In Cheap Pop, Three Man Booth discusses random topics with a slight historical bend.

The biggest announcement of the week has to the WWE’s Wednesday night press conference for the WWE Network. The $9.99 a month service will feature access to all WWE Pay Per Views as well as pre and post shows for RAW and Smackdown. NXT and Superstars, which were only available on Hulu Plus, will be available on the WWE Network as well. The are also plans to make new original content like WWE Countdown (imagine the Top 10 on WWE’s YouTube but longer), a retrospective on the Monday Night Wars and Legends House: WWE Legends like Roddy Piper and Mean Gene Okerlund living in one house together. If you’re like us, you’re already saying,

but there’s more. The WWE is also opening their vaults, giving access to not only their programming but also the programming of acquired companies of ECW and WCW. That sheer volume of wrestling that we have access to leaves us constantly checking for drool. The only thing left to do is start making lists. Once the Network goes live – Monday, February 26 at 11:06 pm, not that we’re counting – here are the first things we are going to check out from the (formerly) big 3.

ECW will be the audio test. During the announcement, they said that the footage would be uncut and uncensored, stopping just short of “uncooked.” But does that extend to the licensed music from yesteryear? Will the war between Tommy Dreamer and Raven have the same gravitas if it doesn’t have the soundtrack of Alice in Chains and The Offspring behind it? What will the Sandman chug beer to if not “Enter Sandman?” And “Natural Born Killaz,” the entrance theme of New Jack was the perfect accompaniment to New Jack’s symphony of violence. Will the mayhem still be poetic if there’s silence? or worse … stock music? Be that as it may, we’re looking forward to seeing the US debuts of future WWE legends, like Jericho who faced off against the Human Suplex Machine Taz (one z!). Or the best of 7 series between Dean Malenko and Eddie Guerrero over the ECW TV Title. Frankly, even their farewell match with the company should be watched over and over. There’s also the introduction of the lucha libre to the ECW Arena. Rey Mysterio and Psychosis caused Joey Styles and the ECW faithful to scream “¡Dios mío!”

WCW had a lot of high concept matches, sometimes involving multiple wrestling rings, like the 3 Ring Battle Royal from World War 3 (the Pay Per View, not an actual war). There’s the 2 Rings covered by a cage for 4 man teams to do battle in War Games as part of the Fall Brawl Pay Per View. And then there’s the 1 Ring chaos of BattleBowl, the single day tournament where teams formed via random lottery faced each other in a single elimination tournament. Winning teams advanced to a Battle Royal later that night where the winner won … a ring. Look, the important part is the tag team lottery: enemies could be forced to team up. That’s what happened to Cactus Jack and Big Van Vader amidst their feud. Their frustrations with one another meant doom for their opponents as they two tried to one-up each other in the amount of damage they could inflict. These bitter enemies made such good teammates that it didn’t surprise us when,  years later in the WWF, Cactus Jack Mankind and Big Van Vader teamed up under the tutelage of James E. Cornette.

WWF / WWE: Our wrestling fandom starts with 1992 so the first thing we’ll do is watch Wrestlemania 8. That’s a given. But as we make our way through 1992 – stopping for SummerSlam 1992 and Bret Hart versus the British Bulldog at Wembley Stadium – we will spend time around the Survivor Series. Mr. Perfect accepted Randy Savage’s invitation to be his tag partner at the upcoming Pay Per View, turning his back on former manager Bobby the Brain Heenan and breaking the alliance he had with the Nature Boy Ric Flair. It was such a big moment that is ended being number 4 on WWE Countdown’s “Top 10 Bad Guys Gone Good” list. Unfortunately, the whole moment can’t be found online. So let’s start there and work our way to the present, just in time for the first NXT to debut on the WWE Network. We’ll be sitting by our TVs, XBox 360s, PlayStation 3s, and clam shell cellular phones for the occasion. We might even tweet it! Please join us (Note from KeepItFiveStar: No Recap!)

There’s one thing that we don’t want to see on the new WWE Network: Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling!

Keep this on YouTube! Or off YouTube! Or you know what? Let’s forget that we brought this up, okay?