Disney tapings

WCW, in their infinite wisdom, decided in mid-1993 to tape a mindblowing three months of their syndicated programming at one time.  They rented out a studio at Disneyworld down in Florida and basically picked people off the street to be audence members--people with any interest in wrestling whatsoever were actually weeded out to try to prevent the results being leaked.  Signs, t-shirts, and other promotional items were handed out to give the illusion of these people actually caring about what was going on.  They were also specifically told who to cheer and who to boo.

Some wrestling fans managed to sneak in, and thus every major title change of the next four months was known in advance by seeing who came out with the title belts--even the WCW World Title was being defended at these tapings at the time.  Basically, it killed any interest in watching WCW...after all, it isn't exactly exciting to watch the Nasty Boys defend their tag team titles in August when you know they're going to keep the belts through October.  (Not that it's ever exciting to watch the Nasty Boys.)

It also killed any motivation wrestlers had to try hard--why bother?  If knew they weren't getting a belt for at least another four months, why bother exerting themselves and putting on a good match?

Yet another problem with the title changes being set in stone was that it didn't account for injuries and other mishaps.  For example: It was known from the tapings that the Hollywood Blondes were going to lose the tag team titles to Arn Anderson and Paul Roma.  The joke was on WCW, though, as a week or two before they were supposed to drop the titles, Brian Pillman (one half of the Blondes) got injured.  So, the bookers were forced into the silly scenario of having Lord Steven Regal "substitute" for Pillman with one half of the tag team titles so that he and Austin could lose the belts "on schedule".

You also had swerves like Marcus Bagwell and 2 Cold Scorpio winning the tag belts (when no footage of them as champions had been filmed) to try to give the impression that they were deviating from the booking, but when they promptly lost the titles a week later (so that they didn't actually deviate from the booking), no one was much surprised.

WCW finally stopped booking major angles at the Disney tapings in 1994, but the memory of their stupidity will last forever.