- In the era before VCRs and cable television, many promotions (from tiny local promotions to those covering entire regions of the country) had their own syndicated programs. Until the late 1970s/early 1980s, videotape (for those promotions that could afford it) was an expensive commodity, meaning that once a show aired it was reused for taping a future week's show. That, plus the perceived lack of future interest in classic wrestling programs (some stations destroyed the films once aired) probably means that, except for those who are lucky enough to have preserved videotapes/films of the programsnote , the weekly syndicated programs of many promotions — especially the smaller ones — are forever lost to history.
- That said, World Wrestling Entertainment has hundreds of thousands of hours of videotapes and films of classic matches, including its classic syndicated and cable programs (at least from the early-1980s forward), plus programs and matches from now-defunct rivals including the NWA (specifically JCP, the NWA still exists and has its own library on demand), WCW, ECW and the AWA.
- Some larger independent promotions have syndicated shows that are only shown regionally, and may only be clip shows. Usually this isn't a big deal, but occasionally a really good match takes place, and with the exception of the live audience is never seen in full by anyone. (Usually, the matches are edited for time, placement of commercials and to remove "dull" moments.) The best example of one of these is an ECW match between Yoshihiro Tajiri and Psicosis. For some background info - Psicosis was running out his WCW contract and planning to go to ECW, and the mutants were very high on the possible matches. Psicosis and Tajiri outperformed even the mutants' expectations and put on a near-5star match. But... it aired on ECW's syndicated show instead of ECW on TNN, and the whole thing to date hasn't been seen, though the match can be found on the Extreme Championship Wrestling: Deep Impact DVD.
- Rey Mysterio Jr.'s WCW career from the point he was unmasked to the demise of the promotion will never be mentioned or marketed by WWE because of the fact that they want to keep his face a mystery. He does however mention the subject in his book, advising fans to check out his unmasked footage online if it interests them.
- Dragon Gate has a weekly television show, but they're only allotted one hour. So they record the show and then "clip" the matches (and occasionally omit some less important ones) to fit the TV show. The full matches are never seen by anyone aside from the live fans.
- Several title changes of the WWF's major titles have never been recorded — or if they were, were never shown on television. Two prime examples came early in the history of the Intercontinental Championship
:- Pedro Morales winning the title from arrogant weightlifting hero Ken Patera. The match took place December 8, 1980 — the night of the murder of John Lennon — at New York's Madison Square Garden. It is unclear whether that night's card was televised (as the venue's cards routinely were through 1992) on New York's MSG channel, but if it was the broadcast would have been pre-empted due to breaking news coverage of Lennon's death.
- Tito Santana defeating the evil Magnificent Muraco on February 11, 1984, for the title. The most common explanation for the lost footage was that, in taping matches for later broadcast, there was no more videotape available to tape the Santana-Muraco match. Only brief clips from the match exist today and were later included as part of several video releases showcasing the title's history.
- Razor Ramon beat Jeff Jarrett in a ladder match for the IC title in May of 1995, then lost it back to Jarrett two nights later. Both of these matches happened on house shows in Quebec, if they were filmed WWE has never shown them. This was done to juice house show ticket sales. Strangely this happened to Jarrett again 4 years later, Edge beat him for the title at a house show in Toronto (which again has never been shown and may not have been filmed), Jarrett would get the title back the next night at the Fully Loaded PPV in Buffalo.
- Over The Edge 1999 is one of the few PPVs to not have appeared on video or repeat. This is because Owen Hart died whilst he was making his entrance from the ceiling. The footage of Owen falling exists in the vaults with instructions to not view, destroy or duplicate but on the PPV itself it was replaced by a different camera facing the crowd. Owen's wife filed a lawsuit against WWE to ensure they would never release the footage, so it is unlikely we'll see it. Many fans nevertheless want to see it out of morbid curiosity. Photos from Owen being attended to in the ring do exist though. The WWE Network, the company's streaming on-demand service, features an edited version of Over The Edge. All references to Owen, his accident, and his death have been removed, with the exception of a newly-added photo dedication to him at the beginning.
- There are plenty of dark matches that are never recorded, but there are also some of these that have only happened once, between famous workers. Possibly the most infamous among the IWC is a match between Bryan Danielson and Minoru Suzuki on June 20, 2004, which was the only one-on-one match the two ever had until October 2021, and no footage of it is known to exist. Another such example that was intended to be filmed was an IWA-MS match between Eddie Guerrero and CM Punk that was prevented by WWE refusing to allow it to be filmed.
- A number of WCW Nitro episodes were not aired by WWE's On Demand & 24/7 services, because of technical issues with the master tapes, or (in some cases) because of multiple appearances by Chris Benoit.
- On the subject of Chris Benoit, the June 25, 2007 episode of WWE Raw is available on WWE Network...but not as originally broadcast. The original edition was a three-hour empty arena tribute to Benoit that was aired live in the U.S. and Canada. Unfortunately, the nature of the events which lead to Benoit's death were only confirmed during the live broadcast, and WWE subsequently scrapped that episode from international distribution, replacing it with an in-studio recap of championship matches from earlier in the year. Said original episode did not appear on the WWE Network at its launch in 2014, and likely never will.
- While some sources say that CHIKARA's Juke Joint Lucas Calhoun debuted in 2000, the earliest available results for him only go back to 2009.
- Some of his earlier matches would have been a real horrorshow.
- While it's technically not "missing" because WWE has the footage, there's lots of wrestling that's not legally obtainable because they haven't uploaded it yet. The most glaring case would be that there's no WCW TV shows available at all from the start of 1990 to the premiere of WCW Saturday Night in 1992, and another gap from late 1994 to when Nitro debuted in September 1995. None of WCW's syndicated shows have ever been uploaded. Of the 200 episodes of Smoky Mountain Wrestling produced only 13 have been uploaded (though this may be because of most of their wrestlers using real songs as entrance music like ECW did). WWE purchased EVOLVE and their video library in 2020 and haven't uploaded any of it, and there's plenty of other examples.
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