10 Important Innovations WCW Made To The Wrestling Industry

5. Launching Thunder As A Second Primetime Show

The arrival of WCW Thunder in January of 1998 was the result of Nitro becoming such a big success on Monday nights. Thunder was originally a Thursday night show (it moved to Wednesdays in 2000) that aired on TBS, which was another Ted Turner owned station much like TNT was. Since Turner owned the wrestling plus the two cable channels he made the decision to air Thunder. For the short term, it was a good move. In the long term, it was a bad idea. A reason that it was good is because WCW was hot when they launched Thunder. Fans were clamoring for more WCW, so they filled that desire by adding Thunder to their programming schedule. The problem was overexposure. There wasn't much of a difference between the two shows and if fans could see the same matches on both shows it didn't seem fresh or like a "must see" TV show anymore. Thunder died because the quality suffered. The quality of Nitro also suffered. If WCW only had Nitro for two hours on Monday they might still be around today. Instead, they failed partly because of the overexposure of having so much content out there. Having two primetime weekday television shows put WCW ahead of WWE until WWE launched Smackdown in August of 1999. By that point, WWE had surpassed WCW. It's another one of those things where we should probably thank WCW for Smackdown just because without Thunder it's unlikely WWE would have ever felt the need to do that second show. As a side note, the original theme song on Thunder was a song called "Here Comes The Pain" by Slayer. That phrase became the catchphrase of Brock Lesnar a few years after this. Way to innovate, Thunder. You did do something right after all.