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News: WCW Thunder Will Be Added to WWE Network This Month

TJR Wrestling

There’s some good news for fans of World Championship Wrestling. According to WWENetworkNews.com, WCW Thunder episodes will finally be added to WWE Network on Monday, March 19th. This will excite a lot of WCW fans because Thunder was the company’s second biggest show after Nitro. What we don’t know is how many episodes they are going to upload because Thunder was a two hour show and that’s obviously a lot of content to put on the network at once. They put on the first year or two and then save the rest for another time. We don’t know yet.

Thunder launched on January 8, 1998 at a time when WCW was beating WWE in the Monday Night ratings wars regularly, so WCW thought it would be a good idea to launch a second show. There were 146 episodes in Nitro in total with the last one airing on March 21, 2001, which was just before WCW went out of business.

There were reports last September by PWInsider that Nitro was going to be added back then, but it was delayed due to wrestlers like Buff Bagwell and Raven trying to sue over WWE Network royalties. The lawsuit was thrown out and now WWE Network is finally going to upload Thunder episodes.

Analysis: I watched WCW regularly including Nitro and Thunder every week. Thunder wasn’t a great show because it lacked the biggest matches that Nitro had and often times the top stars were only on Nitro and were left off Thunder. However, it will be fun to check out some of the episodes again because there were still some great matches and moments even though there was a lot of crap in there too.