WrestleMania Special an Overproduced Mess
Last night’s “WrestleMania XXIV” special on MyNetwork TV felt more like a 60-minute movie trailer than it did a wrestling show – and I certainly don’t mean that in a good way. It was terrible.
With only an hour alotted for an event that ran four hours, I wondered what the show would look like. When Fox aired a one-hour WrestleMania XI special 13 years ago, it wisely just featured the show’s top two matches. By squeezing highlights of nearly every match from this year’s Mania – all to the tune of one generic rock song after another – WWE kicked off its MyNetwork TV run with a frenzied, overproduced mess of a show that made the worst TNA iMPACT! look disciplined by comparison.
I imagine the intent was to attract non-wrestling fans with a product that looked hip and exciting. God forbid you do that by showing, you know, what actually happened at WrestleMania. So what we ended up with was an endless slew of jarring jump cuts, graphics, dramatic slow motion shots, different camera effects, and wrestling moves being repeated 12 different times from 12 different camera angles.
The end result was something akin to eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, sweetened with an extra cup of sugar poured on top, then drenched in honey, then sprinked with M&M's, and topped with a generous coating of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup. Serve it inside a Cinnabon, and you have the broadcast premiere of WrestleMania XXIV.
Like most fans, I usually enjoy the video packages that the WWE production team puts on to hype matches. But what works as a two-minute highlight video can be absolutely obnixious when stretched over an hour.
I’m no production expert, but I am a wrestling fan, and if I were forced to reduce WrestleMania to one hour, I would have shown about 10-15 minutes each of highlights from the Raw world title triple threat match, the Undertaker-Edge match, and the Flair-Michaels match – sans the cornball rock music and ADHD editing , a shorter highlight package of the big spots in the Money In The Bank ladder match, an even shorter clip summing the Mayweather-Big Show spectacle and its surrounding hype, and then a 3-5 music video package rapping up the rest of the card and other memorable images from ‘Mania.
That’s actually not too far from what WWE actually put on last night, but for the life of me I don’t know why they couldn’t just let the action speak for itself instead of weighing it down with so much production.
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Comments (8)
I think WWE, maybe rightfully so, was aiming that special not at the wrestling fan but the general public and lapsed fans. Boiling it down to highlights and montages for longer events is a staple of televised sports programs.
I wouldn't expect a Superbowl special to run the last 10 minutes of the game uninterrupted, but a collection of clips summing up the events by its high points and creating an overall story to hype the event as a whole.
I don't disagree. As you can read above, I'm all in favor of showing an hour of highlights from the show. My problem is the way they put it together.
Never saw the show, but if you were going to use Wrestlemania to highlight Smackdown's move to a new TV station, I wouldn't use Flair/Michaels because neither are on Smackdown. Use current wrestlers so new fans know who to watch.
I forgot to catch the show as I was too. But I think my wife would love that bowl of frosted flakes a la Alfonso.
And as you said, "I’m no production expert, but I am a wrestling fan".
It seems to me that the show was not designed with the wrestling fan in mind; after all, they're going to watch SD anyway. It's intended to bring in the non-fan. What better way to attract the non-fan than with the biff-bang-booms of the matches. The non-fan only needs to have any reason to watch, whether it's the divas or the chair-shots to the face.
Once they lay their eyes on the product, then the addition of stories & plot lines will matter.
It's like watching a trailer for a movie: you don't know much about the story but the head of the Statue of Liberty rolling on a main street in NYC is enough to make you buy a ticket (Cloverfield).
They will air the special again tonight before Smackdown
I'm surprised there is even any partial defense of this show. What a horrible unwatchable mess! Even if you're a fan of that type of stuff, it wasn't even well produced. As for being designed to catch the eye of non-wrestling fans, if wrestling fans can't stomache to watch it how can you expect non-fans to watch it?
I'm surprised there is even any partial defense of this show. What a horrible unwatchable mess! Even if you're a fan of that type of stuff, it wasn't even well produced. As for being designed to catch the eye of non-wrestling fans, if wrestling fans can't stomache to watch it how can you expect non-fans to watch it?
Personally, I would have preferred a longer show, but that's why we have the WrestleMania 24 dvd.
The special was made to get the "general public" interested in Smackdown! moving to MyNetwork. The people like us already know it's there, so that wasn't made for us.
Personally, though, I actually enjoyed it. I didn't look at it as an hour-long music video like some people did. I took it for what it was - a collection of video packages. It was a fun and unique take on WrestleMania.