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Distribution of WWF/WWE syndicated programming without satellites

I brought that up to the wrestling newsgroup years ago, but to no response.

Until about the mid-'90s, WWE used to ship tapes of "Superstars of Wrestling" and "Wrestling Challenge" to its stations; many of them were customized (i.e., "see World Wrestling Federation action live in (insert city) on (insert date)!" or "order Wrestlemania/Royal Rumble/Survivor Series/Summerslam through (insert local cable provider)!". WWE couldn't afford any satellite time to send out a "generic" feed, so about 1,000 or so tapes were mailed from their Stamford facilities each month. They would establish their own uplink unit sometime later to transmit their programming.

World Championship Wrestling may have done the same for "Worldwide" until its demise.

Does anyone remember this, because I'm sure the stations may well have gotten the WWE tapes in advance.

Jonathan Allen
 
...all the promotions did this in the early '80s. Verne Gagne's AWA was the cheapest; the then-program director at WKOW/27 Madison said they had to quit running the AWA package because the physical tape that Gagne was using had so damned many runs on them that it began failing to track on the WKOW equipment!...Joe Blanchard's Southwest Championship Wrestling was briefly syndicated nationally to Spanish-language stations; WBBS/60 West Chicago ran it late on Sunday nights, and had problems with keeping Rapido Rodriguez's commentary track on the air, with Steve Stack's English track on top of the Spanish every other week or so...

...as for the WWF, their first runs in Milwaukee and Chicago were a joke. The bookers in Connecticut would put house shows into the Dane County Coliseum in Madison and plug the shows on WVTV/18 Milwaukee as being "in Madison, the Milwaukee area" -- and they didn't pick up a Madison station for another year or so. Even worse, the first few months on WFLD/32 in Chicago had them plugging house shows in *Sacramento*!...
 
Ultimajock said:
Joe Blanchard's Southwest Championship Wrestling was briefly syndicated nationally to Spanish-language stations; WBBS/60 West Chicago ran it late on Sunday nights, and had problems with keeping Rapido Rodriguez's commentary track on the air, with Steve Stack's English track on top of the Spanish every other week or so...

The English feed did the same thing, you could hear Rapido's commentary in the background, sometimes over Steve.
 
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