Behind The Scenes At WorldWide And Sunday {Pro}
Behind The Scenes At WorldWide And Sunday {Pro}

I first got into pro wrestling back in the early 1980s. At the time, Poughkeepsie, NY was the de facto home of the WWF. Just about every three weeks, the WWF would come to the Poughkeepsie Civic Center and tape three weeks worth of shows in one night.
It was a great time. Seats were only eight bucks so the house would fill up and, for those eight bucks, the show would last over four hours. One time I went, we saw every single wrestler under contract to the WWF wrestle at least once or appear in some fashion (e.g. Roddy Piper doing Piper's Pit segments), with the exception of Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant.
The cards were very unlike a house show for a non-TV taping. Ninety percent of the matches were complete squashes and lasted five minutes or less. However, there was just so much going on and things moved so fast that you didn't care. Plus, at the end of the card, there would be at least one good dark match. It was ironic that you would see squashes all night, and then while the good matches were on at the end, the TV cameras weren't on. One night, the main event was King Kong Bundy vs. Hillbilly Jim (I forget who won). The first time I ever went to a live wrestling card, the main event was a battle royal, with B. Brian Blair ousting "Iron" Mike Sharpe for the victory. That was the night I met Vince McMahon outside a diner.
Although the Poughkeepsie Civic Center was not big enough for a "mega-event", a few noteworthy events did occur there. I'm sure there were many more, but off the top of my head I remember that Paul Orndorff turned on Hogan in Poughkeepsie, Rotundo and Windham won their second tag team title there, Lisa Sliwa debuted there (and it may have been her only match), and the infamous "Land Of 1,000 Dances" video was filmed there.
Anyway, the point of all this is that it really gave me an appreciation for the behind-the-scenes workings of a wrestling promotion. Rather than be disappointed it wasn't "real", I became a smarter mark. Wrestlers would jaw at each other on Piper's Pit and agree to fight "next week" and fight an hour later, as from the taping's perspective, it was next week. On rare occasions, you'd see a jobber taken out on a stretcher only to have him come out showered and wearing different tights to wrestle again an hour later, no worse for the wear.
What's the point of this monologue? Steve Raymond was nice enough to send in his experiences at a tapings in Universal Studios in Orlando a few weeks back. While some of this might seem like he's "giving away secrets", he's not. These are the experiences anyone would have at a TV taping.
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