WCW Thunder, or simply Thunder, is an American professional wrestling show that was produced by World Championship Wrestling which aired on TBS from January 8,1998 to March 21,2001.
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14 Facts About WCW Thunder
2.
Rights to WCW Thunder now belong to WWE, who purchased WCW properties in 2001.
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3.
Second, he felt WCW Thunder did not have enough talent to produce another show and risked overexposing them and making storylines less significant.
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4.
Third, according to Bischoff, TBS refused to pay the cost of producing WCW Thunder which was between $12 million and $15 million per year.
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5.
WCW Thunder originally debuted as a live weekly show, but the schedule was changed by Bischoff in August 1998 due to complaints by wrestlers over travel demands.
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6.
The first match to take place in WCW Thunder featured Chris Adams against Randy Savage with Miss Elizabeth.
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8.
In 1998, WCW Thunder consistently had one of the highest Nielsen ratings on cable, at one time rivaling the audience size of a Thursday night NFL broadcast on ESPN.
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9.
WCW Thunder switched from Thursday evenings to Wednesday evenings on January 12,2000.
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10.
On October 9,2000, WCW moved the Thunder tapings to Monday nights, the same night as Nitro.
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11.
Bryan Alvarez and R D Reynolds wrote in their book, The Death of WCW, the reasoning behind the tapings was attendance at Thunder events had dropped considerably over the previous twenty-one months.
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12.
Towards the end of the show's run, WCW Thunder was the anchor of a TBS programming block known as "iWatch Wednesdays", which was tied to the website TBS Interactive.
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13.
WCW Thunder is the final wrestling broadcast to air on TBS until the debut of AEW Dynamite which premiered on January 5,2022.
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14.
Veteran industry journalist Wade Keller said that the introduction of Thunder could be called "the beginning of the end" for the now-defunct WCW, adding that the program's debut "is probably as good of a turning point as you could pick out".
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