The best of WWF American Wrestling. WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Survivor Series, Royal Rumble, UK Rampage and many more specialist releases. Available only through Silver Vision, the only distributor of World Wrestling Federation videos. So if it’s bodyslams, side suplexes, clotheslines, dropkicks and powerslams that you’re after, increase your library of WWF videos with some of these spectacular annual WWF events…. Silver Vision, bringing home to you the very best of the World Wrestling Federation’s matches.
If you’re lucky enough to know those words off by heart, you’re among the thousands of customers of the company that turned our pocket money into a business that thrived for two decades and ensured younger siblings would be out of luck if they wanted to watch the living room television. Yet Silver Vision came about by a quirk of fate.
Founder Ian Allen, who had a background in home entertainment, was visiting the United States where he happened to attend a WWF event. Captivated by the action, he enthusiastically discussed with his neighbour how he would love to bring the product to home video in the UK. He received a tap on the shoulder from a man in the row behind who introduced himself as a WWF executive. Having overheard the discussion he invited Allen to speak after the show, eventually leading to a successful licensing proposal.
While the licence began in 1989, it wasn’t until the following July that the first batch of tapes hit the shops: Hulk Hogan Real American, WrestleMania’s Greatest Matches, and High Flyers. While the licence covered the already extensive WWF back catalogue, the nature of retailing and promotion meant the new company decided it was best to release the tapes into retail outlets gradually.
In the meantime, other titles would be released for mail order first, with a few shows such as Survivor Series 87 intentionally kept as mail order exclusives to try to build up a mailing list. Both existing customers and those who wrote to a PO Box for information began receiving a regular newsletter titled Mega Mail that was pretty much a pre-made Christmas list for many youngsters. While fans remember the mail order service fondly, it only ever made up around 10 percent of turnover, with Silver Vision very much a retailer-based operation.
As well as the newsletter, Silver Vision had its other memorable features. Most tapes were produced with a signature blue flap on the opposite edge to the spine. This was actually a security measure designed to protect the company and customers against counterfeiters passing off unlicensed copies.
Less scrupulous fans of the time will recall another notable feature, or lack of it. Rival WCW’s releases used Macrovision technology to render tape-to-tape dubs borderline unwatchable, not that this stopped devoted viewers. Contrastingly Silver Vision titles were unprotected against such dubbing, meaning two VCRs and a SCART lead would be enough for a group of friends to rapidly expand their respective collections.
Allegedly.
Silver Vision was also noted for the advertisement at the start of each tape whose words opened this article. They were accompanied by a memorable theme which was in fact a custom-made piece commissioned by the company and later reused for other projects.
While Allen became a devoted wrestling fan, many of Silver Vision’s employees had little or no interest in the product. One notable exception was Steve Riley, who eventually came on board after an unconventional application process.
“I wrote two letters, one to Vince McMahon and one to Silver Vision, basically saying the same thing: I’m a big wrestling fan and that I was running a website called fallscountanywhere.com. I said I was interested in the marketing and the business side of it and wasn’t just some crazy fan that wanted a way into the business.
“Vince didn’t actually reply to me, but Silver Vision invited me up for an interview. I agreed and then a week before decided that I was enjoying going out with my friends too much. The job would have involved a move from Devon up to London. It wasn’t the right time for me, I was in a relationship, and so I turned down the interview. In the same letter I said how I was disappointed that the video of Mayhem in Manchester was just highlights. So I was turning down my dream job and giving them a kick in the teeth at the same time
“A year later I wrote back to say I’d matured a lot and I believed everyone does deserve a second chance. They were nice enough to give me that second interview chance, which I didn’t screw up this time!”
It was a workplace unlike any other for a wrestling fan: not only was there a vast library with copies of every title ever released, but even the boardroom was a one-off. “The bosses used to go over to WrestleMania every year and take all the buyers from HMV or wherever. That’s when they first started doing the ringside packages with the custom chair, so they all used to bring them back. As they went to more and more WrestleManias, the boardroom gradually went from normal office chairs to having WrestleMania chairs all around the table. Then you started getting event posters on the wall and even standees of the wrestlers. It was quite the Aladdin’s Den of rare merchandise.”
Working at the company also meant the occasional insider tidbits. Some of these related to planned releases that were later dropped or delayed: “The Macho Man Randy Savage DVD probably came up about three times a year, every year for the whole time I was there until it finally did get released.” Other news involved the wrestling business itself.
“Ian told me the day before it happened that WWE was buying WCW. This was back in the day when I used to be in all the Internet newsgroups and message boards chatting away, but obviously I couldn’t say anything. I was absolutely blown away: it’s the biggest piece of news in my world as a massive wrestling fan and I can’t tell anybody!”
Riley’s knowledge proved particularly useful when he produced a crib sheet for staff on the customer enquiry line to give them enough information to feign a passing knowledge of the stars of the day, complete with their signature catchphrases and finishing moves.
Customer service was certainly a big part of Silver Vision’s success, with many remembering just how quickly orders would be despatched and delivered. It was a deliberate policy designed partly out of goodwill and partly because mail order (and later online) customers were the most devoted fans and proved a useful barometer of interest. Perhaps the most extreme example came when the company eventually switched media formats:
“We had a cutoff point where we just weren’t going to be selling videos any more and this customer was saying ‘I haven’t got a DVD player, I’m not going to be able to buy anymore. I’ve got all my VHS library and I don’t want to change.’ So we sent him the latest couple of DVDs and a DVD player because he’d been such a good customer over the years.”
After the first DVD release, 1999’s WrestleMania XV, it initially appeared discs and cassettes could live side by side. “We had about three years of everything being dual format, but when WWE started to give us lots of extras [on the discs], it became very evident that DVD was going to be the way forward. There wasn’t a huge amount of different in price between the two, and we couldn’t really offer people the lesser version of the VHS without the extras: they were collectors and they wanted to have absolutely every [bit of footage]. Plus the shows were getting longer: some were taking up two discs and eventually we probably would have needed three or four tapes so it became a redundant format for us.”
The technological advances continued with Silver Vision not only releasing the first sports Blu-ray in the UK, but getting ahead of the WWE in using the format. The company went to large expense to produce its own master discs for making Blu-Rays, allowing it to choose which titles came out in HD. Eventually WWE caught up and made its own masters, reducing Silver Vision’s control but also heavily cutting its costs.
VHS to DVD was a simple if lengthy change. That can’t be said about the change from WWF to WWE following legal action involving the World Wide Fund for Nature, with Silver Vision suddenly confronted with a short deadline to stop selling ‘WWF’ titles.
“We had extra staff brought in and we had an extra warehouse facility because we were just selling off so many videos. We had to sell every little bit of stock that we could possibly could. So prices are plummeting down. Absolutely everybody was helping get rid of these videos, from the MD to the MDS wife, everyone was in the warehouse. Fans including myself were rabid to get hold of those videos because at the time we thought it was the last chance that we would ever be able to own these events.
“It felt really busy and great at the time, but once we could no longer sell anything with WWF we went from a catalogue of hundreds of titles to just four, which was quite a big difference. Luckily WWE were releasing pay-per-views and [other] titles every month so we could build back up quickly and financially it didn’t affect us too much.”
While the WWF initials and logo were off limits in packaging and marketing, a video games company won a court ruling to say WWF video content itself wasn’t barred. That gave Silver Vision a way to monetize its back catalogue by releasing a series of two-disc DVD sets containing the footage from a pair of VHS releases. While the packaging involved a slight tweak to replace the WWF logo, the content remained largely unedited from the original, creating immense jealously among fans outside of Silver Vision’s licensing territory, which had expanded to Europe and the Middle East.
Riley, who came up with the Tagged Classics branding, explains some of the inconsistencies in the range. “Some people were confused about why we had In Your House 13 and 16 in a set. Originally we didn’t know how popular the series was going to be, so we were picking out some of the shows we thought people would most want to go back to.”
The technicalities of the re-releases meant WWE was not allowed to supply any footage of the titles in question, meaning Silver Vision had to work from its original masters used for the VHS tapes. “That meant we couldn’t use anything that had been damaged, which included one of the SuperTapes. I think that’s also why even though lots of people requested a set with the Davey Boy Smith video from his comeback paired with the original British Bulldogs tape, we weren’t able to do it.”
While WWE maintained control in the relationship, Silver Vision did have some autonomy, as shown by Riley pushing management to design custom sleeves for website-exclusive editions of releases. Unfortunately the first such project, an Edge DVD set, didn’t quite go to plan.
“We’d been on and on for ages about doing exclusive slip cases or numbered copies. Eventually we got the go-ahead from the company, then we had to get the go ahead from WWE themselves. So it got designed, it went to us several times backwards and forwards. It went to all the directors in the company. It went to the WWE and then went to the printers and came back as a proof. And then eventually it went out to the customers. So lots of people from all over the UK and America from the WWE saw that and nobody spotted [the problem]. We didn’t spot it until a customer told us.”
The problem? Everything on the cover was fine except the company name was listed as “Silver Vison.”
“You’ve just got to laugh at these things. I think at the time I probably said ‘Oh, it’s even more limited edition now!’”
Silver Vision did also face its ups and downs from the British Board of Film Classification. At one stage titles were classed as sports content, which made them exempt from age ratings. “It was fantastic: we could get in any stores we wanted. If anything became an ‘18’, it was a lot harder to get into the supermarkets.”
The end to that advantage may have been more to do with Silver Vision’s parent company getting the licence for UFC events. “There was a point where UFC was just let through as a sport, so we didn’t have to classify that either. Then suddenly somebody at the BBFC started watching it and saying ‘Hang on, this is bloody and gory.’”
While BBFC would occasionally insist on minor edits, usually to avoid content that would pose a danger if replicated by child viewers, only one title proved irretrievably problematic. The Billy Graham ’20 Years Too Soon’ DVD set not only included bloody matches but also scenes of simulated hanging in a bullrope match and graphic footage of Graham undergoing hip surgery.
“There was so much they wanted us to take out that it just would have made a mockery of the title, so that was one we never released over here. I think you can understand [editing] hanging because a lot of kids of watch wrestling and even though they were rated, we knew they were still getting hold of the DVDs and videos.”
Titles that did make it past the certification process and into the shops could still raise issues, most notably the Chris Benoit ‘Hard Knocks’ DVD set, which prompted an immediate WWE edict after the circumstances of his murder-suicide came to light. “We had to withdraw quite a few titles from the website: anything with him on the cover I think. Anything you take something off a website when you have fans with such an eye for detail as wrestling fans, and where an online community for anything likes to focus on things, it was probably made a bigger deal than it actually was.
“We were under orders to do that and it wasn’t the type of thing we would have wanted to fight against. But we didn’t really have the clout the fight against decisions from WWE anyway.
The ramifications weren’t limited to the website. “We also had to recall the Benoit DVD from warehouses and distribution centres, but not the ones that were actually in the stores. If they’d got into stores there was nothing we could do.”
Said distribution centres were also the cause of a major blow in the summer of 2011. During several nights of rioting that began in Tottenham and spread to cities nationwide, a Sony warehouse was destroyed by arson. Not only was a significant amount of Silver Vision stock lost, but reproducing it was a slow process as DVD manufacturers were swamped with demand from other companies in the same position. Instead Silver Vision had to recall stock from European markets to serve the UK customer base. It also meant some less popular titles had to be deleted from the catalogue as it wasn’t financially viable to create a new print run.
(This was not the only time Silver Vision titles were burned. When the deadline passed for selling ‘WWF’ titles, the remaining stocks had to be incinerated to guarantee they could not slip into distribution – the weeks leading up to this being a literal fire sale.)
Like any other retail business, external factors were always an issue for Silver Vision, most dramatically in its final years. One big blow came with the closure of high street chain Woolworths in 2008 in the wake of the global ‘credit crunch’.
“They were a fantastic customer. Woolworths was the perfect demographic for wrestling fans because the whole family used to go there because they had a bit of everything. You couldn’t walk into a town that didn’t have a Woolworths and they used to carry multiple titles in our range, which some of the other [chains] didn’t do so much. When they went, that was a big chunk of the retail market gone.”
In terms of raw sales, business picked up when supermarket chains began stocking DVDs, but that wasn’t without its limitations. “It was a double-edged sword because while it was great they stocked us, they would only stock certain things like the main pay-per-views of WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Royal Rumble and so on. They would sell in decent quantities but the problem was they would buy them at such a low price that the profits weren’t great.
“They all wanted something unique as well, so we had to create different sleeves or do different giveaways. You had to be in the supermarkets or you weren’t going to get to people, but at the same time it probably wasn’t that profitable a revenue stream.”
By this point Silver Vision’s parent company had expanded its range with sister brands FightDVD and Clear Vision carrying UFC and archive television material respectively. That didn’t soften the severity of the blow when WWE decided to end its licensing agreement in May 2012. Despite a short-term renewal, the relationship came to an end on New Year’s Eve as WWE instead began working with television production conglomerate FremantleMedia.
Riley says WWE cited two reasons for the switch. “They wanted a lot more money than it was viable to pay. And they wanted a big name to represent them because WWE has become so big over the last few decades and they want every part of their business to be represented and to represent themselves as a big commodity and they didn’t really feel that Silver Vision did that. I can kind of understand that, though I don’t think many people really looked at the distribution of DVDs in the UK and thought that will have a negative bearing on WWE.”
While the Silver Vision brand was defunct, Clear Vision continued trading with its other brands. “They started doing a number of other things including classic Marvel animation and NBA but none of them really did a great deal. UFC was kind of a damp squib from the word go because it became clear very soon that the UFC fan wasn’t the same as the WWE fan. They’d go to a fight or watch a fight and they didn’t need to go back and watch it again and keep watching it.”
Clear Vision went into liquidation in 2014 but Riley believes even had the company kept the WWE license it would have faced a decline. “The introduction of WWE Network wouldn’t have taken too long to affect us because we were predominately WWE rather than a company like Fremantle where it was just one of the arrows in their quiver.
“There was already quite a decline with the high street shops disappearing left, right and center. And the Network [with the whole library] would have removed one of the USPs for us which was we had things like Tagged Classics and we never deleted anything that we had, so we could always offer fans everything. Once that was taken away I don’t think we’d have lasted much longer to be honest.”
