Ah, yet another example of
World Championship Wrestling's incredible
stupidity.
WCW, in their infinite wisdom, decided in mid-1993 to tape a mindblowing
three months of their syndicated programming at one time.
They rented out a studio at Disneyworld down in Florida and basically
picked people off the street to be audence members--people with any interest
in wrestling whatsoever were actually weeded out to try to prevent the
results being leaked. Signs, t-shirts, and other promotional items
were handed out to give the illusion of these people actually caring about
what was going on. They were also specifically told who to cheer
and who to boo.
Some wrestling fans managed to sneak in, and thus every major title
change of the next four months was known in advance by seeing who came
out with the title belts--even the WCW World Title was being defended at
these tapings at the time. Basically, it killed any interest in watching
WCW...after all, it isn't exactly exciting to watch the Nasty Boys defend
their tag team titles in August when you know they're going to keep the
belts through October. (Not that it's ever exciting to watch the
Nasty Boys.)
It also killed any motivation wrestlers had to try hard--why bother?
If knew they weren't getting a belt for at least another four months, why
bother exerting themselves and putting on a good match?
Yet another problem with the title changes being set in stone was that
it didn't account for injuries and other mishaps. For example: It
was known from the tapings that the Hollywood Blondes were going to lose
the tag team titles to Arn Anderson and Paul Roma. The joke was
on WCW, though, as a week or two before they were supposed to drop the
titles, Brian Pillman (one half of the Blondes) got injured. So,
the bookers were forced into the silly scenario of having Lord
Steven Regal "substitute" for Pillman with one half of the tag team titles
so that he and Austin could lose the belts "on schedule".
You also had swerves like Marcus Bagwell and 2 Cold
Scorpio winning the tag belts (when no footage of them as champions had
been filmed) to try to give the impression that they were deviating from
the booking, but when they promptly lost the titles a week later (so that
they didn't actually deviate from the booking), no one was
much surprised.
WCW finally stopped booking major angles at the Disney tapings in
1994, but the memory of their stupidity will last forever.