The origins of WCW Monday Nitro
Originally published on hookedonwrestling.com on 4th September 2020, and written by Andrew ‘Charlie’ Charles
It’s only fitting that we get the 25th anniversary celebrations of the very first WCW Nitro underway by looking at the origins of where the big boys played every Monday night.
The origins of Nitro
Vince and Ted’s working relationship.
Can you believe that Vince McMahon the highly successful wresting promoter and owner of WWE, and media mogul and billionaire Ted Turner were actually friends and business associates once upon a time?
Turner owned TBS which was a feed of his independent television station which was based in Atlanta, and was distributed throughout the United States by satellite to cable and satellite subscribers.
As Turner’s Superstation expanded, sports entertainment was regular fixture in the schedule featuring Georgia Championship Wrestling which drew high viewing figures to his network, and helped the station grow going into the 1980s. In addition the Superstation also aired syndicated programmes from WWE.
However the once strong working relationship between McMahon and Turner would soon dissolve. McMahon has started showing syndicated WWE programming on the rival USA Network, and because of this, Turner decided to drop McMahon’s programmes from his channel, and instead showed programming from WWE’s main competitor at the time Jim Crocket Promotions.
The wrestling boom started to slide
WWE decided to stay on the USA Network which helped the fortunes of the company grow with national exposure of the product spearheaded by McMahon’s hand-picked flag bearer and World Champion, Hulk Hogan in the mid 1980s. Hogan would lead the company into the very first Wrestlemania which proved to be the foundation of bringing WWE into the mainstream.
In the meantime Jim Crockett Promotions was struggling to keep up with the boom of WWE, and in 1988 Turner was sold a majority stake in the promotion, and in return created World Championship Wrestling.
Turner would comment in an interview in 1998 about his purchase of Jim Crockett Promotions;
“The reason that I got involved from an ownership standpoint was that Mr Crockett was having a very difficult time competing with Mr Mahon. And I had a vision that eventually we would be successful with”.
Vince McMahon would say:
“I wasn’t really concerned with Ted when he bought Crockett Promotions. Ted called me up to say that he was in rasslin’ business, and I told him that I was in the sports entertainment business”.
WWE goes live and RAW!
In the early 1990s there was a slight but gradual downward turn across the wrestling industry as a whole. However WWE remained the number one promotion in North America.
A refresh was needed to WWE TV offerings, in particular their offerings on the USA Network. Prime Time Wrestling was an established Monday Night fixture on the channel for WWE had gone through a number of rapid format changes with the show ranging from a highlight package show, through to studio based format, and panel based offerings..
Towards the end of Prime Time Wrestling’s run on USA there were some standout memorable moments such as the WWE TV debut of Ric Flair in 1991, and Mr Perfect’s face turn prior to the Survivor Series in 1992, and the unveiling of the Steiner Brothers joining WWE in one of the final editions of the show.
McMahon had been toying with the idea of doing a live weekly wrestling show for a while, and eventually one of the longest episodic TV shows in the world was born in 1993.
Monday Night Raw debuted live from the Manhattan Center in New York City on 11th January 1993 with a fresh format of competitive feature matches. The first episode featured high profile WWE talent of the time such as The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, The Steiner Brothers and Yokozuna.
Raw set the tone for a new style of wrestling TV show, however the increased popularity of the show being live every week would eventually become a financial burden for WWE. The only option to keep Raw going was to pre-record some of their shows. The trend for Raw would be broadcast one live show a month (usually the day after a pay-per-view), and then after the live show pre-record the next three or four editions of the show, which as the Monday Night War unfolded would be a disadvantage for WWE in the short term.
A change of fortune for WCW
The fortunes in WCW would take a turn with the introduction of a highly ambitious TV announcer named Eric Bishoff in 1991. It must noted that a few months prior to Bischoff joining WCW was that he had a screen audition for WWE, but was unsuccessful.
It had become apparent to Bishoff that WCW was mis-managed since the purchase of Jim Crockett Promotions. The company were looking for someone who could help turn WCW into a TV product, as oppose to a live event one.
Eventually Bishoff would be given the role as Executive Producer for WCW, and he was tasked with raising the standards of WCW programming.
Nitro is born
In early 1995 Bischoff had a meeting with Turner to pitch an idea to the billionaire relating to a licencing deal between WCW and Star TV in China which was owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch who also owned Sky TV in the United Kingdom at the time, which had been airing WWE programming since the mid 1980s.
Bischoff proposed to Turner that this would be a good opportunity to increase revenue, and to introduce WCW programming into a big international TV market. Turner raised a question in this meeting which would be a big turning point in the fortunes for WCW. Turner’s question was nothing to do with the expansion into the Chinese market, or Murdoch, or any licensing deals. Turner simply asked Bishoff;
“What do we need to do compete with Vince?”
Bishoff who featured on the Monday Night War DVD released in 2002 commented that he wasn’t prepared for that question. He spontaneously replied “Give me prime time!” Turner looked at the President of TNT who was present in the meeting, and looked back at Bishoff, and then once again to the TNT President and said,
“Scott give Eric two hours every Monday night on TNT”.
Bishoff left the meeting with a huge dilemma on his hands with what he was going to do with two primetime hours he was just given on Monday nights by Turner and the TNT President. This was a huge gamble for Bishoff, as WCW had predominately been on TV on Saturday nights, and WWE was pretty much established on primetime TV on Monday nights.
Fans and media critics aired their concerns that having two similar TV wresting products on air at the same time would water down the sports entertainment business in a TV ratings battle. At the time there were only a small number of wrestling fans tuning in to WWE’s Monday Night Raw already, and WCW’s new proposed primetime TV show would only take a small amount of the WWE’s audience, further reducing the overall wrestling viewership.
Bishoff was fully aware that for WCW to have any kind of success was that they would have to be different and create a loyal fanbase of wrestling TV viewers who did not watch wrestling on Monday nights, and to not just take away viewers who already watched Raw, as their loyal fanbase had already been round for some time.
Bishoff sat down and made the following list;
They’re taped, I’m going to be live.
They’re targeting a specific demographic, I’ll target a different one.
They’re very animated and cartoonesque, I’m going to be very reality based.
The name of Nitro
Once the elements of the show were laid out by Bishoff, a name was needed.
TNT showed classic action movies at the time on Saturday nights under a programming strand called ‘Saturday Nitro’. To fit in with the channel’s strand of branding, the new wrestling show was simply called ‘WCW Monday Nitro’.
Now that the new wrestling show had a name Bishoff held several press conferences announcing that WCW Monday Nitro would be going head-to-head with WWE’s Monday Night Raw and made bold statements saying that WCW would eventually emerge victorious.
Bishoff would make his quest publicly known to make Nitro the number one wrestling show in the world, and laid down the gauntlet for what would become known as simply, the Monday Night War.
