Brandon: I wanna ask you about one of the tape libraries that I hear territorial wrestling fans talk about a lot, as sort of this revolutionary era of TV wrestling, and I think it’s pretty fragmented as far as the ownership goes, but that’s the Memphis tape library, particularly throughout the 80s.
John: Yep, 100%, unfortunately. You know, we did get… it was a separate purchase, I forgot about this, too, there was a separate purchase of USWA, not the Lawler version, the Jerry Jarrett version so WWE owns that.
Brandon: Is that Global? Is that what people mean when they say Global?
John: Global is part of that too, yes, there was a couple different shows, Global was one, and then like USWA Excitement, or I forget what the name of the show was, but there was that, because we’ve aired those before, definitely have seen the light of day because Booker T and Stevie [Ray], that’s where they started, so we’ve used that before for those guys before they were Harlem Heat, so that does exist, and that was basically… That is when Fritz went out of business, Jarrett took over the territory basically and made it USWA, they had a match at the end that was like World Class versus USWA, that was like the last World Class match that ever happened, and they had [knocks on table] I should remember this too, the USWA prevailed, so they became USWA, they were wrestling right out of the Sporatorium in Dallas like World Class, but it was a different organization, but Memphis was always talked about, and the fact that a lot it was owned by Jerry The King Lawler, and he was a loyal employee of WWE for a hundred years now, that we couldn’t make that negotiation happen always blew my mind, I just could never figure it out, he certainly let us use it from time to time, but the full purchase just never came to fruition, he was always weird about it.
Brandon: Does he own it, because the impression I have is that the Memphis promotion went through various different entities, and different owners over time, so…
John: You’re absolutely correct, so what happened was I think that was a big stick in the negotiation because he would say “Yeah, this is all mine,” and then upon further review it was like three different guys, it wasn’t all his, at all, so thank you for jogging my memory, that’s exactly what it was, it was owned by several people, I think Jarrett was still one of them. There was certainly a couple other guys that were involved over the years, that’s why we could never make that happen because there were so many different moving parts that it was not doable, and like I said half the time The King was on the up and up, and the other half of the time he wasn’t, so that was hard to figure that out.
How WWE acquired territorial video libraries, a conversation with John Carlan - Wrestlenomics
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