watching wrestling from over 40 years ago

I've been watching some really old wrestling shows from the early '80s recently. The above is Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka from a broadcast in 1983. He was 40 at the time.

1983 is pre-HULKAMANIA that didn't truly begin until '84, but what's more interesting to me is why anybody even watched this stuff to begin with.

Early '80s television really sucked. There were only two things that weren't complete trash on TV during those years. Late night television shows and sports broadcasts. That was it.

In '83, you were watching local evening news, The Tonight Show (and possibly Late Night), sports broadcasts for baseball, basketball or football, and if you had cable, wrestling.

Cable TV programming in the early '80s was even worse than what was happening on over-the-air television. The cable guys didn't have any nationwide shows that the big guys at NBC, CBS, and ABC had. They also weren't permitted to run baseball, basketball or football games either.

What they did have however was wrestling. Not a real sport, per se, but hey, good enough. So they ran it.

Wrestling shows and cable television was a perfect match. These shows were cheap to produce, cheap to broadcast, filled time and viewers back then were very willing to watch them.

It is interesting how these wrestling shows came up with storylines in this era. Yes, they did have storylines sometimes. When they did happen, it was only the absolute bare minimum required to explain why one good guy was facing the other bad guy. Maybe some dude would come on camera, shout in the microphone and say, "I heard what you said! You disrespected my family! And NOBODY does that in MY TOWN!", or something to that effect. Then another dude came on camera later and would shout in the microphone with, "Yeah! I never liked your family and I'm gonna run you outta town!" That was pretty much all it took.

Anything deeper than that would involve multiple people in a weak story. If there were two good-guy brothers and a bad guy was beating up one of them in a match and then went to hit him with a chair, the other brother would run out and save him. Something along those lines.

Aside from that, wrestling shows of this time was literally the same types of matches every week. True, the VCR existed, but it was really expensive to buy that in '83, so almost nobody had one. This being true, wrestling on TV could totally get away with repeating the same thing over and over and nobody complained. And even if people could complain, whom would they complain to? Nobody, that's who.

Again, early 1980s television did suck, so wrestling was one of the few things that was actually entertaining. Even if a particular wrestling show was boring on a particular week, it didn't matter, because it was a "sport" to watch.

Watching the stuff from 40+ years ago still holds up and I couldn't even tell you exactly why. There just seems to be a vibe with it that's a lot more... honest?

Published 2025 Jul 13