Early Installment Weirdness / Pro Wrestling

aka: Professional Wrestling

• Professional Wrestling being most infamous as "that fake sport" makes strange the fact that when it first began in the late 1800s, pro wrestling was a fully competitive sport. Some of these early matches could last for well over an hour, as the matches only ended when one wrestler was pinned, submitted, or thrown. The first element of 'work' was promoters banning long static exchanges on the mat to keep things more exciting. Ever since that, with each generation pro wrestling has drifted towards entertainment, going from a sport where matches were occasionally fixed and predetermined to make marketable wrestlers the champions, to a predetermined sport intended to look as much like a real one as possible, to the 'musclefest' style of the 80s where the theatrical elements began to take precedence over the athletic ones, and eventually to the dynamic but unrealistic style we see today.
• The earliest installments of Piper's Pit (with Roddy Piper) from the winter of 1984 were rather staid and unremarkable, with Piper simply insulting his guests (if they were faces) or dominating conversations to the point they couldn't get a word in edgewise. The first really lively Pit was taped March 6, 1984, with guest André the Giant, where Piper and Andre milked the segment for all it was worth: Piper insulted Andre's intelligence and suggested he was scared to face him in the ring, even going so far as to say he could slam him if given the chance. Andre finally had enough and picked Piper up by his T-shirt, leading to one of Piper's earliest trademark quotes: "You do NOT throw rocks at someone with a machine gun!"
• Prior to the rise of the National Wrestling Alliance 1948, the rival sports of pro boxing and pro wrestling were largely governed by the same athletic commission in the USA^note This is still the case in some U.S. states, though with wrestling "regulation" usually just means "Pay the tax and keep the blood to a minimum". Despite the rise of the NWA and UWA, however, a good deal of Mexican Lucha Libre is still governed by the same commission that handles boxing, though it is still a minor example since it used to be known as the wrestle y box, rather than the box y lucha libre.
• Prior to 1956, not one of EMLL's anniversary shows took place in Arena México. After 1956, every last one of their anniversary shows took place there. Also, prior to 1977, there were multiple anniversary shows, rather than just one annually.
• While the WWWA championship belts are mostly remembered for being the top titles in All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, they were originally the top titles of a rival foreign promotion that happened to have a prolonged foothold in AJW.
• When Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling started out, it actually lived up to its name, pitting pro wrestlers against martial artists of other styles. However, as time went on "everything should be allowed in puroresu" started to reach it's logical extreme and FMW became best known for being that promotion that indirectly coined the term "Garbage Wrestler" and was most celebrated by it's fan base for showcasing several different styles of pro wrestling.
• Most wrestling fans will instantly recognize Shawn Michaels' entrance music. Most fans also know that it's Shawn himself singing the lyrics. Most younger fans (as in started watching wrestling in 1994 or later) probably don't know that for the first couple years he used it he wasn't singing, his then-manager Sherri Martel was.
• ECW was initially an old school regional based promotion ^note The E originally stood for "Eastern." before it adopted garbage wrestling and a heavier, more "extreme" atmosphere.^note Though it should be said that ECW was mainly based on Memphis wrestling, which was pretty bloody and violent, and even ECW's earliest TV shows were a lot more gritty and "hardcore" than anything you'd find on TBS or USA. That being said, it would get a LOT more violent as time went on.
• A few ECW guys started off with gimmicks they are probably glad everyone has forgotten about:
  • The Sandman's name was originally taken quite literally as he was doing a surfer gimmick, complete with wetsuit, surfboard, and "Surfin' USA" as his entrance music.
  • Tommy Dreamer started off as a pretty boy babyface who wouldn't have looked out of place tag teaming with Marcus Alexander Bagwell on WCW Saturday Night.^note At the time Bagwell was teaming with future ECW alumni 2 Cold Scorpio on WCW Saturday Night Naturally the ECW mutants absolutely hated his guts, though he would later earn their respect and basically become ECW's Sting.
  • Tazz was originally the Tazmaniac, a mute dreadlocked caveman. Then he met Sabu...
• WWF Shotgun Saturday Night was originally envisioned as a B Show aimed at replicating the feel of ECW, which it did in two major ways: First, it was both Hotter and Sexier and Darker and Edgier than the main WWF product, which was still experimenting with such content at the time but had yet to fully embrace the Attitude Era. Second, the show was taped at unique venues that would never have otherwise seen a major wrestling show; these were mostly bars, but it also included New York Penn Station for an episode. After just six episodes in this format, the logistical issues of securing and setting up unconventional venues for tapings resulted in the show being Retooled into a far more standard B Show taped adjacent to Monday Night Raw, a format it remained in for the rest of its run.
• CZW may have the reputation of a No Budget Garbage Wrestler indie fed imitating ECW, but it's come a long way from its days as a backyard fed imitating ECW. It's gained locker rooms, which it fills with trained, licensed wrestlers and personnel. It actually gets the attention of and takes into mind the rules of athletic commissions. It runs in sporting venues, some of the same ones ECW did.
• Ring of Honor started out as a "super indie" with very open ended contracts to which only a few wrestlers were signed with the goal of simply showcasing the best in the world. This came to a fairly quick end when Ric Flair no showed an event without notice. Also, the company began as a money making vehicle for RF Video, who it broke away from after only two years. And it only did 20 something shows a year as a opposed to the 52+/one a week that would become standard when it got HD net.
• Figure Four Online Weekly started out as a parody newsletter before becoming a legitimate extension of The Wrestling Observer.
• Wrestle-1 was originally the name of crossover show hosted by All Japan Pro Wrestling but became better known as its own separate promotion when The Great Muta left All Japan out of shame for Taru's attack on Super Hate and most of the roster followed him when Nobuo Shiraishi decided declaring bankruptcy was better than letting Muta come back.
• New Japan Pro-Wrestling's NEVER (New Blood Evolution Valiantly Eternal Radical) shows were supposed to be about young up and coming talent and independent circuit wrestlers who had not yet or had no desire to sign onto a major promotion long term. However, the NEVER Openweight Title belt has become best known for Katsuyori Shibata's battles to prove his superiority to New Japan's "Third Generation" and while many of the NEVER Six Man Tag Team Title holders are young and or independent wrestlers just as many have been in the major promotions for quite awhile such as Toru Yano Satoshi Kojima.
• Watch any wrestler work a gimmick they had before becoming famous (e.g. The Undertaker during his "Mean" Mark Callous days, The egotistical and trash-talking The Rock as the "Blue Chipper" rookie Rocky Maivia and the bald hell-raising "Stone Cold" Steve Austin during his days in WCW where he had long blond hair), or during their days as a jobber or jobber-to-the-stars before they received gimmicks in the first place, and it will feel weird watching it.
  • On the other hand some guys avert this and it ends up being more Older Than They Think. Watch a Diamond Studd match, then watch a Razor Ramon match. The only difference is that Studd doesn't have gold chains and an accent, he even does the toothpick bit. Same goes for Kevin Nash. Master Blaster Steel, Oz^note "Here's a seven foot tall guy that gets pussy and you put him in a fucking green cone?", Vinnie Vegas, Diesel, Big Sexy the Giant Killer... The haircut and entrance changed, the matches stayed the same.
• The first Royal Rumble in 1988 featured only 20 wrestlers instead of 30, and was shown free on the USA network rather than on pay-per-view^note Solely to screw with the buyrate of the N.W.A Bunkhouse Stampede PPV, which aired at the same time. It didn't really work, the Stampede show did a pretty respectable 200,000 buys, well above what the average buyrate would be for the next 6 years until Hulk Hogan arrived. The Rumble was still such a ratings success that it was made a PPV the next year. The NWA would respond to this by having their first Clash of the Champions show run opposite that year's WrestleMania (at which point the cable companies told both promotions to knock it off because it was costing them money), this also did fantastic ratings and the COTC shows ran quarterly until 1998, when 3 hour episodes of WCW Monday Nitro made them redundant.
  • The stipulation that the winner would main event WrestleMania wasn't added until the 1993 edition.
  • The tradition of every entrant getting entrance music didn't start until the 1996 match, prior to that only the first two entrants got music and everyone else just ran down to the ring when their number was called.
• The first WrestleMania is the only one that has closing credits. The second WrestleMania was held in three different arenas (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) and was held on a Monday night.
• The tradition that pay-per-view events are held on Sunday night wasn't firmly established until 1995. Prior to that Survivor Series was held on Thanksgiving^note The fourth Thursday of November for the non-Americans. Speaking of which, Survivor Series was only created to run directly against the NWA Starrcade PPV, unlike with the Royal Rumble mentioned above (which was two months after this) this time it absolutely destroyed the NWA's buyrate thanks to Vince telling the PPV companies that if they carried Starrcade they wouldn't get WrestleMania. As a result the NWA's first PPV only picked up a measly 20,000 PPV buys, or a tenth of what the Bunkhouse Stampede show brought in despite having a much stronger card. This was basically the opening shot in the long-running WWF/WCW war and while Starrcade being a money loser wasn't the only reason Jim Crockett Promotions became insolvent it was definitely a big step in the wrong direction (or the night before Thanksgiving) and SummerSlam was usually on Monday. Starting in 2021 WWE has mostly moved these events to Saturday (or in the case of WrestleMania, Saturday and Sunday), leaving AEW (who have a weekly show on Saturday nights) to start broadcasting their PPVs on Sunday.
• Impact Wrestling started out as "NWA-TNA" running $10 weekly pay-per-view events (rather than more expensive monthly or quarterly events)^note When the promotion first started up they couldn't find a TV deal (two-thirds of the national TV promotions going under two years prior understandably made the TV networks a bit skittish about wrestling) and widespread internet video streaming was still a decade or so away, so the $10 PPVs were their only way to get their content to the masses. Once they got a TV deal they switched to the traditional monthly PPV schedule, heavily emphasized the T-and-A that it was originally named to suggest (including having scantily-clad dancers in cages, taking the WCW Nitro Girls concept up to eleven), and it was affiliated with the National Wrestling Alliance to give its titles some degree of credibility. Most of these components disappeared after the first couple of years, some much sooner.
• The first Diva Search took place in 2003. It wasn't much more than a fan vote on the internet, and only had four contestants. The winner was a fitness model named Jaime Koeppe, who did one photoshoot for WWE magazine and was never heard from in the wrestling world again. It wasn't until the next one that the Diva Search became something that occurred on the live shows.
• Solo Darling, so, so much. She won the WXW Women's Title (Wild Samoan Afa's promotion) before she developed her squirrel girl persona. There was her time as Tracy Smothers' "daughter" Christie Belle-Smothers. Quite unlike the Kid-Appeal Character she plays in her squirrel girl and killer bee modes, her character in NWA Ring Warriors was focused on Lust.
• When FTR first appeared in All Elite Wrestling, their early image was a continuation of their WWE 'hard-working fighters from the Deep South' gimmick. Over time they transitioned into having a more colorful Retraux '80's tag team' style, which was cemented when they got their new theme music.

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