On a recent edition of his “83 Weeks” podcast, Eric Bischoff recalled WCW holding TV tapings at Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios) in Florida starting in 1993.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On stopping live event touring: “Yeah. It changes everything. And that was I think one of the reasons why it took so long for WCW to really get on track, because of the people that came before me. We’re really focusing on trying to replicate, or duplicate really, the WWE business model. And WCW wasn’t set up for the WWE business model because it was a television company. What does that really mean? It means the television show is the priority. Not the pay-per-views, not the live events, not the licensing, not the merchandising. The number one goal for WCW was to maximize the television opportunity and impact for Turner Broadcasting. Of course live events were important in that equation, certainly with pay-per-views because that was really the only profit center in WCW for really until about 1995-96.
“But first and foremost, we are a television company. And I think a lot of people — well, I think most of the people that came before me and certainly a lot of the people that were there once I became executive producer or vice president or whatever — had a hard time adjusting to that concept. Because everybody came from the territory system. Everybody other than me I guess, you know, I guess I could say I came from the territory system because that’s what AWA was and that’s where I got my beginning. But keep in mind when I got to AWA, Verne was hemorrhaging money. He was funding the company out of his own savings and retirement. The things that he had acquired over the years such as real estate, kept taking out mortgages and increasing the size of those second and third mortgages just to keep the company afloat. So although they toured occasionally, I don’t even want to call it a tour because most of the time they were one-offs within a Midwest, a couple of hundred miles of Minneapolis. But for the most part, even Verne was really just producing his television shows, one for syndication and one for ESPN. But you look at Dusty Rhodes and the entire crew of people that worked with Dusty prior to me arriving, and subsequent to me arriving, all of them — Mike Grams, Magnum [TA] — all the staff came from that territory system. And it was an adjustment for them to think about the company as a television company only, and certainly in the business side of things.”
On coming up with the idea to tape TV from Disney Studios: “It was a decision born out of necessity. At the time we had three syndicated programs. We had Worldwide, which was our syndicated program, that’s the one that was distributed amongst more television stations across the country. Second to that was WCW Pro which, by the way, was the show [where] Diamond Dallas Page and I, I did play-by-play, Page did color on WCW Pro. There was the third syndicated show called WCW Main Event, but what that was was kind of a little bit from WCW Saturday Night, a little bit from the main event TBS show, and maybe 1 or 2 original matches for Main Event shot on the road. And it was kind of all cobbled together if you will. But the primary show, the one that we really made the most money from in syndication, was Worldwide. And in order to produce those three syndicated shows, while WCW Saturday Night was produced inside of Center Stage every week, the syndicated shows happened on the road. So we would travel once every two weeks or three weeks, whatever the schedule was at the time when I first started this. We would travel to Anderson, South Carolina, or Rome, Georgia, or Huntsville, or somewhere close, reasonably close to Atlanta so the talent could all drive and production could all drive. And there were a lot of great venues in those areas because as you know, you live in the South. There’s a lot of small communities all within 75 miles of each other. They’re big enough, they’re large enough population, 50,000 – 75,000 people where you could run a wrestling event and theoretically draw an audience when you have that much population. And there were so many of those markets around the Southeast that it made it easy initially to take the show on the road to produce.
“The problem was we were never hot to begin with. I say ‘we,’ this was before I even got there. WCW was never hot as a ticket. Live events really never got off the ground before I got there or even while I was there initially as an announcer. When it comes to producing television, we’re going to these small markets and these really nice arenas. You know, you look at AEW now, they’re typically going into — or they’re configured, at least they’re going into big arenas, which I don’t understand. But they’re cutting them down and scaling them for about 5,000 seats on average. Some of them bigger than others, obviously, depending on the market. But — and WCW tried to do the same thing. The problem is that WCW couldn’t get — if we got 1200 people to show up to a television taping, that was a good day. That was a good taping. It was not unusual for us to end up with 500, 600, 800, 700 people. We put six, seven, 800 people, even a thousand people, inside a venue that’s built and designed for 5,000, it gets to feel really empty really quick. Especially when the audience that you did bring in isn’t really motivated. They got their tickets for free. It was two for one, three for one, ‘buy a Slurpee, get a ticket’ kind of thing where we were giving them away. And WCW had been papering, as we refer to that technique or that strategy. We had been papering television tapings for years. That became the norm.
“So those people that would take those tickets and use those tickets were not like an AEW audience that you would see today. Even if it’s a smaller audience, you’ll see 3,500, 4,500 people on AEW Dynamite, for example, or Collision. And yeah, it’s not a very big crowd, but at least they want to be there. They took money out of their wallet. They’re interested enough in the product. And when they get there, they’re animated, they’re a part of the show, they’re having fun. You can make 3,500, 4,500 people work on camera. Because that audience is what brings the energy. It’s so subtle, but it’s so important. When you’re producing a show like wrestling, a live-action show, you want the audience to feel like they’re there or feel like they wish they were there, ideally, right? And that’s really hard to do with five or seven or 800 or even 1,200 people that are only there because they got a free ticket and there’s nothing else to do that night. That was the reason why I had to find an alternative. Also, I really wanted to increase the production values. That was like the first thing on my list.”
