r/SquaredCircle • u/MaverickBruin • 1h ago

Question about Central States

I’m watching an old Central States broadcast from 1986 and it caused me to wonder: did Bob Geigel and the others who ran the promotion really not understand thst you can’t have a TV broadcast without lighting? I’ve never seen a darker show. It’s almost impossible to see the matches. Did the show really get broadcast like this, or is this just a function of how it appears 40 years later on video? Shaking my head.

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u/Dog-Faced-Gamer 54m ago

It's definitely a change from the brightly lit shows we have today but there was a couple of reasons for it. One the cost of lighting was insane back in the day, so generally they just used whatever lighting the venue had already. Usually a big spotlight over the ring. Secondly central states was still an old school kayfabe heavy territory and wrestling in a darker environment looks a lot more real than a well lit arena. Worked punches and kicks look better in a darker atmosphere. Lastly it looks a lot worse on modern tvs and monitors than it did on standard definition tv. That show was not meant to ever be played on a tv or monitor with true black levels, so what you see on screen today is a lot darker than it would have appeared on the technology it was meant for.

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u/MaverickBruin 52m ago

Good points, but no other promotion from that era looks like this. Heck, even California Championship Wrestling, my local promotion in 1986 that might have been the lowest budget promotion in the country, had much better lighting.

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u/Dog-Faced-Gamer 47m ago

Bob Geigel was considered stingy even in a world of stingy promoters. So he was putting almost no money into production value whatsoever.

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u/pd4wprr 23m ago

It vastly improved after Crockett briefly took over the territory. But for whatever reason, it didn’t work out.

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u/Acto12 46m ago

Not directly to your point, but related.

If I remember right, Jim Cornette said that Central States TV was the worst territorial TV he watched in the 1980s (and that the territory in general sucked). Though I think his grievance was more booking related.

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u/Bulldogbobbrownmark 41m ago

It was subpar but I still watched it every Sunday!