If You Love Traditional Wrestling
There are some people out there who aren’t fans of modern wrestling which is fine. There are certain aspects of it I don’t like but there are alternatives out there if you prefer wrestling of a more vintage quality.
There are a number of streaming services where everything is all in one place to make things easier to find. The two that I’ve used are WWE Network and NJPW.com.
The big strength behind WWE Network is the access to so much footage from their past and the access to video libraries from defunct organisations that they have purchased over time. I’ve made it a personal project to go back and watch all the WCW big shows and pay-per-views. They have added stuff over time but there’s still so much footage in their archives that they have locked away.
New Japan’s streaming service NJPW World is very good as well although it does only have footage of New Japan Pro Wrestling. There is some really good stuff on there. You can watch the various tournaments they run with entire shows from start to finish. For the more modern footage you can pick from either Japanese or English commentary. Classic footage from previous decades are on there as well so you can watch the legend and founder of the company Antonio Inoki in action. There are other sources of great wrestling footage out there as well.
If for whatever reason you don’t or can’t pay for a wrestling streaming service there is always YouTube. YouTube is fantastic but it does involve being prepared to put in the legwork to find footage. There is also the danger of if the rights to the footage isn’t owned by the people who have uploaded it to YouTube then it may get taken down so you may have to be prepared to binge watch any footage you find. If you find any channels or playlists on there bookmark it, save it so you can go back to it later.
For me I have saved Memphis wrestling from various years as a lot of insider fans rave about the Memphis wrestling territory in particular about the top star and co-owner of the territory Jerry Lawler and the announcers Lance Russell and Dave Brown. I also love Smokey Mountain Wrestling the territory from the 90’s owned by Jim Cornette and financed by Rick Rubin. It was an unashamed throwback to territory wrestling and had the tag line ‘wrestling the way it used to be and the way you like it’. WWE Network only has a very limited amount of footage from Smokey Mountain on there.
On YouTube at the moment there is virtually the whole of the TV show of the company and the big shows on there too. Bob Caudle is superb on play-by-play with Dutch Mantell great as colour commentary and occasional wrestler. Other footage on YouTube are uploaded by fans such as Roy Lucier who has numerous channels with different organisations and territories. They are well worth checking out.
I hope I’ve given you a decent taster of what is out there.
Until next time.
