WWE is boldly marching forward with great new young talent in NXT developmental. But that doesn't mean that they've forgotten the past. Vince McMahon has acquired tons of old footage from old wrestling territories like NWA and AWA, which are available to watch on the Network. Now, in celebration of "Attitude Week", in which the Network featured classic episodes of Raw from the late 90's, they also threw old-school WCW fans a bone with the addition of episodes of Monday Nitro. Here's hoping the Network continues to fatten their archives in the coming weeks and months.
For now, the Nitro vault only includes the first year-and-a-half or so of the classic Monday night wrestling program, but hopefully there's more to come. Even though WCW ultimately crashed and burned, they had a successful run in competition with WWF.
One thing that has become apparent to me in watching old episodes of Nitro is that WCW always had better wrestlers. They waxed and waned in terms of writing and storylines, but once you got the talent in the ring, the matches were always better, the ring psychology was more believable, and in the mid-90's, the first class of high flyers from Japan and Mexico started making waves in WCW.
WCW has been criticized in retrospect for hiring away aging WWE talent and living off of their successes, but WWE didn't want them anymore. Macho Man had some of his best matches between 94 and 98, when Vince McMahon thought he was over the hill. Ric Flair always thrived in the southern promotions, because his silky smooth, 60-minute style was more about the moves and the psychology.
At the end of the day, WWE was put on the ropes in the mid-90's and they fought back. Vince won the war with better programming and edgier storylines. But match for match, WCW consistently put on better in-ring performances during the Monday Night Wars.
With the exception of their gimmicky Pay-Per-Views, which could be awful. Hey, WWE Network, give us more Nitro!
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