10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 2012
3. Raw 1000 Was The Highest Rated Three Hour Raw Of The Year
It was also - and imagine this, nearly a decade into these f*cking things - a good show.
Raw 1000 obscured the true horrors of the years ahead when it formally kicked off the three-hour era, mostly because WWE typically found lots of fun when given extra time to have it.
180 minutes of Monday Night Raw was once a novelty before it became the soul-destroying norm, with the company actually booking extra content to fill the extra minutes rather than simply padding out time with needlessly long filler matches, endless recaps or promo segments giving talent enough time to get themselves over then kill their push in the same stilted and over-scripted speech.
The thousandth edition of the flagship was a glorious example of this, with lashings of nostalgia surrounding a tense and heated WWE Championship match between John Cena and CM Punk, the wedding of AJ Lee and Daniel Bryan, and the return of The Rock, major announcement in tow.
As with a lot of major company firsts, this was the big hit before it all went to sh*t.