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Burt Reynolds


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Having said that merchandising was a HUGE part in the decision making factor of the prequels (and even ROTJ hence the Ewoks). I know for a fact (this quote came from GL's son to me in private) that the reason the prequels all had a different villain, that the clones have so many darn colors, etc was merchandising. It was literally thought up at the time.

I wouldn't disagree. But this was the mid-90s. It really doesn't have anything to do with 80s WWF or SW getting release in 1977. :)

 

 

So it might not have been a factor in merchandising then but it sure as heck is now.

No one is arguing that. Hell, those shitty prequels were one of the first movies to push the shit out of ad campaign tie-ins with places like Burger King, which we see all the time now. :) But again... that's the 90s and 00s, not the 70s.

 

 

I guarantee if John Cena sold ZERO action figures next year, he'd be sent down the card faster than Zach Ryder.

This is 2013. Hogan was 1984. :)

 

 

Those things didn't START with SW or 80's WWF (well in the later case I would argue they did, merch pre Hogan was not terribly important) but it was a massive massive increase.

I keep saying in this thread, as I have for more than a decade online: Vince didn't always innovate, but he usually did things better. We'll take something that hasn't been discussed in the thread, and isn't relevant to the 80s but makes the point:

 

Vince didn't innovate turning wrestling television into Big Money Making TV Content. While Vince may have made money over the years with some of his deals like SNME or Primetime / Early Raw, it wasn't a cash cow nor a major focus on his business in terms of making money. It was still there to get people to buy the stuff that mattered: house shows and PPV / Closed Circuit. The folks who innovated in the US on that was Eric Bischoff and the Turner folks. Nitro and later Thunder were cash cows with loads of revenue coming into the Corporate coffers, a chunk of which were tossed into the Wrestling books. It's why over time the company focused so much attention on TV: it wasn't just the egofuck of beating Vince (though that was a big part), but Wrestling Content was a massive boon to TNT (and TBS) due to those prime time ratings. 1 hour to 2. 2 hours to 3. 2 additional hours on Thursday. They weren't creating that extra time just to sell house shows and PPV: it was to sell Television Time.

 

Vince got that, followed that lead, and when he got his TV feet back under him, went on the same expansion plan and made a killing in revenue off television. To this day it remains a central element of the company.

 

Vince might pat himself on the head for inventing that. He didn't. He just ended up doing it better than anyone else.

 

 

It's a point I made with JVK but it's not usually the first success that changes things. Hollywood didn't get on the horror bandwagon in the 30's until Frankenstein, which was the second hit. Comic book movies didn't start coming everywhere till Spiderman which was after Xmen.

This to me is an overstatement. Comic book movies have been out there your entire life. I'd disagree that Spidey was an important moment, but it hardly was earth changing.

 

Marvel's properties are, and still are, spread out:

 

Fox: X-Men, Fantastic Four, and other smaller projects like Daredevil & Electra

Columbia: Spider-Man and jobbers like Ghost Rider

Marvel: Avengers univers, along with everything they've been able to hold onto / regain

 

Spidey didn't have anything do to with Fox doing X2 and Daredevil: those were in the works before Spidey came out. X-Men's success made Fox want to invest into the properties they had. Over time, X has been the only thing they've been able to sell. Of course they're going to reboot Fantastic Four, but we all know that as soon as Avengers took off.

 

Dittos with Ang Lee's Hulk: that was a project in the works for more than a decade, harking back to the 1989 Batman era and folks trying figure out how to get in on that. Lee got involved in it more than a year before Spidey was released, and shooting began before Spidey was released.

 

In turn, Spidey didn't have much to do with the Superman and Batman franchises. They're Warner's baby, and they were always going to cough out more rather than have the rights revert back to DC. The success of not just Spidey, but the entire genre including X-Men, made them go back in during the mid-00's. Hell, Warner lifted Singer from the X-Men series to reboot Superman. :)

 

Marvel Studios is a different beast. It's drive to produce movies itself was more than just Spidey: it was the fact that Marvel wasn't raking in as much money off the X-Men and Spidey movies as they thought they should given their ownership of the base characters. So self product, and keep more of the cash. Smart.

 

Spidey had a big impact. But it was a piece of various balls in the air that got us to where we are now. A big one, but there were other big ones as well.

 

 

So to be clear the Star Wars trilogy didn't create the summer blockbuster. Adolf Hitler didn't create Nazism either. But he darn sure had more of an impact than Von Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Dietrich Eckhart or Anton Drexler either. Likewise those 3 movies had a huge impact on summer blockbusters. There were summer blockbusters before SW. (Jaws being the most famous example). But I would argue SW was the most important summer blockbuster of all time. Because it made a TON of money and cemented in the general public's limited view that the summer was blockbuster time.

I live through it. SW didn't really stamp on our views that Summer = Blockbuster. You can look at the other big movies of 1977, and the big movies of 1978 and the big movies of 1979 and the big movies of 1980, and it really wasn't a case of Summer = Blockbuster. There very much was still a split between them coming out in Summer and in Fall/Winter.

 

Trust me... Summer = Blockbuster was an 80s thing when it completely took off.

 

That's coming from someone who saw SW more than 20+ times that summer it came out.

 

 

And to your other broad point, I don't get defensive in the slightest when people knock 80's WWF. In my group of wrestling friends I'm almost always the first one to suggest Mid South or JCP or Memphis or something different whereas they want to pop in an old Coliseum Video. You basically made a point saying most people are idiots. Well yeah they can be a lot of the time. Unfortunately there's more of them and they can dictate a lot.

 

And yes not every expert was out to get 80's WWF. Meltzer was in that era but you're right. I never said you hadn't credited Hogan and co for their success.

Meltzer was/is Meltzer, and most hardcores in the 80s hated the WWF. I certainly did back them. But...

 

That was then, this is now. There have always been hardcores online, and all of us who were online back in the mid-90s certainly ran into them. There were people who loved the WWF and hated WCW, people who loved WCW and hated the WWF, those kooky ECW fans over in the corner, and those elitist snob puroresu fans getting off on their own stuff and looking down their nose at everyone else. ;)

 

Now? There are plenty of people online who like 80s WWF. There are big long threads about it all over the web. There were polls on sites that have long since disappeared where 80s WWF stood toe-to-toe with the more praised 90s and 00s WWF and frankly did pretty well, with people liking both.

 

So...

 

It's well past the time that people stop tossing out the "Elitist Snob" crap at people who don't think 80s WWF is all that great. People like what they like, and dislike what they dislike for whatever reasons they have. That goes for any promotion or wrestlers.

 

Example:

 

I really hate watching the 1998 and 1999 Misawa-Kobashi matches. I'd rather watch a random Triple H match... and I fucking HATE Triple H.

 

Now if some All Japan fan read that comment and responded by saying:

 

"You must be one of those rubes who hates All Japan and puroresu."

 

Well... that person would be a dumb ass. :)

 

People like what they like, don't like what they don't like, stop thinking it's because they're Elitists or Rubes. They just happen to not like what you like, or vice versa. More often than any of us care to think, they might just be right and the shit is better/worse than we think it is.

 

 

As to that old house show cards issue my only point was that WWF ran 3 shows, Crockett one most of the time. That gave him a huge edge in a more focused house show lineup with storyline backed matches. His big cards also had fewer matches, again a huge edge in making each match important. But on any given night after 87 the WWF had usually almost as many or as many "Feud" based matches as Crockett did in total.

That's all stuff we covered when the topic came up. We looked it in a variety of ways, and from every angle. The person making the claim just happened to be dead wrong.

 

 

I even admitted my original Kane reference was idiotic. Kane was a huge flop that nearly ruined RKO and Orson Welles (TMA finished him off there). That was a quick facile thing to compare it too. Gone with the Wind I am more comfortable. I'd say Wizard of Oz but actually it took nearly 20 years for that movie to really make money.

Hard to tell. GWTW was a commercial and critical success at the time it came out. WWF 80s was a commercial success... and a critical flop at the time. It's only in the years sense that it's gotten better critical notice. I'd have to think of an equiv on that aspect: slow critical acknowledgement. It's not gotten the praise of Kane: at the end of the 80s DVDVR Project if they did a Top 200 of matches, the WWF is going to get less representation than a number of other promotions. So we'd have to find something that was critically savaged at the time of release, was a hit, and then 20-30+ years later people took another look and thought, "This actually is good. Maybe not GREAT~!, but it's not a bad movie at all."

 

And the Jazz Singer, well that wasn't as huge a change. The movie wasn't all sound, it took a few years and a few dozen successful sound movies for Hollywood and mainstream America to get on board with sound. It always take Hollywood a few hits to back anything really.

The Jazz Singer was a change in this sense: No Sound before, Sound after.

 

And that's basically what the WWF in the 80s was: No National Promotion before, National Promotions after.

 

It took a while for JCP to go National, but it did and in a sense had to in some way or it wouldn't have survived. Watts made a stab at going national before his company went under. The promotions that stayed territories eventually all died.

 

 

Your points about SW and Reagan though seem to be a variation on the "you can't understand something you haven't lived through". Speaking as a history teacher than darn sure would put us all out of business fast. And I don't really agree with it that much anyway. I didn't mean to imply that everyone in Reagan's America believed what he did. But Vince I think did and promoted that same basic belief system through Hogan.

Well... I was getting my history degree exactly during Hogan's first reign, so I kind of get history a bit. :)

 

Hogan as a babyface really wasn't any different from loads of babyfaces who came before him. Reagan's America really had very little to do with it. Heels were bad, some of them did bad things to Hogan and he was after vengeance, and some of them were chasing the belt and Hogan was going to keep it. Hogan-Orndorff really wasn't an embodiment of the Reagan Era. Paul felt slighted. Paul struck out. Paul listened to bad people. Hogan went for payback. It's the type of thing that had been going on in heel turns for decades.

 

Did Vince wrap Hogan in the Flag? Real American nonsense? Sure. But that had been going on for ages in pro wrestling. Hell, it wasn't even central to Hogan as a champ as the majority of his opponents happened not to be Evil Foreigners.

 

Say your prayers and take you vitamins? That crap had been around long before RR, and has been around long after. It really wasn't an RR thing, no matter how much goofballs like the Moral Majority thought it was.

 

Really... you're reading far too much into Hogan. :)

 

 

It's just that when you compare Smokey to 80's WWF I laugh. Smoky was a time piece that was a hit, was fun and had really zero impact on its broader business. 80's WWF had a much bigger impact on pro wrestling. I would say in that way SW as a game changer is the better comparison.

That's not an unreasonable way to look at it.

 

I was going more for Smokey be from a pedestrian genre, being rather simplistic in it's goals and execution, not really going for anything terribly broad artistically or thematically, not taking itself seriously, being rather cliched, generally dismissed as low brow... but both wildly successful, perfectly entertaining, and when reflecting back on it was a pretty good movie for what it was.

 

No one thought the WWF was an Oscar nominee for churning out Best Matches. No one thought Smokey was either.

 

SW got 10 Oscar nomination, including the three big non-acting ones: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. It won 6 of them, and got a 7th special award because people were so blown away with an element of making it. It was a massive commercial hit... and it was a massive critical hit as well.

 

Granted, anyone who knows anything about the movie kind of laughs in hindsight at Lucas getting nominations for Director and Screenplay. :) But they are reflective of folks being blown away by the shit on a critical level at the time.

 

The WWF in the 80s? Not so much.

 

That was my analogy to Smokey. I'm sure we can some up with others.

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Coliseum Video was run by A & H Video Sales Representatives, Inc. The Evart Enterprises thing sounds like a bit of an urban myth, though someone said they did the box artwork.

Have no idea if these searches hold when posted, but give it a go:

 

WWF:

http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon...11220&SID=2

 

Evart:

http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon...11220&SID=2

 

Evart in more detail:

http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon...HC=83&SID=4

 

Setting aside the porn, the WWF ones by Evart are little inconsistent. Some, like the Andre, might be box art. Others, like the WrestleMania and "Biggest, the smallest, the strangest, the strongest" (which isn't porn) aren't for box art:

 

 

Authorship on Application: compilation of film footage & all other cinematographic material: Evart Enterprises, Inc., employer for hire.

Previous Registration: Preexisting material: some film footage.

Basis of Claim: New Matter: "compilation of film footage, script, and all other cinematographic material."

It is an oddity.

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Here's my take on this. Modern cinema tends to view SW as a make or break point. Everything changed after SW. Is that right? To an extent, but the perception that that's what happened is extremely prevalent.

From a critical standpoint, a lot of critics blame Jaws and Star Wars for killing off the more artistic, auteur-driven New Hollywood cinema, so if people view the territories as being more artistic per se then I think Star Wars or Jaws is a fairly apt analogy for the WWF. I like the image of the WWF being Jaws. The auteurs were also largely to blame for the demise of New Hollywood, much like the territories themselves, and Hollywood was taking advantage of a changing commercial landscape much like Vince did.

 

I think the analogy works fairly well.

Not unreasonable.

 

Except Jaws probably was a better movie than the WWF was wrestling. :)

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Who or what is the Heaven's Gate of wrestling? Post-UWF buyout Crockett?

It'd have to be something that cost a ton of money and failed right out the gate.

 

...and did huge damage to the business as a whole (when OJ talks about auteurs being to blame for their own Hollywood demise, this movie served as the breaking point). That's why I'm tempted to go with '87 Crockett over SWS, which was sort off in its own isolated world and ended up being a blessing in disguise for All-Japan, despite being a money pit.

 

TNA is one long unending Heaven's Gate. :)

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One small thing JDW you talk about how Hulk etc were in development before Spiderman. You're right. But Hollywood always has tons of projects in development that never got made. I had a friend who's a screenwriter at Columbia and he's gone into detail to me about how once Spiderman was a hit, every studio was interested in Marvel. Hulk was a good exception because it had been a popular tv series well remembered. Anyone in 2002 who remembered the Spiderman series wish they hadn't. The others I am convinced without Spidey's success might not have happened.

 

Yeah X2 got made because X-Men was a success. But a lot of those other movies would never have left development if Spiderman had flopped. Your average movie exec would simply have said "eh one hit wonder" and let it go. Just like none of those SW ripoffs ever made much money. Except Flash Gordon but calling that a SW rip off is rather like saying Stalin ripped off Kim Jong Il.

 

There's always been superhero movies? Well yes. There were serials in the 40's, then Batman in 66. But not much came from that. Superman was a hit, and led to some fairly silly TV stuff around the same time frame. Batman 89 led to its own series, and a few pulp revivals (Shadow, Phantom). But I'd argue it's only in the last 10 years that the top ten blockbusters each year consistently have 3-4 superhero movies among them. There was always wrestling before 80's WWF just not as successful either.

 

The story I've heard JDW is that Vince got a huge amount of cash up front for the video rights to the WWF. He basically got Evart/Coliseum/whoever to pony up a huge amount of cash up front to be the exclusive distributor of WWF videos. Now how this small company got the cash is beyond me (given where it was located it would be fairly amusing to find out it was mob money ala Maniac Cop 2 and TCM) but that's what happened. And then the home video sales of Wrestlemania kicked in and were huge. It was only $40 and a 3 hour tape when 60-90 for a movie was typical at the time.

 

Action figure sales were important for the first 2 waves of figures I'm told. Every wrestler I've ever asked made in those waves has confirmed this (Piper, Snuka, Valentine, Sheik, Orndorff and Bundy, the only action figure possible to use as a murder weapon). After that it seemed to have dropped off a TON (simple answer being the cartoon show was cancelled).

 

WWF a critical flop? With who? Meltzer? If there's anyone movie critics could laugh at at having less influence it would be wrestling critics.

 

And you might not have read the basic of my comparison with Hogan/Reagan. It was a Hogan can do whatever he wants and cheat like crazy, be a jerk and screw his friends but that's okay because he's Hogan. He was the Teflon Champ.

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Most home videos were priced for rental, meaning they had higher prices than retail "sell-through" videos of children's movies and whatnot that stores had to invest in and make up. Even the highest priced wrestling videos were cheaper than studio movies, though. Only the $9.99 30-60 minute "greatest hits series" type wrestling tapes were sold at retail.

 

In the long thread about Blockbuster's mass closing of stores at the last version or the DVDVR forum, it was mentioned that one of the reasons porn was so profitable for non-chain video stores was that they cost something like $5-$10 each. Stores broke even right away.

 

Also, by '88 at the latest, the Turner Home Enterainment JCP titles were selling for $30 shipped.

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Authorship on Application: compilation of film footage & all other cinematographic material: Evart Enterprises, Inc., employer for hire.

Previous Registration: Preexisting material: some film footage.

Basis of Claim: New Matter: "compilation of film footage, script, and all other cinematographic material."

It is an oddity.

 

Apparently, Evart and A & H Video Sales Representatives were the same company. They filed the trademark for Coliseum Video under the name A & H -- http://www.trademarkia.com/coliseum-video-73545435.html and were listed as such in the Ventura lawsuit -- http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-8th-circuit/1387808.html

 

On this early Coliseum release you can see them claiming the rights to the package design and summary -- http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i9/TheRe...xplosivetnt.jpg

 

Later, they're listed as the copyright holder on some releases -- http://www.wrestlenewz.com/wp-content/uplo...sualMatches.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

I picked up a whole ton of NWA/WCW vhs for $5 each, factory sealed, from a flyer that WCW sent out to mag subscribers sometime in 1992.

I got something similar from WWF magazine in 1996. I don't remember if they were that much, but one day in the mail I got a catalog featuring all of their VHS titles for some reason. Weird thing is is that the subscription stopped a few years earlier.

 

To bring this back on topic

 

 

 

Burt's got stories for days in these.

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Authorship on Application: compilation of film footage & all other cinematographic material: Evart Enterprises, Inc., employer for hire.

Previous Registration: Preexisting material: some film footage.

Basis of Claim: New Matter: "compilation of film footage, script, and all other cinematographic material."

It is an oddity.

 

Apparently, Evart and A & H Video Sales Representatives were the same company. They filed the trademark for Coliseum Video under the name A & H -- http://www.trademarkia.com/coliseum-video-73545435.html and were listed as such in the Ventura lawsuit -- http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-8th-circuit/1387808.html

 

On this early Coliseum release you can see them claiming the rights to the package design and summary -- http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i9/TheRe...xplosivetnt.jpg

 

Later, they're listed as the copyright holder on some releases -- http://www.wrestlenewz.com/wp-content/uplo...sualMatches.jpg

 

Yep. Look like on some of the early ones the claimed sole copyright, either by mistake in printing it, or in the WWF/Titan being slow on the uptake to get their own claims in.

 

So Coliseum = Evart and A & H Video Sales Representatives.

 

Strange that it took so long for Vince to cut them out, either to do it in house or move to some other license. Would assume that Coliseum/Evart took low enough cuts and/or their distribution was good enough for Vince and/or there just wasn't massive money in tapes for Vince.

 

The Ventura ruling you point to gives some info:

 

Anson arrived at his estimate of damages by applying a royalty percentage to Titan's revenues from wholesale distribution of the tapes.   The sales figures for the ninety videotapes upon which Ventura appeared were not available, but net profits (a more conservative measure) were established to the penny ($25,733,527.94).

Jesse left the WWF in August 1990, filed suit in December 1991, and expert reports would have been a couple of years after that. Jesse was on most of the stuff produced from 1985 when they launched through 1990, all of the Manias from I to VI... $25M probably was the vast majority of the profit off sales through at least the end of 1990 with some legacy stuff being sold after that. Say an average of $4.3M a year from 1985-90, with it below that early on and comfortably above it towards the end.

 

"Profit" isn't really "profit", because it's likely Hogan gets his cut after that number, etc:

 

During each negotiation, Bloom asked Glover whether Titan had changed its policy regarding the payment of videotape royalties, and each time Glover reiterated that no talent received videotape royalties unless they were the featured performer on a videotape.   Glover also told Ventura of this policy.   Bloom and Ventura relied on Glover's statements concerning Titan's royalty policy, and understood that by entering into fee agreements they waived any right Ventura had to royalties.   Despite these representations, Titan simultaneously made numerous royalty payments which were inconsistent with the purported policy of not paying royalties except to featured performers.10

 

10. In 1985, 1986 and 1987, Titan paid videotape royalties to Hulk Hogan and Marvel Comics for “Wrestlemania I,” “II” and “III,” despite the fact that there was no featured performer in these productions.   During 1988, Titan paid videotape royalties to all 54 wrestlers appearing in the “Survivor Series,” to all 57 wrestlers appearing in “Wrestlemania IV” and to all 38 wrestlers appearing in “Summer Slam '88.”   Again, these payments were inconsistent with Titan's stated policy because none of these videotapes had one featured performer.   Beginning in December 1988, Titan paid royalties to all wrestlers appearing in videotapes of pay-per-view events.

So Vince wasn't pocketing $4M+ without costs. But still...

 

That's not a bad revenue stream. Not major relative to PPV or house shows, but not a bad extra bonus to toss to workers whenever Vince got around to paying them.

 

John

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Most home videos were priced for rental, meaning they had higher prices than retail "sell-through" videos of children's movies and whatnot that stores had to invest in and make up. Even the highest priced wrestling videos were cheaper than studio movies, though. Only the $9.99 30-60 minute "greatest hits series" type wrestling tapes were sold at retail.

Yep. The video business didn't think people wanted to own stuff, despite people paying a ton for Star Wars when it hit video and laser disc. One guesses they pawned that off on something special rather than there being a market for it.

 

On the other hand, chains like Blockbuster and the others were signing up deals with the studios, so it felt like free money to the studios.

 

Felt like DVD changed that, but it might have happened just before DVD?

 

 

In the long thread about Blockbuster's mass closing of stores at the last version or the DVDVR forum, it was mentioned that one of the reasons porn was so profitable for non-chain video stores was that they cost something like $5-$10 each. Stores broke even right away.

Yep... porn was often priced to move for consumers. There long was mail order, sale at porn stores, and other distribution. Though they probably weren't dealing with royalties with a lot of the performers: flat fee for a scene or scenes in a movie, and that's the end of paying Ginger and Tom Byron. After you pay costs, every sale is profit without royalties.

 

 

Also, by '88 at the latest, the Turner Home Enterainment JCP titles were selling for $30 shipped.

I'm trying to remember what the two video Best of Starcade went for when originally put on sale. More than $30 since it was two tapes?

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JDW it happened way before DVD, it started in 1989 when Batman came out on VHS for only $24.99 and sold like gangbusters. That wasn't seen as a special one off like Star Wars (remember my point about Hollywood usually needing TWO examples to start a trend). Within a few years, low priced VHS tapes of everything were available.

 

To put into perspective how fast this change was in 1989 Universal had put out only 8 of its classic horror movies on VHS (all for $50-80 and some whose selling point was critic Gene Shallit on the cover). By 1992 you could get over 40 of them on VHS for $15 a pop. The video market exploded in the very early 90's and owning stuff became the norm. DVD certainly expanded that field but it was done with VHS.

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I seem to remember there being a time where VHS would be available for rent for a short time period before they were available to purchase. I believe the prices were outrageous at first but would then go down to a more reasonable price. I assume the video rental places had some sort of deal worked out with the studios here.

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