Midnight Zeus

Superstar Billy Graham, Legends of Wrestling and Tribute To The Troops are ones I can think of off the bat. Tribute To The Troops was seen as a bit too political a release for the UK/EU market.

Most of the VHS era was before my time, but it surprises me they didn't have copy protection, as that was always a big thing while I was there.

 

Before I joined SV I never knew the mail order service existed. In all the years I'd been buying videos, it never occurred to me to write off and see what else they had available, relying on what the Smiths nearest to me had. I remember topping up my collection somewhat when I was at Uni and my loan came through.

 

Fast forward to working there and my staff price for videos was £2.50. Each month I got paid I'd spend £100 on videos, maybe more. In a few months I'd completed my collection, as many as I wanted anyway. In true style for my nature, most stayed sealed in boxes in my loft until I ended up giving them away years later.

Below is the second ever incarnation of the SV website (third if you include changing the name from wwfvideo.co.uk to silvervision.co.uk), which is very similar to the first, just that I changed the navigation buttons when I started work there. I also added a short lived section called Classic Videos where I chose a couple of old releases and wrote a bit about them. A precursor to the blog that came years later.

 

 

The second image is of a competition on the website, to win Divas in Hedonsim on video. Note the NTLWorld email address, as I worked from home initially, and getting my work email address set up there proved a problem for some reason. The Divas titles did sell fairly well, though less so as time went on, for obvious reasons. We used to get some interesting questions from potential customers, asking about the varying levels of undress of the Divas on these videos!

 

 

Any of the competition winners listed there post on UKFF?

I never saw any in all my time there and we never sold any in my time. It was very much against their policy to delete titles, always producing more no matter how long it took to sell them, so it would be very out of character to delete that one. However, many moons ago, way before I started working there, I'm sure I remember seeing a WBF video being sold in a second hand video shop. It could well have been a US copy, I never paid it much attention. There were no WBF videos in the company library. I do have a WBF press kit upstairs, so I'll grab that and scan it in a some point.

From what I remember that was a WCW Magazine giveaway that never happened because WWF bought WCW, so they gave them all to is and we resleeved them and released them under Wrestle Vision,not he only title ever to go under that label. It was released on it's own too, as well as as a double pack.

No, left years before you started. When I first started I had no knowledge of any of the advertising for the web, so seeing this in the newspaper was the first I saw of it!

 

 

This was a code that appeared in the newspaper, and then on putting it into the vault on the website, the vault opened to allow you to order Invasion at a reduced price, and some other videos that were on sale only in the vault. This was quite technical for the SV website at the time and one of my first promotions that got the green light.

Incinerated. Tears were shed. Actually they weren't, just getting carried away in forum mode.

Over the years I found in cupboards or was given various bits and bobs by the boss. Many were old giveaways from the early to mid 90s VHS days. So I got some out of the very much in need of a clear out spare room, and these are first up.

 

 

Now I never had any of the Bret Hart videos back in the day so maybe you can tell me, did they come with the video, or did you need to send off for them? I have a pile of each of these, something I didn't realise until I was rummaging around my 'wrestling boxes' earlier today.

 

Edit: just noticed they are a set of 5, so now I need to go searching to see if I have the other two as well.

I will scan some in down the line. I have lots!

 

You guys can then spot the errors that got missed after many rounds of proof reading.

That's going back a bit!

We had lots of very loyal customers, and that's putting it mildly. I remember when we made the move to finally stop doing VHS, we had one customer who was so distressed, that we bought them a DVD player so they could continue collecting WWE releases.

There were some huge perks working for a company like that, as a wrestling fan. Before I'd even joined the company, but had a start date, I was at Rebellion 2000 and my future boss invited me backstage where I met Crash and Molly Holly. I look awful in the photo having stayed at a friend's house and having a few beers the night before. I remember seeing Kane bending down to go through a doorway and getting an idea of just how huge these guys were. See, as a kid I had nobody to to wrestling shows with, so I didn't. Starting work with SV certainly changed that, and I went to so many thereafter.

Yup, that was a printout I put in my work book to keep track of things and have a record of activity.

 

So who remembers this?

 

 

Riddled with mistakes it took me about 2 full years of lobbying to stop it being sent out. This one is pretty tattered, I have a better kept one somewhere, along with all the previous and subsequent Mega Mail brochures and newsletters.

A pre-order schedule for the SV website from summer 2001, back when we were doing DVD and VHS releases. You can see there how early the website used to release titles before they hit the shops.

 

Don't know anything about it I'm afraid. They have a history of planning releases, and then changing or scrapping them. It sounds entirely reasonable what you are saying, because Savage going to WCW didn't sit well with Vince, from what I've read.

 

Somewhere in the spare room I have a kind of scrapbook of my first few months with the company, where I'd print off screenshots of stuff we did, and ads we placed. If I can find it I'll take some pics and add them to this thread. I know the Video Vault is there, which was a highly technical promotion for SV at the time, and we advertised it in national newspapers.

Wild Wednesday. I was inspired at an ecommerce show!

 

The thing about Make Your Mark was that several modules never actually got activated, so there was a level at which point profile power never went any further. You'd get points for purchases, reviews, adding items to your wish list and entering competitions. They were capped though, so once you maxed those out your profile power never went any further. The Road To Wrestlemania part left a big hole that was never filled. We used to get quite a few emails asking about profile power!

 

Promo video change - you probably know more than me, way before my time!

The staffing levels were just right a lot of the time, except at Christmas when a good proportion of the company would end up in the warehouse in the lead up to the Royal Mail cut off day.

 

I remember when the Dusty Rhodes DVD was due in and our warehouse manager was away. It was getting later and later in the day and it finally came in with less than an hour before Royal Mail were due to do the pick up. Gary and I were so adamant it go out that day that we, along with the other warehouse guy, frantically packed and labelled all however many hundreds of pre-orders there were, and every single one went out, in time.

Ahh, yes, that sold really well. It was supposed to continue as a series, but then it got canned.

The initial release sold really well, but the Tagged Classics re-release not so much. I think most people who wanted it, had it by then, and probably preferred the oversized DVD pack that contained them originally.

 

As for the Network, I can only theorise that it would have had a significant impact. A small minority would seek out the full DVD/Blu-ray set after seeing a documentary, but I'm guessing the vast majority would need no more than the Network from here on out. There will still be a market for the physical product for quite some time, but an ever decreasing one.

Before my time, but I never heard of any such releases being on the agenda. Not sure what the licensing issues would be, unless it was a US thing and something to do with the TV station there?

I think we did the Mega Mail once or twice in the WWE Magazine, but it cost an arm and a leg!

 

We did indeed sell books at one point, and the WWE Magazine too, for about 2 years - we had lots of customers from France for the magazines. We also sold the WWE comic books at one point too - Austin, Rock and Foley. We even sold WWE live event hospitality packages for 2 events I think.

1987. SV actually started off as mail order before they got in the shops. For some reason they decided when they put the titles in the shops that SSeries 1987 would be kept back, presumably seen as the weak title amongst the potential launch range.

The Bloodbath name was actually a company decision. It was changed along with the colour of the sleeve as it was thought the supermarkets wouldn't take it as is.

 

As for people taping over masters, no. Master tapes aren't like normal video tapes, they are more akin to the old cinema reels, but in thick plastic cases and really heavy.

 

There were never plans to release any of the Collesium videos. When SV got the contract on 1989 there was already a huge catalogue out in the US and they had to pick and choose which ones to launch onto the UK market. It would have saturated a budding market to release them at the time, and later on the demand just wasn't there. Tagged Classics had pretty much run it's course by the time SV ended things with WWE - the decline in sales of these titles was pretty dramatic.

 

UMD sales were dismal. We never made one reorder on any title and had to scrap them in the end.

 

Billy Graham - bull rope matches were indeed the main problem. Anything to do with strangulation was a huge issue with BBFC and WWF/E releases.

 

The inserts disappeared when US stopped producing the artwork for them as they were stopping them themselves. I lobbied for see through cases so we put content listings in the reverse of sleeves, as a DVD collector myself I knew the worth.

Couldn't give actual sales figures, but as time went on sales of individual titles got less and less. WrestleMania always did well, Royal Rumble as well, but to a lesser extent. The first Bret Hart and Undertaker 3 disc DVD sets were up there as the best selling non PPV titles, with CM Punk doing incredible business in the relatively short time we had it. Any time a Hulk Hogan DVD was released it did big business, with The Hulk Hogan Anthology only being outdone on the first week of release by WrestleMania 22 back in 2006, even beating the Royal Rumble. To answer your question Ian, I don't believe anything beat that Warrior VHS in the UK.

Superstar Billy Graham - in total BBFC wanted to take 15 minutes of footage out, and we thought that compromised the title too much so chose not to release it.

 

The mistake with the steel books is that initially they were sold at £2 more than the standard one, and with little in the way of extras people were tending towards the cheaper standard option or the extra filled Blu-ray. To be honest, releasing 3 versions of a non WrestleMania was too much for the market to handle, especially as collectors were getting fewer and fewer as the years went on. Customer behaviour seemed to change too - there was a time when Z amount of people would buy each and every release without question, but people became choosier as the years went on.

Gary mentioned exclusive slipcases we did for the website and posted the Edge one, with spelling error. Well here is my concept that I gave to our design department for the Hell In A Cell exclusive slipcase:

 

 

And this is of course what it ended up being - a more minimalistic design: