TNA taking Impact on the road.

[Duckman]

TNA president Dixie Carter has announced that the company will tape Impact on February 24 in Fayetteville, N.C.

Will be good to see (if Impact is back on the UK by then) the show outside the Impact zone.  I'm not sure if this is a long term thing or just a one off but to see a different type of crowd (i.e. not tourists) and setting for Impact will be interesting.

Peace

Duckman

[Alex Smiley]

It's been touted as one of the major things that NEEDS to happen for TNA to "get back on their feet" in a sense. It'll definitely be interesting, if TNA can manage to run a good show not mucked up with the bad booking we've seen lately.

There's always room for hope, yes?

[! JDM The Professional !]

It will be good to see how the crowd react. I'd love to see wrestling fans there who love wrestling for what it is and boo/cheer at the right times!

lol

[Ian "Wolfie" Trumps]

It's been touted as one of the major things that NEEDS to happen for TNA to "get back on their feet" in a sense. It'll definitely be interesting, if TNA can manage to run a good show not mucked up with the bad booking we've seen lately.

There's always room for hope, yes?

Not to start an argument, but the question is how do they need to get back on their feet? If a company is now in a position to start taking a show on the road you don't get that from being down in the shit, its usually part of being in a position to do something different, in this case financially to go outside of the Impact Zone.

If the company was doing shite they wouldn't be taking Impact onto the road which is less cost effective than keeping it in house. Jeff Jarrett has stated TNA is making a profit which I am sure we all take with a pinch of salt and from what I have heard Spike have been encouraging TNA to go on the road because of the positive reactions they get from the Impact Zone.

[Black Death]

actually ian it was one of the points that people said that TNA should have done when EB and HH took over . start touring impact first . getting them shown in different places , with different crowds.  It a good move  and the Fayetteville crowd should be a postive crowd for them .

to many it can be seen as step in the right direction ,  the many that feel that the company is going the wrong way .

[Alex Smiley]

Not to start an argument, but the question is how do they need to get back on their feet? If a company is now in a position to start taking a show on the road you don't get that from being down in the shit, its usually part of being in a position to do something different, in this case financially to go outside of the Impact Zone.

If the company was doing shite they wouldn't be taking Impact onto the road which is less cost effective than keeping it in house. Jeff Jarrett has stated TNA is making a profit which I am sure we all take with a pinch of salt and from what I have heard Spike have been encouraging TNA to go on the road because of the positive reactions they get from the Impact Zone.

You're right, "getting back on their feet" is probably not the best way to phrase it. Bolded the part about Jarrett because yeah, that's exactly how I feel about anything he (or Bischoff or Hogan) really say on how well the company's doing. Then again, the point has already been made that we don't really know HOW they're doing because, unlike WWE, TNA is a private company and they don't release their numbers (that I'm aware of anyway). It's possible Jarrett just said that to cover some of the bigger issues they have (mainly booking) just as much as it's possible he's telling the truth. Honestly hard to know which, in my opinion.

TNA's business condition notwithstanding, having Impact on the road is definitely all sorts of awesome. I for one hope they bring TNA back to the West Coast for this.

[Duckman]

A once a month special live Impact outside Universal would be a good starting point.

I don't imagine it'll be live though but they should certainly look to take the show on the road.

Cost wise it's estimated it costs WWE over $600,000 for every Raw and SD just in production costs and travel.  Given that you can see why TNA can't just start touring Impact all over the country.

Slow and steady build is needed but they really need to get out of the amusement park.

Peace

Duckman

[Duckman]

Figure Four Weekly's take on it.  Again, I hate quoting Alvarez but dude makes some valid points:

TNA's latest plan to address their issues without actually addressing their issues is to do more Impact tapings from locations outside the Impact Zone in Orlando, Fla.

It has become comical the lengths the company will go to try to solve their problems while repeatedly managing to avoid doing anything to solve their biggest problem of all, Vince Russo's creative. Their newest solution is almost outlandishly funny given the way the whole thing came about.

Several months ago, some Spike TV executives went to a TNA house show in New York and were blown away by how great it was, and what an amazing atmosphere the show had as compared to tapings at the Impact Zone. Shortly thereafter it was announced that they'd be doing two TV tapings on February 24th in Fayetteville, N.C., and that they'd do another eight to ten live tapings elsewhere in 2011.

I probably don't need to explain this to any of you, but perhaps someone from Spike will read this, or someone can explain this to the people at Spike. TNA house shows are significantly better than TNA Impact for reasons that have nothing to do with anything involving the Impact Zone.

People have argued many times in the past that the Orlando fans are burned out on the product and thus it would benefit the program to tape from elsewhere. To be fair, the first time Impact comes to a new market for a taping the crowd is probably going to be a lot hotter than they were at the Impact Zone, because that's what usually happens the first time you tape in a new market. But taping on the road is a major added expense and is an attempt to solve a problem without actually looking at the root of the problem.

The issue is not the same fans in the same building every week or two. The Charlotte (WRAL-TV studios), Tampa (Sportatorium), World Class (Dallas Sportatorium) and Atlanta (WTBS studios) territories all ran weekly for years. Atlanta, even prior to going up on WTBS, did huge business weekly in the '60s. World Class ran every single week and after five straight years they were hotter than ever, as opposed to having burnt out their fanbase as Impact has supposedly done in the same timespan. Kansas City ran weekly and the owners made a killing during the heyday. Amarillo with the Funks ran weekly on Channel 10. Memphis ran weekly out of the WMC-TV studios for decades, and also did huge crowds every Monday night year after year from the Mid-South Coliseum. Paul Boesch taped both weekly and bi-weekly depending upon the period, first from the Houston City Auditorium and later from the Sam Houston Coliseum, for KHTV channel 39, a show which ran for more than 30 years.

The two most impressive examples, and the two that really make TNA's concern about burning out the Impact Zone look ridiculous, are Portland Wrestling and CMLL at Arena Mexico and Arena Coliseo. Don Owen's Portland Wrestling ran the Portland Sports Arena, a renovated bowling alley, every week for decades, and their television show ran continuously on various local stations for 38 straight years â€" significantly longer than Raw, which WWE errantly claims (and which Wikipedia considers a true fact) is the "longest running weekly episodic television show in US history."

La Empresa Mexican de Lucha Libre, which promotes today as CMLL, has been in existence since 1933 and is the longest-running wrestling promotion in history. They own two arenas in Mexico city, about two miles apart, the larger Arena Mexico and the smaller Arena Coliseo. The first Arena Coliseo card took place on April 2, 1943, and the first Arena Mexico card was promoted on April 27, 1956. With the exception of a short interruption due to a 1985 earthquake and an even shorter interruption following a 1991 union strike, CMLL has run either Arena Coliseo or Arena Mexico every single week for nearly 54 years. From September 1990 through September 1991 they averaged 10,000 paid fans on Friday (and that's with the shows airing free on TV 24 to 48 hours later) and just under 10,000 paid fans on Sunday every single week. In the last few years they have run, on average, 3.5 shows per week every week in the same three-mile radius in Mexico City. In fact, Friday's show, which drew 8,500, was the seventh show they ran in the same three-mile radius in 14 days. And although the last three years have been rather poor, CMLL had 20 shows in 2008, nine shows in 2009, and 18 shows in 2010 that drew more than 10,000 paid â€" all in the same building.

In many territories, first-row fans were so well known for coming week after week, month after month, year after year that their seats were basically permanently reserved, and the only way someone new could claim that seat was if the person currently claiming it died.

"We never thought it special back then," noted Les Thatcher.

Arena Mexico is a particularly striking example, because while there were territories were you could get into the weekly television taping for free, Arena Mexico and Arena Coliseo have always charged attendance, whereas TNA lets fans into the Impact Zone for free. While CMLL is in a down period right now, they will still do anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 paid on average in the same building virtually every week this year, just as they did last year, and the year before, and every year prior dating back decades.

It also should be noted that until the last several years, and particularly in the '90s, you could write up results of Arena Mexico shows and the same guys who were headlining ten and twenty years earlier would still be headlining. So you can't even use the excuse that fans get sick of the same people on top (though this is absolutely not an argument that you should keep the same people on top, because you shouldn't â€" only that if you know what you're doing, at least keeping some veterans around for decades isn't going to kill your business).

TNA's problem is not that they've run the Impact Zone for too long. Compared to the great weekly wrestling shows throughout history they've run the same building every week for the blink of an eye. The big difference is that all of those promotions which were successful year after year didn't have abhorrent booking, start-and-stop angles, inexplicable babyface and heel turns and constant swerves. And it's not just that the show makes no sense when you watch the television. Of late, they've been taping three or four weeks' worth of shows in the span of three or four days, and every correspondent report we receive has a line reading something to the effect of, "This might have been taped for a different episode." It's hard enough trying to follow Impact storylines on television. Imagine being a fan attending the show and having to essentially watch a version of Impact where many of the angles and matches are out of order. It's no surprise the fans are burnt out.

And that brings us to the other reason for taping elsewhere, that Spike TV execs saw a house show and thought it was so much better than Impact. I don't know this but based on the fact that Russo is still writing TV I'd presume that nobody asked the most obvious question: "Who is responsible for these house shows?" The reason house shows are so much better than TV has nothing to do with the fact that they're taped outside Orlando. They're better because they're put together by completely different people and they don't resemble Impact in any conceivable way outside featuring the same wrestlers. In fact, while the same human beings work both house shows and TV, in a sense you could almost argue they are different wrestlers because if a guy is a heel on TV but he's obviously more suited to be a babyface, he'll work as a babyface at house shows. This happened many times with Eric Young, who was a heel on TV but a huge babyface at the house shows, and has also happened with AJ Styles and Jeff Hardy. I've been to a TNA house show and it's like an Impact show taking place in an alternate universe. On Impact all the matches are three minutes long. At the house shows all the matches get anywhere from seven to 15 minutes. At TV and on PPV most of the matches have fuck finishes. On house shows most of the finishes are clean. At TV there are a million backstage segments, such as was the case on TV this week when, in 80 minutes, we got one wrestling match. On house shows it's all wrestling. On TV they do a million goofy angles. At house shows they may do an angle or two, always logical, such as the gimmick where it's announced that if the babyface beats the heel, X number of fans will get backstage passes. Of course, the babyface always wins. On TV the quarters decline as the show goes on, because nobody is pushed as a star and all the supposed stars randomly appear all over the place. On the house shows, opening matches with opening match guys build to midcard matches with midcard match guys which build towards main events with the biggest stars. Why these differences? Has nothing to do with where the show takes place. Has to do with the fact that Jeff Jarrett and Jeremy Borash put the house shows together while Vince Russo in charge of the television. Simple as that. In fact, until late last year, Vince Russo had never been to a single TNA house show. And you'll be shocked to hear that when he went, he suggested they revamp the shows with more of his input. Seriously. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

With all that said, I'm not going to argue that in 2011 a wrestling TV show should be all wrestling, no talking and maybe one angle. You can't do that. But there is a happy medium between TNA house shows and Vince Russo Impact that could easily be attained by putting anyone with even a modicum of a clue in charge. There are plenty of them out there. From current bookers in other companies such as Gabe Sapolsky, Hunter Johnson, Dave Prazak and Mike Quackenbush to former WWE developmental bookers like Les Thatcher, Jim Cornette and Danny Davis to former WWE writers such as David Lagana and Court Bauer to former territorial bookers who still watch the product such as Larry Matysik and Dutch Mantell. And there are literally dozens and dozens of people I didn't list, some of whom, like Mike Tenay or Lance Storm, probably don't want the hassle, and others, like Paul Heyman, who now have better things to do.

I'm not even suggesting Russo be banished from TNA outright â€" I'm fine with him contributing ideas to someone who actually understands how to book a pro-wrestling television show, because that is, quite frankly, something that he is good at, and was the role he played when he had his most success in wrestling as part of the WWE booking committee in the mid-'90s being filtered by Vince McMahon.

And there it was. I didn't even last a week before writing the same TNA article I always write.

Peace

Duckman