Has Kevin Von Erich sold the WCCW videotape library to Vince McMahon and WWE?

Yes.  WWE issued the following press release on June 5, 2006:

It should be noted that the video library purchased by McMahon does not include any WCCW shows taped after the 1988 buyout by Jerry Jarrett.  That footage is owned by Mario and Angelo Savoldi, former promoters of the Boston-based International Championship Wrestling promotion, which became known as International World Class Championship Wrestling in 1991 after Kevin Von Erich licensed the name, logo and original theme music to the group (and also appeared very briefly on their TV shows).  The Savoldis, in addition to the post-buyout World Class and I(WC)CW tapes, also own the footage from USWA Dallas, Wild West Wrestling and the Global Wrestling Federation, from which a few budget-priced DVDs (including the Classic Superstars of Wrestling series, with early footage of Steve Austin, Mick Foley and Booker T) have been compiled.
 

How much Dallas-Fort Worth wrestling footage (from WCCW or earlier periods) still exists?

Answering this question in detail requires a bit of historical background, which was provided by wrestling historian Kit Bauman in a thread at Wrestling Classics. Bauman relates a story, told by Lou Thesz, of an exceedingly rare instance of wrestlers banding together to protect their interests:

It's recently become evident that at least part of the film library Steve refers to was the McLemore series, and that at least some of it was indeed salvageable; we now know that the surviving Texas Rasslin' footage was sold to WWE by Kevin Adkisson, along with the WCCW videotape library.  One match from the series, a two-out-of-three falls bout pitting Duke Keomuka against Ricki Starr, is included as a bonus feature on WWE's Triumph and Tragedy of World Class Championship Wrestling DVD.

There have been persistent rumors that some of the 1980s WCCW material may have been stored under less than optimal conditions for a number of years as well, though Kevin's son-in-law Joey Nikolas has stated that this is not the case.  On at least one of its World Class shows, however, WWE 24-7 has reportedly aired deteriorated footage due to its historical importance; as of October 2007, shows dating from October 1982 to January 1983 have run, although several shows from late '82 have been skipped.  Whether this is due to the master recordings being in unviewable condition is unclear.

It's also unknown how much footage from KTVT has survived, though bits and pieces of footage from Saturday Night Wrestling/Championship Sports have turned up through the years.  Some short clips from around 1979-80 were used in Brian Harrison's Heroes of World Class; some mid-60s footage (of a 1966 Fritz Von Erich-Joe Blanchard match in Fort Worth, and grainy footage of Fritz vs Gene Kiniski at the Sportatorium, narrated by the late Paul Boesch) was seen in ESPN's late '80s series Legends of WCCW.  The six-man tag match pitting the Von Erichs against Wild Bill Irwin, Frank Dusek and Ten Gu, included as a bonus match on WWE's The Most Powerful Families in Wrestling DVD, also originally aired on KTVT.

A question that has been asked more than once on wrestling message boards is whether some of the old tapes might still be lurking in vaults other than WWE's.  The late '80s Legends of WCCW series presumably still exists in ESPN's vaults (and could conceivably air again someday on the channel, which is currently airing old AWA shows -- the master tapes of which are also currently owned by WWE).  Less likely, though, is the possibility of KTVT retaining any of its old footage, mainly due to the fact that the station, an independent channel owned by Gaylord Broadcasting during the WCCW era, became a CBS owned-and-operated affiliate in 1995.  In all probability, everything that survived from Channel 11 now sits on a shelf at Titan Tower in Stamford, CT.

What matches are included on Best of the Von Erichs?

The DVD, which was released by VCI Entertainment on August 31, 2004 and is now out of print, contains seven matches, all from WCCW's peak period of 1983-84:

●  Kevin & David & Iceman King Parsons vs Michael Hayes, Terry Gordy & Buddy Roberts.  Sportatorium, 5/18/83.

●  Kevin vs Chris Adams.  Cotton Bowl, 10/27/84 (includes the post-match attack by Adams and most of the aftermath), and the rematch at Reunion Arena, 11/22/84.

●  Kerry vs Gordy.  Sportatorium, 8/17/84.  Lumberjack match, with Gordy subbing for Michael Hayes.

●  Kerry vs Gino Hernandez.  Sportatorium, probably 7/20/84.

●  Kevin, David & Kerry vs Hayes, Gordy & Roberts.  Sportatorium, 8/12/83.  The Freebirds win the Six-Man Tag titles.

●  Kerry vs Hayes.  Sportatorium, late May/early June '83.

What was The Von Erichs: Front Row Ringside?

This was a VHS release from Continental Productions, which was sold via mail order only in 1987 and ran approximately 70 minutes.  It included footage of Fritz's 1982 Texas Stadium win over King Kong Bundy and key matches in his sons' careers, including David's 1979 non-title win over Harley Race in St. Louis, Kerry's NWA title win over Ric Flair, Mike's 1983 debut match against Skandor Akbar and more. 

The tape concludes with a preview of a planned follow-up video which would have included home movie clips of the brothers during their childhood/teenage years.  For a number of reasons, including a change in production companies (see below), Mike Von Erich's suicide shortly after the release of Front Row Ringside and Fritz's subsequent decision to sell his interest in WCCW, this second video was never issued.


I'm familiar with WCCW's syndicated telecasts, but not with its local show from Fort Worth.  What can you tell me about its history? 

Quite possibly more than you really want to know.   :)   But here goes anyway:  the Fort Worth wrestling telecast, which first originated from the North Side Coliseum, began during either the late '50s or early '60s on Channel 11, KTVT (whose call letters prior to 1960 were KFJZ).  From old Channel 11 schedules posted by Mike Shannon at the Dallas Historical Society's message boards, we can see that there was no wrestling on the station in 1957, but by 1964 an hour-long telecast was airing at 4:00 PM on Saturday afternoons.  According to Shannon, the Saturday night show began in 1965; and by 1968 (at the latest), Main Event Wrestling -- as it was then known -- had expanded to 90 minutes and was ensconced in its familiar 10:00 PM timeslot. 

For those old enough to remember Main Event Wrestling in the '60s and early '70s, its opening theme music was Frederick Ellsworth Bigelow's classic "Our Director March".  Like the rest of the show's format, its introduction changed little over the years:  "From the North Side Coliseum in Fort Worth, here's Saturday Night Main Event Wrestling...ninety minutes of ringside excitement featuring the world's greatest professional wrestlers.  And now let's go to ringside and your announcer, Dan Coates."   The close:  "From the North Side Coliseum in Fort Worth, this has been Saturday Night Main Event Wrestling...a pre-recorded wrestling exhibition featuring the world's greatest professional wrestlers.  Join us again next Saturday night for professional wrestling.  Remote costs paid for by North Side Coliseum and Kissinger Auto Stores.  This has been a KTVT remote origination."

A look at the schedule for that year shows KTVT's fondly-remembered Saturday evening lineup, dominated by syndicated country music programming:

5:00 Gospel Singing Jubilee
6:00 Wilburn Brothers
6:30 Cowtown Jamboree [local country music series which aired live from Panther Hall in Fort Worth]
7:30 Porter Wagoner
8:00 Buck Owens Show
8:30 Bill Anderson Show
9:00 Country Music Carousel
9:30 Ernest Tubb Show
10:00 Wrestling
11:30 Roller Derby

In later years, reruns of vintage Western series such as The High Chaparral, The Virginian, Lancer, Laredo and Gunsmoke aired in the 60 or 90 minutes prior to Main Event Wrestling (which became known simply as Saturday Night Wrestling in 1974, at about the same time the show finally switched from black-and-white to color; at that time, KTVT was a fairly low-budget independent station).  The show had several opening/closing themes during this period, including "Close Up Tight" by jazz-rock fusion pioneer Bill Chase (from his album Pure Music) as well as a pop arrangement of the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Until the early '80s, the show always consisted of the regular Monday night cards in Fort Worth, with the prelim and midcard matches usually followed by the opening minutes of the main event before time ran out.  In November 1983, when WCCW's popularity was skyrocketing, the station expanded Saturday Night Wrestling to two hours and retitled it Championship Sports.
Its best-remembered opening theme music was Chicago's "Street Player" (from Chicago 13).

It was during this period that the best-of-three falls match formerly known as the semifinal event became the "TV main event".  The show also added a weekly "taped feature", which was usually a main event from one or two weeks earlier (not a TV main event, but an actual main event) -- which meant that Fort Worth cards, more often than not, were now basically airing in their entirety.

In 1988, when regular weekly cards were discontinued in Fort Worth, KTVT began taping at WCCW's Friday night cards in Dallas.  Upon Jerry Jarrett's takeover late that year, the promotion began free Saturday morning TV tapings at the Sportatorium.  The format for this version of Championship Sports was essentially similar to that of studio wrestling shows in Memphis and other territories, consisting primarily of squash matches and advancing storylines mainly through interviews and run-ins.  The show retained this format until its cancellation in 1990.

Who were the announcers for the KTVT show?

The first Channel 11 wrestling host we know of was Paul Boesch, who had previously been the commentator for WFAA-Channel 8's live telecasts from the Sportatorium in the 1950s.  How long Boesch held the position with KTVT is uncertain, but he is known to have been there until sometime in 1966, likely leaving at some point during the dispute between Ed McLemore and Houston promoter Morris Sigel that resulted in McLemore and Fritz Von Erich  forming Southwest Sports.  Boesch, who took over the Houston office following Sigel's death at the end of '66, went on to become one of wrestling's most respected and legendary promoters.  He retired in 1987 and passed away on March 7, 1989.

Dan Coates, who had handled ring announcing chores in Dallas and Fort Worth since 1954 as well as such North Texas events as the Kowbell Indoor Rodeo in Mansfield and the annual Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Fort Worth, took over as Channel 11's ringside commentator following Boesch's departure.  Subbing for Dan on occasion were ring announcer Boyd Pierce and Indianapolis wrestling announcer Sam Menacker.  Coates died from complications of Parkinson's disease on March 15, 1998.

D/FW sportscasting legend Bill Mercer, who had announced wrestling in the Metroplex area off and on since 1953, replaced Coates in 1975 and remained with the show until spring 1982.  Those who subbed for Bill when he was covering various other sports events included Boyd Pierce, sportscaster Ron Spain, announcer/referee Steve Harms (who was also at the mic for a short-lived Sportatorium telecast that aired only in West Texas and New Mexico around 1980) and, on one occasion, Brian Blair.

When Mercer left KTVT to call the action on WCCW's syndicated series, Marc Lowrance, who had replaced Boyd Pierce as ring announcer in 1980, became the host of Saturday Night Wrestling/Championship Sports.  He was joined at various times by color commentators Doyle King, Harvey Martin, Frank Dusek and Terrence "The Beauty" Garvin.  Filling in for Marc during his occasional absences were Mercer, King, Dusek, and for one show in 1984, none other than good old J.R. -- Jim Ross, who was an announcer for Mid-South Wrestling at the time.

Jon Horton, a.k.a. Craig Johnson, took over the last few months of both the KTVT telecast and the syndicated USWA Challenge series after Lowrance left WCCW to become a minister in 1990.  He was joined by Percy Pringle on color commentary.


How were the deaths of David and Mike Von Erich, Gino Hernandez and Bruiser Brody handled on Championship Sports?

Generally, on those occasions when a major WCCW star passed away between the show's taping on Monday night and its airing on Saturday night, commentator Marc Lowrance would appear in taped inserts from the KTVT studios to announce his passing and pay tribute.  (You can view the segments dealing with the deaths of Hernandez and Brody at WCM's YouTube channel.) 

The exception was the episode which aired the weekend after Mike Von Erich's suicide -- a tragedy so profoundly shocking and heartbreaking that KTVT opened the show with nothing more than a stark graphic:

All references to Mike were hastily (and somewhat choppily) edited from that night's show.

On the 2/18/84 Championship Sports (taped on 2/13), referee David Manning, accompanied in the ring by the babyface wrestlers on that evening's card, opened with a brief memorial for David Von Erich including the traditional ten-bell salute, and announced that David's brothers would not be appearing on the card as scheduled.  The music video for Glen Goza's tribute song "Heaven Needed a Champion" made its debut on the following week's show.

Why was Championship Sports canceled?

In September 1990,  Jerry Jarrett, after a financial dispute with Kevin and Kerry Von Erich (who had been minority owners during the USWA period) sold his 60% share of the promotion back to the brothers -- although Jarrett did retain control of the syndication network, which continued to produce weekly USWA programs taped in other cities.   Kevin made an attempt to keep the promotion going at the Sportatorium, reverting back to the World Class name and bringing back Marc Lowrance and Bill Mercer as ring announcers, but was apparently unable to afford a weekly TV production at that point. 

There were also reports that frequent on-air profanity and angles involving violence against women -- including one in which John Tatum delivered a brutally stiff superkick to the head of Superstar Bill Dundee's valet, Tessa -- led KTVT to pull the plug on the show, after repeated warnings to tone down its increasingly "objectionable" content.  However, this supposedly happened at virtually the same time as Jarrett's departure, which (as explained above) would have killed the show anyway due to lack of financing.

Shortly after Championship Sports went off the air, KTVT began airing programming from the WWF, which would not allow  stations on which its shows aired to run advertising for competing promotions, including Kevin's.  Consequently, he was only able to keep the revived WCCW going for a very short time before throwing in the towel in late November of that year.  (As a Sportatorium concession stand worker stated in a newspaper interview at the time, "I think after they lost the television, a lot of people assumed it was closed...I guess the old has to give way to the new.")


Why was the theme song for WCCW's syndicated show changed in 1987?

The change occurred as a result of Fritz Von Erich's decision to go with a new production company.  After five years with KXTX and Continental Productions (a partnership that resulted in massive national and international syndication success for the promotion), Fritz turned the show over to Lee Martin Productions, a company with ties to then-Dallas Cowboys principal owner, the late Harvey R. "Bum" Bright.  Martin (a former Dallas-area sportscaster who, to our knowledge, had no previous association with wrestling) and his group decided to jazz things up -- literally -- by replacing WCCW's well-known tympani-and-brass theme with a piece of saxophone-driven library music.  Reportedly entitled "Love on the Run", the new theme wouldn't have sounded out of place on a smooth jazz radio station, but was a ridiculously bad fit for a pro wrestling show.  This tune was replaced after a few weeks by an equally generic but more uptempo number.

When Fritz left the sport altogether and sold World Class to Kevin, Kerry and former booker Ken Mantell later in the year, Continental Productions, which had been used by Mantell for his Wild West Wrestling promotion's show after the split from World Class, was brought back as production company for WCCW's syndicated show.  Continental kept the video from Lee Martin Productions' title sequence (consisting of nighttime shots of various locations in Dallas) but restored the popular original theme music.


Was wrestling televised from the Sportatorium before the WCCW era?

You bet.  In fact, both KRLD-Channel 4 (now KDFW) and KBTV-Channel 8 (which became WFAA in 1950) did simultaneous live telecasts from the Sportatorium on Tuesday nights for several years when TV was in its infancy!  KRLD's original wrestling announcer in the early '50s was Ves Box, who was also at the mic for Ed McLemore's syndicated Texas Rasslin' series during the same period.  Bill Mercer began doing wrestling from the "new" Sportatorium when it opened in the fall of 1953 (calling the action on KRLD radio and television at different times), and continued as TV host for a time when the station moved its wrestling program into its studios around 1958 (see below for more info on Studio Wrestling).  WFAA's commentator in the early '50s was Jack Sherman, who was replaced in 1954 by mat legend and later Houston promoter Paul Boesch.

There was no television from the venue through most of the 1960s and '70s, although Bill Mercer's memoir Play-by-Play mentions incidents which took place on a show he did for KRLD in the late '60s, taped at the Sportatorium with studio interview inserts (the title of this show was apparently Sportatorium Wrestling).  However, in 1979-80, when Fritz Von Erich briefly took over the Amarillo territory from Bob Windham (Blackjack Mulligan) and Dick Murdoch, a show was taped at the Sportatorium specifically for the West Texas market. This show, with interviews and commentary done from a Dallas studio, was hosted by then-KXAS sportscaster Steve Harms, who also did some refereeing for the promotion during the period.


Didn't WCCW do some of its TV from a studio?  I remember seeing the ring surrounded by just a couple of rows of seats on some shows.

What you were seeing on Championship Sports was the Will Rogers Auditorium, which was used when the Coliseum was hosting other events (usually concerts, or the annual Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo).  The ring, main camera and ringside chairs were set up on the Auditorium's stage, with the orchestra pit off to the left side of your screen.

There was once a studio wrestling show on KRLD (now KDFW), however, which some old-timers in the D/FW area may recall.  Entitled, appropriately enough, Studio Wrestling, it was hosted in the late 1950s by none other than Bill Mercer.  When Mercer became the original radio voice of the Dallas Cowboys in 1960, the show was taken over by one Eddie Hallack.  Hallack, who is described by those who remember him as "quite a character", also hosted a KRLD series called So This Is Opera (!), and later operated a chain of restaurants in the Dallas area.  He died of heart failure on April 9, 2005 at the age of 92.