I’m almost embarrassed to admit the amount of fun I had tonight going to a live taping of ECW and WWE Smack Down Wrestling. As a kid I was a HUGE fan of wrestling. That was back in the days of Andre the Giant, Rowdy Roddy Piper, The Iron Sheik and some up and comer named Hulk Hogan. It’s been many years since I have considered myself a fan of wrestling. But I tell you what, they put on an entertaining evening.
Over the summer my son spent a few weeks staying with his grandma in California. While there he spent a fair amount of time with his two cousins who are big fans of wrestling. By the time we got him back, he too was a wrestling fan. My Tivo has been filled with wrestling ever since. When he found out they’d be doing a taping here in town, be dropped a couple subtle hints that he wanted to go… By subtle I mean dancing around the house screaming at the top of his lungs. OK, maybe not that extreme, but I’m not far off. I did a little research and found that the tickets were pretty reasonable. With all that, how could we NOT go?
For the first hour the stage is set up for a live taping of the ECW show. There’s about a 15 minute delay, but other than that, it’s shot basically in real time and it airs the same night. This means there is some dead-air time as they cut away for commercials and promos, but they kept it almost exactly to an hour. These guys obviously have it down to a science and they don’t seem to miss a thing.
At the end of the first hour, about 20 crewmen come out and they do an AMAZING job of switching out the ropes in the ring from ECW to WWE Smack Down. They also replace all of the banners around the ring and in less than 10 minutes they are done with the transformation. We barely had time to grab Paxton a Jeff Hardy shirt before they were queuing up the intro music for WWE.
The wrestlers and the production value for WWE is quite a bit better for WWE. And, the crowd was WAY more in to it once the WWE portion started. We were sitting in front of a guy and girl who were pretty funny to listen to. During the ECW portion they did nothing but complain. And I mean about EVERYTHING. “Don’t these people know that so-and-so retired?” “Don’t these people know that so-and-so got beat by so-and-so at such-and-such event?” If they weren’t so amusing I would have probably turned around and told them to STFU. Thankfully it didn’t come to that. But, the karma police made a stop at their doorstep anyway. A guy trying to pass in their aisle kicked over their $6 soda. How do I know it cost $6? Because he complained about it for the next 10 minutes. I’m pretty sure I was smiling the entire time.
I’m bummed I didn’t take my nice camera with zoom lens. I saw several people with them and nobody was saying a word. Bah! I’ll know for next time. Until then, here are a few shots from my pocket camera.
