The WWF SmackDown Rewind — page 2

A few weeks ago I checked out the pilot episode of SmackDown and now we’re moving onto the official first episode.

Two shows cover a large amount of modern WWE history. There’s Monday Night Raw, which was born in 1993 and has spent most of its existence as WWE’s flagship program. I cover new episodes Monday nights and Scott Keith has covered a good chunk of its history in his rants.

Then there’s SmackDown.  While Niz does an amazing job reviewing the new episodes, there isn’t a lot of representation of the old episodes on Blog of Doom.  Scott has only covered a handful of episodes over the show’s 27 years of episodes (at least that have appeared during the great reloading of rants).  After reviewing an old episode of Nitro, I wanted to dive into something else. SmackDown? Yeah, let’s do that. There’s also a bit of history in this for me as the first thing I wrote on Blog of Doom was a SmackDown special. Now we’re back, baby.

The first episode of SmackDown aired months before it became a regular series as a pilot on UPN. Besides giving WCW’s Thunder a Thursday night opponent, it gave the company two additional hours on top of Raw to feature their talent. This is also right around the end of the Vince Russo era, as he’d leave WWE when SmackDown became a regular show and he felt overworked. He’d go to WCW and wreak havoc and, to this day, keeps finding his way to new companies.  God help us all.