mm film.  I seem to recall you do posess a few of these, Ohtani.

[David Mantell]

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IXtKAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT79&lpg=PT79&dq="Pat+Roach:+British+wrestling+was+sold+to"&source=bl&ots=La2L6ag37l&sig=ACfU3U3YvtpVwWdX-sr5e7bKZbRz8MKikQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_pN-l39KCAxUfXUEAHfmzDE8Q6AF6BAgNEAM#v=onepage&q="Pat Roach%3A British wrestling was sold to"&f=false

[David Mantell]

[PeteF3]

I think Jim Cornette has said that he finally came out in the black on the Smoky Mountain venture by selling tapes to various countries probably similar to the ones who got old WOS kinescopes. I like Smoky Mountain (well, the first 3 years at least) but I don't think WOS' penetration in Tanzania or wherever is much more significant than Smoky's.

[David Mantell]

1 hour ago, PeteF3 said:

I think Jim Cornette has said that he finally came out in the black on the Smoky Mountain venture by selling tapes to various countries probably similar to the ones who got old WOS kinescopes. I like Smoky Mountain (well, the first 3 years at least) but I don't think WOS' penetration in Tanzania or wherever is much more significant than Smoky's.

I expect by this point things had moved on in those countries to the point where there was more variety in terms of channel options for a start.

WCW managed to, if not sell out, then at least reasonably fill out for three nights in December '91 the Olympia in Kensington, London (home of the show jumping tournaments they used to have on BBC2 just before Christmas in days of yore)  I myself went to night 3 of 3. They also had shows in Sheffield and Dublin. This was on the basis of 3 months so far of screenings of WCW Pro Wrestling at 1am on a Saturday night plus intermittent runs of rather less up to date tapes in comparable timeslots for the previous 20 months. . I imagine British (and French) wrestling had rather better timeslots in their import countries due to lack of small hours options.

I think it was Max Crabtree, again in Garfield's book, who said it sold well because people in a lot of these countries couldn't really relate to a lot of British culture, but that all of humanity can relate to the concept of wrestling.

[ohtani's jacket]

It's going to take more than a quote from Pat Roach to convince me that British wrestling was being sold en masse to overseas markets. Where is the proof that British wrestling aired overseas? If there were so many prints sold, why is it so rare to find one in the wild? Why are we assuming that anything prior to 1975 in the INA archives is an overseas print?

Even if prints regularly found their way to parts of the Commonwealth, though funnily enough not the major countries, how is this any more significant than the NWA champion touring countries and putting on matches? In New Zealand, they used  tiny venues like the Auckland Town Hall or a YMCA where they shot the TV, but when the NWA champ visited, they'd use Western Springs or Carlaw Park. 

I know that British guys worked in some far flung places, but I don't see the same type of impact as the touring Americans. 

[Shrike02]

1 hour ago, ohtani's jacket said:

It's going to take more than a quote from Pat Roach to convince me that British wrestling was being sold en masse to overseas markets. 

This is just one example of several logical fallacies by the OP. Fun thread but the premise and the claims made from it just haven't been persuasively argued, much less supported by credible evidence.

[David Mantell]

7 hours ago, ohtani's jacket said:

If there were so many prints sold, why is it so rare to find one in the wild?

As a Doctor Who fan who knows about 1960s missing episodes I know the answer to that. They didn't send out a print to each individual customer.  They made a small number of prints and bicycled them around different stations, probably via mail. Often when prints reached the end of their chain they were either destroyed on the spot or else sent back to the point of origin for destruction.(Or they didn't send them back and they end up being found by programme hunters like Phillip Morris of TVE, or they end up being taken home by staff and turn up yonks later in some private film collector's stash.)

That's how it was for lots of TV from that era.

[Phil Lions]

11 hours ago, PeteF3 said:

I think Jim Cornette has said that he finally came out in the black on the Smoky Mountain venture by selling tapes to various countries probably similar to the ones who got old WOS kinescopes.

This was of course years after SMW had shut down, although I would imagine the channel bought the tapes earlier, but I used to watch SMW via German TV back in 2000. It was so random. I'd go from watching Lance Storm holding three belts in WCW to seeing him team up with Jericho in SMW. The channel was called Premiere Sport 1 and it used to show nine hours of wrestling every day (well, in reality it was three hours, but they were airing the same content three times a day). They had WCW (live PPVs, old PPVs, Nitro, Thunder, one of the recap shows, old Nitros), ECW Hardcore TV, AAA and SMW. It was quite the eclectic mix and I loved it.

Sidenote: Around this same time there was another German channel where I vividly remember seeing Tim Flowers' ICW promotion out of Canada. How random is that!

[Dav'oh]

1 hour ago, David Mantell said:

They made a small number of prints and bicycled them around different stations

Why weren't they sent to Japan, Australia and the United States, wrestling hotbeds, often very discerning, rather than Malawi and the Cocos Islands?

[sek69]

1 hour ago, Dav'oh said:

Why weren't they sent to Japan, Australia and the United States, wrestling hotbeds, often very discerning, rather than Malawi and the Cocos Islands?

My guess is that they were probably sent to TV stations in various Pacific Islands since a lot of them in the Commonwealth back then and British programming would have been relatively easier to obtain than most international shows. 

[David Mantell]

55 minutes ago, Dav'oh said:

Why weren't they sent to Japan, Australia and the United States, wrestling hotbeds, often very discerning

Why weren't US tapes (officially) sent to Britain, France or GFR/Austria until the mid 80s and Vince?
Even more to the point, why weren't tapes and kinescopes of different territories swapped around between them (except maybe the odd NWA World title change match and bits of Shea Stadium 1980) until the mid 80s anti-Vince combines?
(To be fair the British and French TV stations never swapped footage with each other - talent yes, but never TV footage)

59 minutes ago, Dav'oh said:

often very discerning, rather than Malawi and the Cocos Islands?

I wouldn't say places like Zimbabwe or Nigeria weren't discerning.  They would have had wrestling as a legit folk sport and the kinescopes appearing on TV apparently inspired people to set up their own scenes with their own stars drawn from the cream of local sport-wrestlers.  I've already mentioned Stax getting his honorary citizenship from Mugabe.  I could also mention Jayne "Klondyke Kate" Porter wrestling in Nigeria in front of 10K.

Having said that, Japan bothered to send its own TV crews all the way over to South London to film their boys - and local talent like Johnny Saint vs Jason Cross - at the Fairfield Hall Croydon in early 1996.

in fact, they were so impressed by what they saw, they invited Johnny Saint to come back home with them for a big indoor stadium match against Naohiro Hoshikara

 

[David Mantell]

17 minutes ago, sek69 said:

My guess is that they were probably sent to TV stations in various Pacific Islands since a lot of them in the Commonwealth back then and British programming would have been relatively easier to obtain than most international shows. 

Nope, BBC and ITV programming was being sent to all over the place on mainland Africa and Asia.  Ten years ago, they got a haul of nine Patrick Troughton era Doctor Who episodes back from Nigeria.  About the same time they found a couple of missing Morecambe and Wise episodes over there from BBC2 1968 and managed to restore them to colour from chroma dots in the film print (like I reckon the INA should do with a lot of its 1967-1974 stock of French wrestling and probably a load of other Channel 2 output from that period.)  A previous batch of six William Hartnell era episodes were also found in Nigeria in the mid 80s.

Sierra Leone was still airing the last few Troughton episodes as late as 1976.  Other places that bought 60s Doctor Who included Uganda, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Jordan, Iran (under the Shah) and Zambia as well as Barbados and Jamaica. https://broadwcast.org/index.php/William_Hartnell_stories#So_who_bailed_on_Who_first.3F

Some Doctor Who episodes eventually screened in Australia were from prints previously used in Singapore.  Possibly this was the history of the complete The Tomb of the Cybermen which was found in early 1992.

[David Mantell]

And remember, that's just Doctor Who.

Wrestling was apparently one of the easier products for ITV's overseas sales agents to flog to these stations.

[David Mantell]

An interesting side issue is what Japan or America or Australia would have made of European wrestling (other than perhaps 1980s CWA).  Japan pretty much remodelled its scene entirely after getting Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson at the turn of the 60s/70s.

America however simply didn't get the point of clean sportsmanly babyface matches and lighter weight wrestling - it ran counterintuitive to everything the American fans had been taught to expect (big guys with Personal Issues with each other fighting it out to settle the score).  Australia, well, I guess younger fans who only knew Jim Barnett's company which was basically American wrestling imported would have gone the same way as Americans although in the 60s/70s there would have been an older generation whom WoS and Le Catch would have reminded of the earlier, purely Australian wrestling up to the 50s.

To view the other side of the coin, ITV and Britain were certainly not ready for Wild Crazy No Holds Barred American Wrestling in the 60s/70s.  France was easing up and allowing more out of the ring brawls on TV, but in Britain the IBA kept it all fairly clean and classy.  (A few mins of the 1976 Shea Stadium match between The Executioners vs Strongbow and White Wolf, the latter being a familiar face on ITV from about 1969 IIRC and would be back as The Sheik a couple of years later, did find its way onto World of Sport in summer '76 as a warm up for Andre vs Chuck Wepner and Ali vs Inoki.)

But if you want to see the cultural divide at work, reread the early posts on the British and French wrestling threads on this forum from before I came along.

[El McKell]

1 hour ago, Dav'oh said:

Why weren't they sent to Japan, Australia and the United States, wrestling hotbeds, often very discerning, rather than Malawi and the Cocos Islands?

Because TV stations in places that have their own local wrestling probably aren't going to be very interested in airing wrestling from overseas, local wrestling in the US or Japan is going to have a much stronger audience than British wrestling so a TV station won't want to pay for it. 

If you're going to charge for it, I think only TV stations in places without wrestling scenes of their own will buy it

[David Mantell]

2 minutes ago, El McKell said:

Because TV stations in places that have their own local wrestling probably aren't going to be very interested in airing wrestling from overseas, local wrestling in the US or Japan is going to have a much stronger audience than British wrestling so a TV station won't want to pay for it. 

Yes and it cut both ways and it cut internally within North America and Europe too as I discussed.  Getting your footage shown in another territory could cause MURDERS at the next NWA convention.

4 minutes ago, El McKell said:

If you're going to charge for it, I think only TV stations in places without wrestling scenes of their own will buy it

Yes although this may then inspire viewers to set up their own wrestling scenes, build jerry built rings and get local sport-wrestlers to legitimately spar in it for 20min until going to a preplanned finish.  This does however create jobs and possible red carpet treatment for the stars of the imported TV when they go out and visit these places.

[David Mantell]

Thought.  Perhaps Iraq was buying British or French (probably British as Iraq was British Mandate between the wars) kinescopes and that was how Saddam Hussein became a pro wrestling fan and ended up setting up his own wrestling territory in Iraq.

You'll notice the very British looking ring.

[ohtani's jacket]

I wish the sales of ITV wrestling to foreign markets was as well documented as the research into BBC sales of Dr. Who to overseas stations. 

We know that kinescope copies of ITV wrestling exist and have fallen into the hands of private collectors over the years. We also know some of these prints exist in the ITV archives. The missing link is some kind of tangible evidence of it screening on TV in other countries. That shouldn’t be so hard to come up with. 

In what manner, if at all, did it air in Zimbabwe, for example? Television was only available amongst a small percent of the white population in the cities during the period of ITV wrestling that in most interested in. 

[Dav'oh]

What sort of return were they getting? It had to be peanuts selling to banana republics, did it lead to the promotions running tours?

We had our own news, but we leant heavily on the BBC; we had our own foopball (sic) but we still got Jimmy Hill; we even had our own Burger King, but we still got...Burger King.

(As an aside, British cultural hegemony still ruled in the 70s but the septics were getting their foot in the door. By the 80s we were the 51st state.)

[David Mantell]

1 minute ago, Dav'oh said:

What sort of return were they getting? It had to be peanuts selling to banana republics, did it lead to the promotions running tours?

Enough for it to be profitable, not enough for them to feel generous enough to properly share the proceeds with The Boys.

[David Mantell]

30 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

In what manner, if at all, did it air in Zimbabwe, for example? Television was only available amongst a small percent of the white population in the cities during the period of ITV wrestling that in most interested in. 

Well here's what we know about television in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBC_TV

Doesn't mention British wrestling but does mention WWF Superstars (and Doctor Who!)  The Honorary Citizen Haystacks thing happened during Mugabe's rule, presumably some time in the 80s.

Possibly the white population had their own segregated wrestling scene.  Wrestling was big in apartheid era South Africa (although if anything their wrestling felt a lot like the CWA) and Stax visited the territory:
 

p.s. okay, that makes two places in the world along with France that still had that string thing down the middle of the ropes any time after the 1930s.