Tape Libraries

One of the fun thing about the Observers are the various smaller promotions out there at the time. Which leads me to ask, which tape libraries does the WWE own and who should they seek out to buy. I know they own WCW, ECW, AWA, WCCW, Championship wrestling from Florida, and Mid-South. What about the UWF? Portland? Smoky Mountain? Continental?

Also, other than those huge satellite dishes, how could a US fan watch Japanese, Lucha Libre, or a Stampede?

​UWF from after the Crockett buyout is owned by WWE, but the stuff from before was the subject of a nasty divorce proceeding between Bill Watts and his wife, which ended up with Bill’s son having the rights to most of the old stuff. He then finally brokered a deal with WWE for what there was, but it turns out that huge amounts of the old Mid-South tapes were completely lost. So short answer, WWE pretty much owns what there is, but most of it is gone, unfortunately.

​Portland tapes were all lost to cheap broadcasters who wanted to reuse the tapes, and Don Owen also decided not to keep copies. As far as I know, the only existing copies are from people taping them at home, or the tapes that PNW sent out to guys like Joe Pedicino for Pro Wrestling This Week. Pretty much everything that exists has been used for stuff the Roddy Piper DVDs.

Smoky Mountain is 100% owned by WWE and they could put it all on the Network tomorrow if they wanted, because it was previously put on WWE Classics on Demand and is already digitized.

Continental is another casualty of confusing ownership rights and people not having the forethought to save the tapes. Basically very little exists, and no one knows who exactly owns the rights to the stuff that there is.

And US fans were basically limited to tape trading for international stuff. I don’t know of any C-Band dishes that would even be able to pick up Japanese TV stations, for example. The satellites wouldn’t be anywhere near the right place to hit them.