Good luck legally finding the following matches and moments.
- Prior to the early 1970s, few episodes of the larger promotions' syndicated television broadcasts have survived to this day. The WWE, for instance, has rarely offered episodes prior to the mid-1970s on its network and streaming services, while the American Wrestling Association (AWA) has a 1970 episode that has surfaced (including an appearance of Bobby Heenan from very early in his career) but few others from that era apparently survive. The reason? Videotape was an expensive commodity back in the day and many times the tapes were reused to tape new programs, while many other stations simply destroyed the films (or returned the videotapes) of their programs after their original airings. That means that unless someone has had the foresight to keep old episodes of their wrestling programs (much less in airable condition), whatever happened on these shows may be lost to history.
- Most ECW fans were supremely disappointed to find that one of the most powerful moments of the ECW One Night Stand reunion show, Sandman's entrance, was completely ruined for the DVD release due to the removal of not only Sandman's entrance music (Metallica's "Enter Sandman"), but also the crowd singing along to it. The original ECW may have replaced entrance themes for their home video releases themselves, but Paul Heyman was at least smart enough to get Motorhead to cover "Enter Sandman" so he could use their version for cheap without having to ruin the entire entrance.
- Speaking of which, pretty much anything ECW that's not published by WWE certainly qualifies; now that the ECW Revival experiment has degraded into a B Show, it's doubtful we'll see any other new ECW DVDs, as well as WWE's TV-PG policy.
- And even before then, in the early-to-mid 1990s, there was the era of the "tape trades" (e.g., fans in Philadelphia would trade VHS tapes of ECW shows in their area to other fans in New York City for NYC-based shows). Obviously, this was long before the advent of the internet and streaming videos.
- A popular dirtsheet story says that when Vince didn't allow Metallica to perform the song "St. Anger" live at a pay-per-view to promote the album of the same name, they later asked for an absurd sum for royalties every time Vince used "Enter Sandman", and that's why the One Night Stand DVD had the censored entrance. However, it's most likely just because it's licensed music and that now has absurd costs in generalnote . Any of that is game for being edited out. Always has been to some extent (it was even seen in the 1980s in WWF Coliseum Video releases)
- As mentioned above, any time licensed music is used for a particular wrestler, it's likely to be edited out in videos and rebroadcasts, especially if the WWE stops using the music. The most glaring example for a lot of fans is how "Real American" (which WWE still holds the rights to) is edited over "Eye of the Tiger" in replays of Hulk Hogan's earlier matches, which include his world title win over The Iron Sheik and the first WrestleMania.
- For that matter, anything WWE-owned in their original forms (with original music, no blurring or censoring "WWF" utterances). Probably, then, all Chris Benoit matches for the foreseeable future.
- For compilation sets, yes. However, WWE's released several pay-per-views on DVD following Benoit's death that have Benoit matches in them, simply because editing them out is unavoidable (most notably, the SummerSlam Anthology featured every iteration of that event, including several shows Benoit performed on).note
- They managed to get around this for the Elimination Chamber anthology set by not advertising Benoit anywhere on the outer packaging (his name only appears on the chapter booklet and DVD menus) and removing any commentary during the Elimination Chamber match he was involved in that painted him in a positive light.
- Thankfully in late 2012 WWE reached an agreement with the World Wildlife Fund (Now The "World Wide Fund For Nature") enabling them to stop the practice of blurring the WWF scratch logo and all utterances of the acronym. Meanwhile we're left with ten years worth of DVD collections marred by blurs, and it's unclear how much will be re-released unedited.
- Ring Warriors
- During the 1990s, the highest rated shows on ESPN Asia, South African Broadcasting Corporation and EuroSport were the televised matches put on by Ring Warriors, a promotion founded by Hiro Matsuda. It was also the first promotion to dabble in internet streaming, making it the single most watched promotion in Africa and Europe. Unfortunately things went wrong and it did not last into the 2000s, relevant to this page being the destruction of Ring Warriors' video library. The promoters found but were not allowed to retrieve a clip of Bruno Sammartino and Gordon Solie by asking the broadcasters and scouring production houses. Even if that is ever released, you're gonna have to get stuff like Finland national Tony Halme becoming the first Grand Champion or defenses against Shinya Hashimoto(who eventually became second champion) yourself...
- In 2011 Ring Warriors was rebooted in the USA with new wrestlers such as Bruce Santee and Big Van Vader, new title belts, improved streaming, a you tube channel, DVDs, video downloads, NWA membership and a soon to come new television deal. In December of 2012 Ring Warriors left the NWA after all members lost their voting powers, in 2013 there was much restructuring in order to get the promotion on television, including the moving of most online content to a soon to come "internet television service", in 2015 the sale of most physical merchandise, including DVDs, was halted to focus on ticket sales for television tapings, and in 2016 the television deal fell through and the promotion, which had slowly been restricting access to it's content in preparation for it, closed.
- One of the Facebook accounts became associated with Billy Blade and dedicated exclusively to Pro Wrestling Unplugged, which he acquired around the same time, which means even much of the previews, teasers and recaps of Ring Warriors can't even be looked at any more.
- In 2018, Ring Warriors rebooted again with one of the old title belts and mostly new wrestlers on WGN's television network. By the end of the year Ring Warriors was on hiatus again but the 2018 program was archived on Amazon Prime. As for the 2011-15 download, streaming, DVD and the axed you tube content? The owner told fans to wait.
- WWE's 1999 Over the Edge event never has been, and never will be, released on any home video format in part or in whole; this is due to the death of Owen Hart.note The footage itself is kept in a secure vault in WWE's archives, sealed shut with a label that reads "Never to view, duplicate, or destroy."
- Interestingly, on rare occasions highlights of The Undertaker's match with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin have been shown when discussing Undertaker's title history, but nothing else from the pay-per-view.
- For that matter, nearly anything involving Owen Hart due to the multiple lawsuits his widow has filed against the WWE.
- Typically, any regular televised episode of a wrestling show never sees the light of day again after it is aired except in the form of highlights. For wrestling fans who want to call out wrestling organizations for doing this, keep in mind many other sports leagues enforce similar practices - ESPECIALLY the NFL, which never even allowed games to be replayed on ESPN Classic during the network's early years when other leagues did.
- Most PPV pre-show matches were never aired again in any form, though given that they were by design throwaway matches of little consequence it's no surprise that they were forgotten about as soon as the PPV itself started. They also weren't on the VHS or DVD releases of those shows, so the only way to see them today is to hope someone recorded it and has uploaded it to YouTube. This has started to change for more recent shows, with pre-shows of WWE's bigger events being added to the network along with the actual show.
- No WCW pay-per-view was released on DVD by the organization while it still existed, and WWE hasn't released any DVDs of a WCW pay-per-view in its entirety, though they have made good use of WCW's tape library in "best-of" sets, including a three-disc DVD set dedicated to "the best of WCW and NWA Starrcade", AND a three-disc DVD set dedicated to "the very best of WCW Monday Nitro".
- Now they are going to release "the very best of Clash of the Clampions".
- Want to see a Ring of Honor show from before 2010? Better find a compilation DVD of every wrestler involved in it and hope their matches from said show are included. This is a combination of losing half of their founders, their original distributor and a new DVD company not taking what was left of the old stuff over. They did eventually start releasing DVDs of years before 2010, counting down to the beginning, slowly. But slow's better than nothing.
- Fortunately, WWE's launch of the WWE Network has helped curtail this problem, offering most of the promotion's full-length pay-per-views and television programs, the latter sometimes in their complete run, (mostly) uncut and uncensored. This means that every episode so far of WWE Rawnote and WWE Smackdown can be streamed online through the networknote . Even then, not all of WWE's archives are available through the service, for various reasons including the reasons stated above.
- Unless you have WWE Network, It is very HARD to find WWE Raw Episodes online (Especially the older ones.) YouTube and Dailymotion have a scattered amount of episodes available, But WWE has blocked the majority of the episodes on YouTube (although some of the episodes, mostly from 2011 and 2012, have remained.) An official YouTube Channel called 'wwegmtech' has every WWE Raw episode from June 2010 to July 2013 uploaded (although the 1000 Episode was never uploaded on there). The only downside? They're dubbed in Spanish.
- The same goes to SmackDown. The Official WWE YouTube channel uploaded a majority of the episodes from 2010 and 2011, although some episodes were skipped (like the Super SmackDown live episodes). Like Raw, it's very hard to find old episodes from SmackDown unless you have WWE Network.
- WWE Main Event is the same thing, although every episode is available on WWE Network. A couple of episodes were uploaded on YouTube, and the first 30 minutes of the August 21, 2013 episode is available on TV News Archive (although it's mislabeled), but that's it.
- WWE Saturday Morning Slam, a short-lived attempt by WWE to directly appeal to children's audiences, is not available on WWE Network and hasn't been seen since the program's only season ended in May 2013, when it aired on The CW. Better have recorded the series by then (although most of, but not all the episodes can be found on YouTube though, so there's that.)
- WWE Network began adding matches from the Canadian promotion Stampede Wrestling in December 2015, only for them to pull all the footage several days later after Bret Hart notified WWE that he had the rights to all Stampede matches featuring him. This stipulation doesn't apply to his appearances in other promotions however, including WWE.
- Of the 200 episodes of Smoky Mountain Wrestling's TV show only 13 are on the WWE Network. Music rights are to blame: the company was financially backed by record producers Rick Rubin, who told producer Jim Cornette that he could use any Real Song Theme Tune he wanted "until someone told him to stop". Nobody did, and the WWE doesn't feel like trying to renegotiate the royalties.
- While all of the episodes of WCW Monday Nitro are available on the WWE Network, the same can't be said for its companion show WCW Thunder, which didn't get added to the Network until 2018. And even then, only the show's first year and the first seven months of the 1999 shows were added. Given the show's role in causing WCW's demise, it's not that surprising WWE isn't enthusiastic about making the entire show available. Also, some episodes on the Network are presented incomplete due to master tape damage, which may partially explain the long wait. Fortunately, the following year saw the rest of the 1999 shows and the first two months of 2000 added to the network as well, so the wait for the whole series shouldn't be too long.
- Unfortunately only the first 2 and a half seasons of WCW Saturday Night (which ran from 1992 to 2000) have been uploaded, and no episodes of Worldwide, Power Hour, WCW Pro, or any other WCW syndicated TV can be found on the network. In fact there's no WCW TV on the network at all from January 1990 to the premiere of WCW Saturday Night in April 1992, and another gap from early 1994 to the premiere of WCW Monday Nitro in August 1995.
- The WCW pay-per-view Collision in Korea is not available on the WWE Network, due to its notoriety of being one of few global wrestling events to be held in North Koreanote . This also applies to any WCW/NJPW co-production event (including Collision in Korea) due to the rights being tied up.
