10th June 2012
WWE.com recently wrote an article chronicling all the old Raw stages from it's inception to today and also hinting at a new stage come the 1000th episode of Monday Night Raw. With pictures of the WWE Championship leaking onto the internet it also makes me feel that the 1000th Raw could be the start of a new "era" and will be something worth watching. Since that article brought back a lot of memories from my childhood in the attitude era I wanted to recreate a few of the stages. I thought I'd start with the retro style stage from 94 that had Neon lights directing attention to the superstars entering the arena.
From there I was just so excited that I had to continue through the timeline. Strangely enough, every stage goes through a state of change at least once a year. So that proposed the question; should I make EVERY stage? Or just ones I like? The answer I chose was just the ones I like. So I continued onto 1999 attitude era stage. This is the additional stage, the original stage just had curtains and a giant screen but at this point it had introduced special lighting and new trussing. This was the arena that I remember from the attitude era as this was roughly where I started watching professional wrestling.
Continuing onwards, WWF turned into WWE due to legal complications with the World Wildlife Fund and lost. So the name change and rebranding started, this was a perfect time to change the stage as they were changing TV networks and also at this point they bought over WCW and used the WCW Championship as the World Heavyweight Championship and they created the Undisputed WWE Championship belt. I never really liked this stage personally because I thought it was so clunky and lacked any superstar specialisation, every entrance looked kind of samey in this arena.
After that stage had an eight year run HDTV was introduced and WWE decided to format all television content to be HD and thus the "HD Set" was introduced with a sleek design that enabled customisation and superstar entrances that would quite literally take over the entire section of arena. When Kane walks to the ring the entire stage erupts into flames all displayed through LED video screens and Elemental Labs' Versatubes. Throughout the years this stage has seen dramatic changes to its look from; most notably the move from a projector screen to a LED screen for the main titantron to the removal of the cylindertron.
