Thought of the Day: Wrestling Needs Used Car Salesmen
Watching a Nitro from 1997 and it made me miss something.It’s the night after Bash at the Beach 1997 and Heenan is talking incessantly about how you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO see the encore. That’s something you NEVER hear anymore about PPVs. Anymore today it’s basically “here’s what we’ve got, buy it. Please?” Gene Okerlund and Bobby Heenan were masters at sounding like used car salesmen or carnival barkers, where after hearing them talk for 20 minutes you had to buy the PPV, just because you had heard so much about it.
Another thing you hardly ever heard said anymore about WWE PPVs: the date of the show. Watch an old WWF TV show and you’ll hear the date of their next PPV probably 10 times. That’s done for a reason: you hear the date so often that you start counting down to it in your head and on the day or before it, you snap and order the show because you NEED to see it. Now it’s always “in just under two weeks” or whatever they say anymore, which is something easier to forget.
Don’t beg us to buy a PPV. Sell it to us.
I agree with the old WWF PPV’s. I always liked them telling us what the date and the location of the PPV was. It made it feel more important. Now, I barely know where the PPV is going to be held half the time.
I agree, but I see that now, they’re probably counting on social media to sell it for them. That will work to a degree, but actually pimping the shit during PPVs and trying to sell it through their programming would work wonders.