Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: wrestling, wwe

Is Anyone Else Nostalgic for the Performance Center Era of WWE?

Published Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:05:09 -0500

Starting on Friday, WWE will begin broadcasting Raw, Smackdown, and PPVs from The ThunderDome, a wonderland of lasers, pyro, LED panels, and virtual fans. But does anyone miss when Raw and Smackdown were broadcast and taped inside the WWE Performance Center? Man, those were the good old days.

The biggest thing that the WWE Performance Center had going for it was the complete lack of real fans. To be perfectly honest, I actually preferred when there were no fans at all and matches took place in complete silence. You could really hear the grunting and moaning, and I feel that it added something special to the show. But even after that, when WWE added NXT trainees acting as a crowd behind plexiglass barriers, it was still pretty great.

Shayna Baszler is one of the last WWE performers lucky enough to perform in front of an empty building.

One of the worst things about WWE fans is the way the cheer the people they're supposed to boo and boo the people they're supposed to cheer. Sometimes they go into business for themselves and chant rude things that undercut WWE's well-planned storylines. It used to be that they only did that sort of thing on special occasions, like the night after WrestleMania, or when WWE was in Canada. But in recent years, they do it pretty much all the time.

That's why I treasured the WWE Performance Center era, where the fans were either nonexistent or paid employees of WWE. It was a simpler time. A time of peace and harmony. A time that's now come to an end.

As WWE moves into the ThunderDome, fans will once again be back in the mix, appearing on a thousand LED boards surrounding the wrestling ring. They'll be free to chant whatever they want, to cheer or boo whoever they want, and to do who knows what else, like moon the camera. The Chadster doesn't want to see that sort of thing. And so, with the final WWE Performance Center show in the record books, I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for that special time we had. Where our pro wrestling viewing relationship was private and intimate, an exchange between just WWE and ourselves, with no stinky fans getting in the way. It was about as perfect a pro wrestling experience that's ever existed, and I miss it already.

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