4 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 17)

Ups…

4. An Interesting Concept

WWE ThunderDome
WWE

The jury is clearly still out on it, but WWE ThunderDome as announced Monday sounds like a hell of an intriguing idea.

For the past five months, WWE has broadcast Raw, SmackDown and its PPVs from the Performance Center, providing a strange look into how athletic entertainment looks without a real audience. Even using NXT trainees as fans, while necessary, really had run its course, and the Performance Center itself really was becoming stifling.

So now, WWE will move into the Amway Center in Orlando for the foreseeable future. Doing so will allow them to use pyro, lasers, drone cameras and video boards to bring fans virtually into the arena.

All of this sounds very interesting, and more importantly, different. It’s gotta be better than having Shotzi Blackheart wearing a facemask and cheering for Raw superstars in a cramped arena.

We shall see how things go this weekend.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.