18 WWE Easter Eggs, References And In-Jokes You Never Noticed

11. You Can Find The Missing Music From The WWE Network WrestleManias On VHS Tapes

In the late '90s, WWE re released every WrestleMania up to that point on VHS. First, there was "WrestleMania: The Collection," a boxed set of the first 13 shows that was available exclusively through the company's official merchandise catalog for the then shockingly low price of $79.99. A year later, they released "WrestleMania: The Legacy," which added WrestleMania 14, gave you the choice of buying the whole set or individual shows and was available at retail.

Eventually, they also added WrestleMania 15 and a revised boxed set. At $10 a pop, they sold well, but there were a lot of noticeable issues immediately. They were made as cheaply as possible, using thin tape recorded at slow speeds that made picture quality worse and easily introduced defects. Legacy also added the Attitude Era scratch logo to every single show, no matter how out of place it looked.

To a lot of people, none of this mattered, though. Why? The early WrestleManias were heavily edited when they were first released on VHS. Commercial pop music was edited out, as were parts of matches, lots of interviews, etc. The re releases used the unedited live broadcast versions of the shows and thus restored all of the missing content. Including the music.

Nobody knows if WWE got a great deal or what, but all of the music edited out before and since (including on DVD and WWE Network), including songs from Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Survivor, and the Alan Parsons Project, is on these tapes.

While WWE Network restored the missing segments, the music is still missing, unlikely to ever return.

Contributor
Contributor

Formerly the site manager of Cageside Seats and the WWE Team Leader at Bleacher Report, David Bixenspan has been writing professionally about WWE, UFC, and other pop culture since 2009. He's currently WhatCulture's U.S. Editor and also serves as the lead writer of Figure Four Weekly and a monthly contributor to Fighting Spirit Magazine.