I'm not sure if you guys have heard the news but the other day the WWE announced they will be ceasing all production of DVD/Blu-ray content. While it's been an inevitability especially since the launch of the Network it still signals an end of an era and I'm curious to hear if you guys collected any of the DVDs back in the day?

I believe the first ever WWF DVD was technically Wrestlemania XV but I'd say the first proper DVD set was the 2002 Hulk Still Rules which was Hulk talking through his career while they played a stack of matches. This was the prototypical DVD where you'd get the documentary followed by a second DVD filled with matches. It always felt appropriate for Hulk to kick things off since when you think WWF he's really what kick-started Vince Jr's reign.

However it would take nine months for the next DVD to arrive, Rey Mysterio's 619 which really felt like the launching point for the project. This was one of the first sets I bought and it was a really strong set that not only included his best WCW matches but it also included the When World's Collide match which was fascinating as somebody who had no idea the event had ever existed. The only issue with the set is that they squeezed a bunch of WWE TV matches on there that really have nowhere near the significance of the other matches but one of them was the triple threat with Benoit & Angle which was one of my top picks for the ongoing SmackDown project.

They started releasing more DVD sets more frequently with the Shawn Michaels, Bloodbath: Most Incredible Steel Cage set and The Ultimate Ric Flair Collection. The latter was the holy grail around the time of it's release and included the Clash of the Champions and WrestleWar match with Ricky Steamboat and the Memorial Cup match against Barry Windham among others. This was the set that everyone put over and re-enforced Flair's status as the best of all-time. Personally I never got around to buying it and it's one of the biggest DVDs missing from the collection.

The first DVD set I bought was Mick Foley's Greatest Hits and Misses. I don't think I've ever gone so far out of my way for anything wrestling related before. To set the scene, I was 13 years old and spending my last day of the summer holidays at the big shopping centre. I was just browsing Target when I came across the set completely out of the blue. It was one of those things I just had to have, so I raced home, grabbed all the loose change I could find, came racing back with my pockets filled with this change and made the poor clerk count it out with me. I had to have that DVD set and I proceeded to marathon that set the rest of the day. In fairness, it really was a great set and such a wonderful road-map through 90s wrestling. Pre-Hogan WCW, Smokey Mountain, ECW followed by prime Attitude Era WWF.

I feel like around this time a couple of sets were real missed opportunities. First off was the Stone Cold Truth which came out early 2004 so enough time for Austin to be back in the good graces of the WWE. This should have been right up there with the Ric Flair collection but it was a one disc with only five matches on it. I never bothered with it and everytime I had an opportunity I'd pass on it. One DVD that I did end up buying was Monday Night Wars. When it was released it was rightfully criticised for being a propaganda piece but it did have a great Bischoff interview which really held the project together and it was the first time we really got to relive that era as a whole before they went crazy with Attitude Era related releases. It could have been so much better and they really needed more than an hour or two to tell the story but that was one of the more rewatchable DVDs.

It's always touchy subject, but the Benoit DVD was awesome. Great doco capped off by an excellent choice of matches including a few from NJPW which was mind-blowing. I'd never seen a NJPW match before and it really was like watching WCW/nWo Revenge come to life. The crazy thing was watching a Pegasus/Liger match and realising that the stuff they were doing was nearly 15 years old and nearly as old as me. The Eddie set complimented it nicely and one thing I enjoyed is how these sets would include a lot of alternative commentary - so it was fascinating to hear RVD and Eddie breakdown their 2002 Ladder match together. Of course for some of the Japanese matches they'd get Cole and Tazz to call the match but it was just really bizarre.

I feel like the DVD sets really found their groove at this point which led straight into Rise and Fall of ECW. This DVD was a game changer and the main reason for the One Night Stand show. I didn't really have any access to ECW when it was around. There was the video game which was a re-skin of WWF Attitude which I totally judged a book by it's cover because the DVD sets that made their way out here looked ugly. For whatever reason, you could only buy those DVDs as well and I could never find them at any video shop. Regardless, Rise and Fall was another game changer and as much as the Foley, Benoit and Eddie sets had pre-disposed me to the company watching a recap and getting a better understanding of ECW circa 1994-96 really changed my perception of the company. The doco was excellent and the match listing was really strong as well. The Scorpio/Sabu and Psichosis/Rey were on heavy rotation for me.

This was followed by the Rob Van Dam set which kind of bummed me out because it went back to the old format where the superstar would talk about a random subject and then they'd play a match. By that point I didn't like the chocolate mixing with the peanut butter. This was one of those sets that I'd been dying to get my hands on since 2001 and to this day I'm still not sure if I've watched every match on the thing. Still it had a lot of classics there - the best Lynn/RVD match, Eliminators/Sabu & RVD, RVD/Bam Bam and I was happy to have that Invasion PPV match against Jeff since it was such a strong return. The alternative commentaries are really good here as well, I'm pretty sure it's Rob and Heyman. It's one those sets that I thought would be right up there with the Foley, Benoit and ECW set but it never really caught me.

There were a couple of big sets around this time that I never actually got around to watching like The Undertaker set or the 80s wrestlers set. I'd say the biggest one was The Destruction of Warrior set which caused a huge stir. It was a really tacky production but by going down the road they did they made it far more infamous than they would just releasing a regular Warrior DVD. It kind of made Warrior cool that the WWE was so petty they spend all that money just to dump on this guy.

Supposedly that was going to be the fallback plan on the Bret Hart DVD, but Bret had been more cordial with the WWE around that time and was appearing in their video games (where as Warrior was removed from HCTP which came out two years before the DVD). Plus Bret really wanted to preserve his career and Bret being Bret released one of the best DVDs alongside one of the best wrestling books all around the same time. This was an awesome set and I think it's biggest legacy is that suddenly people were talking about The Killer Bees.

One memory I have of the set was being amazed that they got Jeff Jarrett onto pay tribute to Owen...only to realise it was straight from Raw Is Owen. For a few minutes I really thought Bret had led the way to mending more fences.

The WWE would continue to release more classic wrestling comps like Dusty, Roddy, Hogan got a really good comp around this time but I'd say the major one was the Brian Pillman set which had a good doco and reminded everybody how cutting edge Pillman was.

They also started to release more DVDs about other promotions like AWA and WCCW. The WCCW DVD was way more interesting because they had so many talking heads on and it's really easy to focus on the tragedy of the promotion. With AWA there seemed to be a ton of WWE spin and the main focus was on Verne and Bockwinkle - it didn't go through the weeds enough from memory. Still, the WCCW set was a top tier DVD and I think it brought guys like Akbar and Hart back into prominence.

By this point 3-DVD sets started to become the norm and you'd get a lot more bang for your buck. Guys like Rey, HBK, Cena, Hulk, Austin etc. got re-releases and they had this awesome Ladder match comp which was one of those must-haves. The Austin set was nearly perfect EXCEPT it didn't have a doco. Everything else about the set was great because it felt properly curated and they threw in a ton of his WCW stuff and early WWF stuff before the neck injury. The set did a great job of highlighting that Austin could actually work. For instance instead of including Wrestlemania XIV, they have the King of the Ring 1997 match against Shawn which I feel nobody really talked about despite being really good.

I sort of lost track with a lot of releases around this time. I stopped buying DVDs around this time but I mainly remember being upset that I'd spy a Ricky Steamboat comp or WCW comp and wonder why it didn't come out sooner. The early Match Review posts were largely based on matches from The Clash of Champions, ECW Unreleased, WarGames sets and I remember the Punk doco really standing out among the lot. They were still pumping these documentaries out until 2019 with Finn Balor being the last guy to get the treatment with a 2 Disc set.

With the Network and all the streaming sites it's so easy to access content but I'll always be appreciative of the DVDs and all the matches and stories they exposed me to. If I ever find a clearance, I'll add a couple just for old times sake.

I used to VHS tape all the PPVs and had a full library that ran from somewhere in 2000 to 2007, I’d scarcely buy an actual DVD of the PPVs because I simply didn’t have the money as a kid but I’d ask for one or two at birthdays and Christmases of good PPVs.

I got the ECW one and a few other one offs like that badass Ric Flair collection but by the time WWE got serious with their documentaries and that kind of content it was a torrent and download situation which obviously is negated by the network now so all that’s gone.

I did however keep buying the WrestleManias on blu ray, when the first one came out on blu ray which was WM24 I was so excited to have WWE content in HD and even to this day as good as the network in I still believe the picture is better on a blu ray than the network, which just started the tradition of buying them until WWE became simply unwatchable in 2017 so I stopped buying them.

WWE did some cool shit on those DVDs from time to time, I remember specifically on the Vengeance 05 one there’s a backstage segment after the HIAC between Triple H and Batista backstage where they agree the feud is over and hug before Trips collapses in a chair.

I haven't bought physical media of any kind in over a decade, but I very am concerned that they're becoming obsolete in favor of streaming. You can already see the destruction with movies, there is currently a shockingly low percentage of films available to watch. It seems counterintuitive at first, as there is so many things to stream, it seems endless, but it's so heavily weighted towards recent releases, that you essentially have the majority of film history unavailable for streaming. Films that were actually easiest to get in the VHS days, then only a fraction of them went to DVD, then a fraction of those went to Blu-ray, now only a fraction of those being streamed, shrinking availability for the past 20 years, and a trend that will only get worse.


There's actually a horrifying bar graph that really put into perspective the crisis.




And it's only going to get worse as the consolidation of media companies increase, the Disneys of the world gaining more ownership of libraries to do nothing with, because it won't make financial sense to stream the 20th Century Fox library when there's some dogshit Marvel thing bringing in the most subs.

And I'm afraid this is the future of wrestling libraries, as well. Especially being attached to something like Peacock Network, which is streaming other stuff, so wrestling will be lower on the priority list, and there is only so much bandwidth, it's easy to imagine which starts getting shelved first. If a WWE sale is inevitable when Vince croaks, it'll probably be to a Disney type giant, if not literally Disney, and you'll have most wrestling that was ever produced just sitting on a shelf. 

I think the golden age of "seeing stuff" is over, we're probably in a bronze age, currently, and 10 years from now a lot of people are going to be wondering what the fuck happened as a large amount of things that were once easily available to watch become difficult. 

And with the amount of lobbying telecommunication and media companies do to government, even acquiring things illegally via torrents will probably be more difficult, as well. 

Definitely a valid point about classic films. To be fair there is a reasonable selection of classic films on Amazon Prime, but it is the very well known ones, Hitchcock films and the like. Anything but the most famous of 40s/50s films, good luck. As Kilgore says streaming services are heavily biased towards 21st century films.

Honestly if a streaming service was set up that streams more obscure classic films, it could receive a lot of attention. Nothing like Netflix or Disney+, but I think it would be a pretty good business. I'd pay for it.

It's cable evolved.

Also gotta love finding a hidden kilgore gem in a random WWE DVD thread.

On DVD I had a few shows from 2002 for some reason. I guess because the smackdown six era was in my lapse of viewing, I ended up getting the DVDs to relive some of it. I watched Armageddon 2002 more than any person really should.

Also just went to one of those PPV's wiki... and the write up is like reading fan fiction. They typed up the moves describing it as use the word "decapitated" from like a clothesline or something. For when a mere ! is not enough... Fan Fic Evolved.

Dec 10, 2021 20:25:35 GMT Peepshow said:

I used to VHS tape all the PPVs and had a full library that ran from somewhere in 2000 to 2007, I’d scarcely buy an actual DVD of the PPVs because I simply didn’t have the money as a kid but I’d ask for one or two at birthdays and Christmases of good PPVs.

I got the ECW one and a few other one offs like that badass Ric Flair collection but by the time WWE got serious with their documentaries and that kind of content it was a torrent and download situation which obviously is negated by the network now so all that’s gone.

I did however keep buying the WrestleManias on blu ray, when the first one came out on blu ray which was WM24 I was so excited to have WWE content in HD and even to this day as good as the network in I still believe the picture is better on a blu ray than the network, which just started the tradition of buying them until WWE became simply unwatchable in 2017 so I stopped buying them.

WWE did some cool shit on those DVDs from time to time, I remember specifically on the Vengeance 05 one there’s a backstage segment after the HIAC between Triple H and Batista backstage where they agree the feud is over and hug before Trips collapses in a chair.

The only PPV I bought on DVD was Wrestlemania XX which was a 3-Disc package that included a Wrestlemania XIX doco and a Top 10 matches of all-time special among others. Typically I didn't buy too many PPVs because they were one and done but the Wrestlemania DVDs always seemed to have the best value and I'm pretty sure they remained 3 Disc sets from that point on.

Dec 11, 2021 0:32:46 GMT Big Pete said:

Dec 10, 2021 20:25:35 GMT Peepshow said:

I used to VHS tape all the PPVs and had a full library that ran from somewhere in 2000 to 2007, I’d scarcely buy an actual DVD of the PPVs because I simply didn’t have the money as a kid but I’d ask for one or two at birthdays and Christmases of good PPVs.

I got the ECW one and a few other one offs like that badass Ric Flair collection but by the time WWE got serious with their documentaries and that kind of content it was a torrent and download situation which obviously is negated by the network now so all that’s gone.

I did however keep buying the WrestleManias on blu ray, when the first one came out on blu ray which was WM24 I was so excited to have WWE content in HD and even to this day as good as the network in I still believe the picture is better on a blu ray than the network, which just started the tradition of buying them until WWE became simply unwatchable in 2017 so I stopped buying them.

WWE did some cool shit on those DVDs from time to time, I remember specifically on the Vengeance 05 one there’s a backstage segment after the HIAC between Triple H and Batista backstage where they agree the feud is over and hug before Trips collapses in a chair.

The only PPV I bought on DVD was Wrestlemania XX which was a 3-Disc package that included a Wrestlemania XIX doco and a Top 10 matches of all-time special among others. Typically I didn't buy too many PPVs because they were one and done but the Wrestlemania DVDs always seemed to have the best value and I'm pretty sure they remained 3 Disc sets from that point on.

The Mania of WrestleMania! Yes! I picked up the dvd set for like £4 a few years back solely for that because it’s not on the network. That was the first bit of behind the curtain media I ever saw from WWE, Beyond the Mat was the only behind the scenes stuff I had seen at that point.

I decided to go back to the Spectacular Legacy of the AWA DVD because I had a really tough time recalling it.

Straight off the bat, the cover of the DVD is really striking - it definitely passes the video store test.

However it does highlight the issue I have with the presentation, it's not really about the AWA itself. It's about the legacy of the AWA and how it helped develop guys like Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels etc. and doesn't give you a great feel for the promotion.

That was one thing about the WWE documentaries that could be an issue. They'd do a great job of covering the origins of a promotion but then they'd barely touch on any of the success of the promotion before they're covering the downfall. In a 110 minute documentary, it's around the 40 minute mark they start covering Hogan which is framed as the beginning of the end of the promotion. The rest of the run-time is spent dumping on Verne and all his attempts at running against Vince.

I didn't really know any better when I first watched it and felt it was a decent primer for the AWA, but looking back it has some of the worst spin since Self Destruction. They have the Gagnes on there and Greg is putting over his father, but the doco is filled with all this double talk where for every complimentary Greg compliment they'll find some disgruntled wrestler to knock him down a peg.

Also it's the first time I realised how over-bearing the music is, it's like watching a really whimsical Disney movie.

So I think that's why the DVD didn't make a huge impression because the nicest thing the documentary had to say is that it was a great feeder for the WWE. Otherwise you have to draw your own positives and having interviews from Nick Bockwinkel and Verne Gagne is really good, Bock in particular speaks with so much reverence it's hard not to get invested even when he's just full of hot air.

Are there any good AWA projects, documentaries, write-ups online?

Cool thread even if the heyday of my fandom coincided with the VHS tape boom rather than the DVD era. The big ones for me were the Bret, Flair, and Horsemen sets along with The Rise and Fall of ECW. Then in later years I watched a bunch of the other old school sets alongside my brother.
===============
Big Pete for AWA stuff....

-KHawk at ProWrestlingOnly is the big AWA historian.
-Kayfabe Memories is still around! This was one of my go to sites for learning about the territories way back in 00-01...
www.kayfabememories.com/Regions/awa/awa.htm
-DVDVR did a Best AWA Matches project about a decade ago. The discussion thread appears to be wiped but here's the results and some stats...
sites.google.com/site/chrisharrington/mookieghana-prowrestlingstatistics/top80s_awa_results
-And of course there are my various love letters to dying day AWA/Larry Zbyszko right here on PW.