“It began over 5000 years ago when civilization was young…every major culture, Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, Japan; studied it, practiced it, perfected it to a fine art.
They admired its Olympian demands: strength, speed, agility, skill, grace, and courage…
They did it to honor their gods…they did it to honor their kings…they did it to train their soldiers…they did it to compete…and they did it for fun.
It has come down through the ages to us today…”
I grew up watching and loving pro wrestling. It was my constant passion from the time I discovered it in 1985 up until I pretty much closed the book on watching new wrestling when Ric Flair had his retirement ceremony on WWE Raw in 2008. I consumed every minute of it on television that I could find. I scoured every video store around for VHS tapes of wrestling to watch. I bought every wrestling magazine I could afford and begged my parents to buy me the ones I couldn’t. And I had as many wrestling figures as I could get my hands on.
I sought out wrestling in every form imaginable. When I first got on the internet, I discovered there were people out there in the world who made copies of wrestling tapes and sold them on a sort of black market. They were called wrestling tape traders. Once I made this discovery, a fair portion of my paycheck went to buying those tapes. I was buying and watching tapes of matches and promotions that I had only read about in magazines, feeding my need to consume every bit of wrestling history that I could.
But then in November of 2004, something happened that changed my world. WWE launched their Classics on Demand service on its website. For the first time, tons of classic wrestling content was available at the click of a button to watch. I could go back in time and watch episodes of Monday Night Raw from the beginning in 1993. Or I could watch old episodes of my favorite wrestling program, World Championship Wrestling that aired every Saturday night on TBS in the mid-80s. I didn’t think things could get any better than this.
Then in 2014, WWE launched the WWE Network! It was a streaming service, so I was no longer stuck watching the classic content on my computer…I could stream it on my big screen. Since that time, I’ve lived in a world where a lot of old wrestling that I want to watch again has been at my fingertips to pull up and watch at my leisure.
But now, things are changing. An email was recently sent out to subscribers of the WWE Network that the service is coming to a close when WWE moves to Netflix in January. While this notice officially only pertains to folks outside of the US who still have access to the actual WWE Network, it makes the rest of us wonder what is going to happen to the WWE library housed on Peacock when this move takes place.
Netflix has said that it will be the sole home of WWE Raw, premium live events, some legacy premium live events, and other select programming. That’s a pretty vague statement when it comes to the entirety of the WWE library. I for one take that to mean they will carry some of the modern programming that WWE produces for Peacock such as The Bump and other recap shows that keep modern WWE fans up to date on all the current happenings around the WWE Universe.
I have serious doubts that Netflix will use their servers to house all the hours of Mid-Atlantic Wrestling, Mid-South Wrestling, World Championship Wrestling, WWF Wrestling Challenge, WWF Superstars, and the thousands of hours of Monday Night Raw from through the years. For old-school wrestling fans like myself, dark times may lie ahead.
It has been such a wonderful treat to be able to watch all of these old television programs on demand. While I guess I should just be happy that I’ve had this access for so long now, I can’t help but feel disheartened at the thought that I likely won’t be able to relive more of these grand old memories after the jump to Netflix takes place.
This is another example of what I was referring to recently when I penned My Thoughts on Physical Media. While streaming is a fantastic thing, it’s never guaranteed to continually provide what you’re looking for. Things can, and do, come and go. Luckily, I amassed a large library of classic wrestling content on physical media before streaming became a thing, and I can ease this pain a little by being able to pull that collection out of mothballs to enjoy it once again.
So while one service I love may be coming to an end, there is another that is still going strong, and that is that whole black market wrestling tape trading circuit I mentioned earlier. Only now, they sell DVDs instead of VHS tapes. I’m not going to give out any names or web addresses of where to find these fine folks, but you’d be able to find them yourself fairly easily with a little online searching.
While we wait to see just how much classic wrestling content is left behind in the move to Netflix, I’ll be browsing the tape trading circuit figuring out what my next purchases are going to be. It’s been a very long time since I’ve traveled down this road, but it’s one I’m familiar with and I know at the end of the journey I’ll be left with something that no streaming service changes can take away from me.
And that’s the way it was,
Mick