Thoughts on Rasslin' Rags

Growing up, in regard to magazines, two publications immediately come to mind as being a constant presence in my life, those being Nintendo Power, and WWF Magazine. Without getting too far off track, Nintendo Power was a printed saviour in it's time. Before the internet, magazines were very important to gaming culture, as it's where strategies and secrets were born, and in the 8-bit Nintendo era, you really needed those tips.

WWF Magazine on the other hand, served no practical purpose. It was a combination supplement/advertisement. You could not read WWF Magazine and know what was going on in the promotion. If there was a Pay-Per-View coming up, you would get the run down on that (you know, so you could "call your local cable company"), but as a whole, the magazine was kind of a random assortment of articles. Some would be profiles of new Superstars, there would be interviews, some "behind the scenes" looks at wrestlers or events, and of course some buildup about the top couple feuds.

These books served not as a storyline summary, like other wrestling magazines of the time, but since this was WWF's in house publication, it was more used to build the characters. Bobby Heenan on the set of a western, Huk Hogan making an apperance on Regis and Kathy Lee (to promote No Holds Barred), Ted Dibase relaxing in one of his many mansions, or Ron Garvin talking about going from wrestler to referee. Before WWF had 6 hours of programing to fill per week, they had to get more creative to flesh out their characters, and I think they did an excellent job with this magazine.

Looking through the pages of one, you'll note it looks nothing like a wrestling magazine of it's time. In the 80's nearly every wrestling magazine was fully in black and white (save for a few full page colour photos in the middle, like a mutated "Tiger Beat", The Missing Link replacing David Cassidy), and featured little in the way of design. There would also be somewhat sleazy ads for cat fight videos (for $59.95 a pop), and questionable "muscle building" programs. WWF Magazine had none of this, it was full colour, featured gorgeous design, with brilliant two page layouts, and for the most part, had no advertisements (looking past the fact that the whole book was an advertisement!).

I say this not to take away from other wrestling publications, but only to draw contrast. I feel magazines like "Inside Wrestling" and "Pro Wrestling Illustrated" are much more important to the sport, as they are much more news oriented. They paint the image of pro wrestling in America, they covered every promotion and offered criticisms. I do know they weren't unbiased, but reading them now, it takes little effort to read between the lines.

This leads me into something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Many wrestling fans, myself included, are d.i.y. historians and archivists. Wrestling prior to the mid-80's has been for the most part forgotten. Not in the way that it isn't considered relevant, but in that the majority of wrestling footage from the early 80's or prior has been lost (due to studios recording over master tapes, as was common in the 60's and 70's) or is locked in a vault in Stamford, Connecticut, being released as quickly as is profitable (read: very slowly).

It's easy to figure out why wrestling fans love video, it's a very visual sport. You could lack every sense other than sight and enjoy it just the same. Wrestling boomed with cable, giving many wrestling fans a familiar feeling of watching a show they haven't seen since it's first broadcast two decades ago, and most wrestling footage hasn't seen a commercial release. It's impractical to release it all because there's so much of it, and very few buyers, causing wrestling fans to turn to one another to trade tapes to complete collections.

In my pursuit of digital wrestling media, something I've rarely come across (only once actually) is a digitized wrestling magazine. I can't be the source of any rare wrestling videos, I just wasn't born early enough. Most footage from after the first wrestling boom is out there somewhere, if you look hard enough, but wrestling magazines seemed to have fallen through the cracks. Maybe they don't offer the same level of entertainment, or maybe they're simply not as flashy as a video, but they're still important to the story of pro wrestling. So maybe this could be a way of 'doing my part'.

To begin, this was sort of a test. This isn't a WWF Magazine, but instead a program, since for the purpose of getting used to working with magazines and PDF's in this manner, it has fewer pages. I did scan a full issue of the magazine prior to this, but while trying to work through a series of errors that were coming up, I lost the entire scanned issue. I also don't own every issue, and the handful that I recently grabbed while home for the holidays are rather spaced out, so don't expect anything to be complete or chronological, but do expect them to be high quality. This first release (and each that will follow) is a 300 dpi full colour PDF (which explains it's size). I recommended reading this viewing the pages side by side, as to preserve the two-page layouts.

Here is the internet world premiere of WWF Program, issue 215 (47.9 MB):

This coming Tuesday is a "classic wrestling party" some friends put together semi-monthly, so expect to hear a bit about that soon, the card for this one is full of winners.

Until then, "give me a break!"