Discussion
Alright, so I said in the spooky movie thread that I'm watching WCW Saturday Night, but I don't want to disrupt the Spooky Movie Thread to talk about WCW Saturday night, so I'm doing it here.
This is a thread about #prowrestling and specifically #WCWSaturdayNight
Alright, so lets start with background.
WCW was a television program broadcasting out of Atlanta. It was not a wrestling league, it was a program broadcast on Saturday nights for the National Wrestling Alliance. Ted Turner bought WCW, he broke with the NWA, turned it into a league of it's own, and launched a bunch of additional television programs.
This is a gross oversimplification.
At the same time, the WWF (now WWE) was gobbling up most of the remaining independent wrestling promotions, until really only WCW and WWF remained.
WCW was southern style wrestling, broadcast out of Atlanta, and steeped in southern wrestling tradition and history.
WWF was ... something else. Shiny, featureless, Regression to the mean.
Both franchises launched a shiny flagship show on Monday Nights kicking off the Monday Night Wars that ran for several years. This was an incredibly competitive and lucrative period in the history of professional wrestling, producing some of the most interesting storylines and matches ever.
Every wrestling fan remembers Nitro and Raw. Everyone remembers the Monday Night Wars.
And everyone who looks into it agrees that the Monday Night Wars ended on Jan 4th 1999 with the finger poke of doom.
I was in the stands. I watched it live.
I stopped watching wrestling after that.
The basic events are summarized here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerpoke_of_Doom
But the gist is this:
The creative team at WCW added a second multiple hour long broadcast to their schedule in 1998, at that point they were doing somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours of live, unscripted television every week. They were out of ideas.
In the meantime, they had given complete creative control, or at least veto power, to Terry Gene Bollea, better known as “Hulk” Hogan. (I've written about my thoughts on the hulkster: https://ajroach42.com/heroes-dead-and-otherwise/ I won't revisit them here.)
Those two things taken together led to the situation described in the above article. A match that had been hyped for months didn't happen, and instead another perhaps equally exciting match was going to happen, and then ... nope, ha ha, you all suck and you're dumb for liking this.
While that was happening, one of the announcers said to the TV audience that something more exciting was happening on the rival program, and ... well, the ratings speak for themselves. "over half a million viewers switched channels from Nitro on TNT to Raw is War on the USA Network"
My biggest takeaway from my Nitro re-watch, though, is that most of my favorite wrestlers were nowhere to be seen!
The stuff I cared about, the stuff I remembered, seemed like it was playing second fiddle to the NWO storyline, which, especially by 1998 had pretty much outworn it's welcome.
And then I stumbled across an episode of WCW Saturday Night from 1997 and I remembered nearly every match beat for beat and I realized that I must have been watching a lot more Saturday Night than Nitro as a kid.
So now I'm going to talk about the thing that I was planning to talk about at the top.
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Two or three years ago I watched every episode of Nitro from from the first Nitro broadcast through to the finger poke of death.
I have no interest in seeing the dying days of Nitro after the finger poke of death, it was obvious to me, even as a kid, that it was all over at that point.
(I'll talk about the finger poke of death for a second. Hold on.)