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Post by hitmanmike1 on Apr 17, 2012 17:43:07 GMT -5
A lot of factors come to fact here on what caused the demise of WCW which you can say all of the above which if you read The Death Of WCW's book and Eric Bischoff's book you will get 2 different versions. The Death Of WCW I believe is the most acurate. Eric Bischoff isn't totally wrong with the politics being a factor but it is only a small reason why WCW went under. I feel Bischoff letting Hogan, Nash and friends call the shots booking wise let to it's demise.
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Post by The Pod-Father! on Apr 17, 2012 17:47:04 GMT -5
I'd say that Hogan, Bischoff, & Russo all had a significant hand in destroying the company...But perhaps the biggest factor was the AOL-Time Warner merger and Turner Networks' decision not to include pro wrestling as part of their broadcast package. That effectively killed the interest of any prospective buyers for the company, IMO.
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Post by Patrick McFadden on Apr 17, 2012 18:15:12 GMT -5
I think it was a combination of a number of things but TNAte is correct in that the AOL-Time Warner deal was the most significant factor by far.
It's a shame really, despite WCW's rather inauspicious last year there was no storyline so insane or swerve so outrageous that they couldn't have been pulled back from the brink.
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Post by Chad Rivera on Apr 17, 2012 18:19:12 GMT -5
I'd say that Hogan, Bischoff, & Russo all had a significant hand in destroying the company...But perhaps the biggest factor was the AOL-Time Warner merger and Turner Networks' decision not to include pro wrestling as part of their broadcast package. That effectively killed the interest of any prospective buyers for the company, IMO. Yup
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Post by hitmanmike1 on Apr 17, 2012 18:21:46 GMT -5
I think had WCW didn't lose so much money I would think AOL would perhaps kept WCW alive tillm someone brought it of them. I would also say whicg I should have included in the poll is WCW's failure to push the younger stars which fans wanted but nope we saw Hogan ad friends pushed to the moon
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Post by DanThompson on Apr 17, 2012 23:03:15 GMT -5
It takes many nails to close a coffin some nails are bigger then others.
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Post by yaknow on Apr 17, 2012 23:16:44 GMT -5
Losing television
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Post by Gee Hall on Apr 17, 2012 23:52:32 GMT -5
Hard to pin anything solely on one person. I wasn't there. The WCW losing money is a stand-alone problem for a business of any kind. Politics can't help that out. And poor booking when that is the product you deliver to consumers as a product is culprit. Those three get my vote without question. We all have our hunches who killed Colonel Mustard in the bedroom with the knife, but these factors occurred regardless. I miss legit competition.
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Post by stevekasan on Apr 18, 2012 8:24:03 GMT -5
Godfather said it, Time Warner. I remember they put Nitro on a Tuesday with the US Title tournament and Lance Storm winning it. It did great for them. If the AOL-Time Warner merger allowed them to continue with wrestling putting Nitro on Tuesdays would have given them that boost.
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Post by RKing85 on Apr 18, 2012 14:42:53 GMT -5
the biggest factor was definitly losing their television deal.
But in the poll, I went with Bischoff, politics, poor booking, losing money, and Arquette winning the title.
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Post by The Pod-Father! on Apr 18, 2012 14:53:29 GMT -5
Godfather said it, Time Warner. I remember they put Nitro on a Tuesday with the US Title tournament and Lance Storm winning it. It did great for them. If the AOL-Time Warner merger allowed them to continue with wrestling putting Nitro on Tuesdays would have given them that boost. The crazy thing is, the Time Warner-AOL merger not only hurt WCW...But Turner's business as a whole. It was a case of too many companies with seperate interests and motivations (something that was pretty commnplace in the late 90's and early 2000's). I remember reading an article years later about how Ted Turner lamented the loss of wrestling and Atlanta-centric sports on his networks. the merger ultimately changed TBS' identity from a Southern Superstation into just another run-of-the-mill cable station (and that lasted until the last 3 years or so when they re-branded themselves as a comedy network).
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Post by DanThompson on Apr 19, 2012 0:25:34 GMT -5
Do you think if WCW continued to beat WWE in ratings around the time of the merger that the same thing would have happend?
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Post by Irwin R Schyster on Apr 19, 2012 1:58:08 GMT -5
Its all of the above for me, some of the issues were larger then others but they all played factors in WCW going down.
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Post by Gerald Sinstad on Apr 19, 2012 2:05:41 GMT -5
Do you think if WCW continued to beat WWE in ratings around the time of the merger that the same thing would have happend? The fact that the ratings for Nitro were still pretty reasonable suggests that the merged company simply didn't want to broadcast wrestling on their network.
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Post by The Pod-Father! on Apr 19, 2012 3:01:26 GMT -5
That's pretty much what happened. I think I remember it being the AOL people that diodn't want to be in the wrestling business and they pretty much forced Turner's hand.
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