In this weekly column, I will comment on the past week's goings-on in WOW, and whatever else it occurs to me to discuss :-) I also hope that a big part of the column will be printing and responding to your e-mails. So please send them in (the address is thatthing35@yahoo.com)!
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5/24/01: Enjoy the Silence
This article was actually originally the "I give up, WOW is dead" article. As I've explained in the past, I believe WOW needs a cable deal to survive (along with a huge boatload of money). Last week, the major broadcast networks announced their fall schedules. No WOW there, obviously (what, did you expect it to be on after "Friends"?) The E! network also announced their new shows, and no WOW there. So I thought at first that the cable networks' fall schedules had been announced, and since WOW was not picked up, I thought we could call it dead.
However -- and perhaps, unfortunately -- it's not going to be that easy to tell. Hopefully, as we go through this, you are learning something about the entertainment industry... I know I am. I learned that the cable networks do not announce their fall schedules at the same time as the broadcast networks. They do business a little more haphazardly. They could announce a fall show in the summer. So it'll be difficult to set a deadline by which we will know for sure that WOW is finished. WOW continues not to say a damn thing to anybody, so it's more of the ever-so-fun "waiting in the dark" game.
Make no mistake, I am no more optimistic than I was before. This federation wants to get on the air in four months. They're $6 million in debt. They don't have a cable deal. We know they can't get on E!, USA, or Fox (see last week's column for the USA/Fox thing). Syndication would be virtually impossible, since they refuse to pay for syndicated time slots. They don't have a syndicator either, since they fired the old one, MG/Perin. They don't have any wrestlers. They don't have a production crew. This is all a hell of a lot that needs to go right in four months. Especially when not much of anything at all has gone right for the last eight months.
Well, the next quarterly financial report is due out in mid-July. We should definitely know what's going on by then. All I can say is that good news would no doubt be reported promptly, therefore, no news is bad news. Let's hope we hear something.
Mailbag!
Jack Stark writes:
"TR, Thanks, for constantly keeping me informed and entertained with your website. As you know, there are constant rumors floating about the Internet about wrestling. One on the WOW web board is that various WOW wrestlers, including Ice Cold, are being recruited by WWF/WCW. Are there any truth to these rumors?"
My educated guess is that many WOW wrestlers would be willing to jump to WWF. I mean, they would have to be a little dense not to realize that the WWF's situation is juuust a little more stable than WOW's. The question is: Is the WWF interested in the WOW wrestlers? So far, it doesn't look like it:
As I say, that's all circumstantial evidence. We can never prove that the WWF is not interested; we can only prove that they are interested, and that only if a wrestler either jumps, or reveals to the public that they declined an offer.
"You know, it would be nice if McMahon used the WCW to attempt to have a real women's division with real matches that have nothing to do with leather straps, evening gowns or his daughter (though I really like Stephanie's character)."
They kind of sort of are semi-doing that now... lately, you've had a kinkiness element (strap matches, spanking matches), but not the full-on exploitation that there was a couple of years ago. But yeah, overall, it doesn't seem like they think a serious women's match has much of a role in their program.
"Also, I was wondering how much you know about women's wrestling in Japan. Most of the women there put many of the men here to shame in terms of ring performance."
I don't know nearly as much as I would like to know about it. From everything I hear, that is totally correct about the skill level, and it may have been even more true a few years ago than it is now. Someone recommended to me an excellent site about Japanese women's wrestling, which has whetted my appetite greatly, but I can't really afford tapes right now.
"One group that seems to be very popular here, but not as much in Japan is Arsion. They even have an English speakers fan club. Keep up the good work!"
There are several Japanese women's wrestling groups, and you can read all about them at that site (and if you're poor like me, you can wish you could see them :P
DPratt writes:
"I saw your mention of the WOW ref asking fans interested in becoming wrestlers to contact him. For the record, this isn't new to McLane. GLOW in its heyday when it was putting out its own magazine actually used to run ads asking anyone interested in joining GLOW to contact them. And that was when they were touring the US and putting out videos and magazines. In short, when they were doing good. So I am not suprised they are falling back on that... in actuality, 99% of the season 1 WOW wrestlers were aspiring actresses and models with no experience, so how is hiring people out of the stands any different? At least it means they are still considering coming back.
"For the record, this hiring people off the street like GLOW, POWW, and WOW have, seems to me to be largely the problem. There are tons of women in the indys going nowhere because WCW had little interest and WWF can only hire so many, so they are going randomly around the indys where demand is sketchy at best. It would seem if WOW wanted to hire more wrestlers to fill gaps, rather then hiring them from internet ads, they should cruise the indys. I refuse to believe in a state the size of California that there aren't woman wrestlers working the various indy shows that would gladly come on. Granted WOW is hardly the WWF but except for the marquee names most of the indy wrestlers drive 8 hours to make $50 which I assume is a lot less then WOW wrestlers made. I have a feeling there are at least a handful if not more with a marketable look and some experience who would do whatever WOW wanted for a chance at better money and exposure on national tv. Sure most of them would be green and probably only have a few years experience at most but I am betting they could still perform at least AS WELL as the average WOW wrestler did and would have had some decent training and experience performing in that arena to bring to WOW. Crap, MSW (my local indy fed) has only about 4 women wrestlers on the roster and they are all better then 75% of WOW's roster. Our current woman's champion is probably better then ANY of WOW's roster. I doubt in a city the size of LA the same can't be said. Personally I think a green indy worker with one year's experience is better than over 75% of what WOW had at the end of the season.
"It really made no sense that they didn't work harder to do it and instead got mostly models and wannabe actresses who didn't even desire to be a wrestler 1 month before their first try-out. I know they probably worked cheap, but like I said, unknown indy wrestlers hardly make good money. Honestly, that is what most start-up feds would do: look for experienced talent first, and then if needed, train newcomers. The fact they basically skipped even scouting the indys is largely why they had mediocre talent and I think also to a great extent why few hard core wrestling fans took it seriously."
That's all very well said, and you've convinced me to a large extent of the validity of your argument. I hadn't really thought through the question of why they didn't hire more experienced workers. I guess I always assumed in the back of my mind that the reason was probably money. But you're right, there's no real reason to believe that the experienced wrestlers would ask for more money than the aspiring actresses. The only other plausible answer I can think of is that they figured their best shot was to take the best-looking women they could find and teach them how to wrestle. If that was their thinking, I think they made a mistake. People like Riot and Danger are not threats to be Playboy centerfolds, but the core wrestling audience would much rather see them work than Summer or Lana Star, I do believe. And the core wrestling audience is what's needed to make a wrestling show succeed. Nothing "crosses over" less than wrestling.
I'm not sure I would describe the wrestlers' lack of experience as the single biggest problem WOW had. There are a lot of contenders for that honor. But yeah, I gotta agree that even under the best of circumstances, it would have been quite tough to put together a good federation with people who just stepped in the ring for the first time a couple of months earlier. And unfortunately, if by some miracle the show does come back, we can't expect the situation to be too much better. The returning wrestlers lost months of development time, and the new ones will of course be as green as the returning ones were last October.
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