RAW
Sucked. It was dull and they didn’t do anything with the Flair angle. I’ve got no interest in the product after having watched this show. Last week was so good; this week was so bad. Next week is the 3 hour RAW with all sorts of guest stars, including Trish Stratus and supposedly Hulk Hogan. Go figure!

Talking About DVD
You see, the WWE owns most of the major tape libraries out there. Stampede, World Class Championship Wrestling, Mid-South/UWF, WCW, Georgia, Mid-Atlantic, even most of the stuff that was shown on the DuMont is owned by the WWE right now. They’ve been using it for WWE 24/7 and for the Internet as well as for their DVD releases. This is a great time to be a Wrestling History Fan, right?

Well, kinda…

You see, the WWE controls the content. They’ve proven that they can be fair with stuff that’s not exactly positive for them, like The Ultimate Warrior DVD. They made him out to be a more human version of himself than he could have been. They did a good job of making the AWA look like something special, even including interviews and highly negative comments from Verne Gagne towards Vince. They’ve done DVDs on Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair and Shawn Michaels that used footage from all sorts of different territories.

But they also control what gets seen. There’s a lot of stuff from Mid-South that would be great. They could do a full DVD on that talking about Bill Watts and the way the company ran. A lot of the WWE talent of the last twenty years came through Mid-South. Hacksaw, Ted DiBiase, Junkyard Dog, Michael Hayes, most of the tag teams of the late 1980s came through and made their first impact on the Louisana/Oklahoma/Mississippi realm. Vince has had a thing about Watts for years, even pushing his son with a gimmick that must have been designed to fail (Techno Team 2000) and there was some bad blood. The thing is, there’s so much great stuff that we could have a total DVD set and get some of the best stuff done in the 1980s on there.

The Stampede DVD is on-hold, but I believe that they’re working on it. The big problem there is they don’t want to give the Hart family too much unless they can get Bret involved and he’s not interested. The best Stampede stuff comes from guys like Owen Hart, Hirose Hase, the Cuban Assassin and Phil LaFleur. There is another problem named Chris Benoit.

They’ve got some of the best matches of the last twenty years and they won’t use them because of the Benoit thing. There’s a lot of great Benoit stuff, like Angle matches and the stuff with Guerrero and Malenko from 1996/7. They won’t use it and it’s good stuff. I’ve watched a lot of his stuff recently and it’s still as good and important as it was when it first took place. Watch the Kevin Sullivan vs. Chris Benoit feud from 1996 and you’ll see some of the best brawling that WCW ever did.

The WWE won’t let any of it out. I understand the thinking, but it’s gold and we’ll never get any of it re-released. That’s a huge problem when you consider how much Benoit is over the big WCW shows (which rumor has had it they wanted to release as Internet PPVs) and even the last 7 WrestleManias.

They have said that they’re eventually going to release those DVDs and they’ve said that they’ll be including Benoit material, but not on the next release, just in the future.

There’s more. The problem is there’s so much material, estimated at 20 to 30 thousand hours not including the WWE’s own library, that there’s no way we can ever get it all out on DVD. That means that On-Demand and the net are the only two real options, and they’re holding back on both of these.

They’ll never really have a reason to make a Championship Wrestling from Florida DVD, there’s just not enough there, but they’ll use the bits with Dusty Rhodes, Superstar Graham and maybe Kevin Sullivan on wrestler/title DVDs. Though they may never do the Sullivan stuff because Nancy Sullivan, later Nancy Benoit, is all over that footage.

The WWE only sees the stuff as vehicles to tell the back story of its own or its owned Superstars. The possibility of putting up stuff like the Pak Song angles that were so hot is almost nil, which means it’ll just sit in the archive.

In the old days, you’d have folks make individual deals and release old footage without much tie to current stars (and they’d always do Before They Were Stars tapes). They still do these with footage from places like Global and Memphis, which are the only libraries not owned. The WWE can decide what gets out, and while they are making some good footage available, they’re also making some of it almost permanently inaccessible because they don’t see it as potentially interesting to the average viewer. That is true, but we’re still looking at an age when this footage could be put out.

And thus the concept that was floated to the WWE and that I only heard about through my work as the same company came to pitch to us. The Custom DVD creator. It’s a lot like Personics from the late 1980s where you make a list of the stuff you want and they do a process to create the thing for you.

The idea was they’d put together a huge library and then you could select what you wanted, charging more for popular stuff and less for less popular items. It would be great, but the WWE didn’t buy it (nor did our museum) and I’m interested in seeing the direction things go with the library.