Off the Mat: The Heat Machine

Time to spend a little time with what is likely my biggest guilty pleasure....

In pro wrestling, there is a strange kind of industry-speak that derived from the secretive con-artist origins of the "sport". Way back, as legitimate wrestlers toured the circuits, they commonly wound up performing at carnivals, festivals, circus attractions, et al. where they inevitably began crossing paths with the nefarious sorts who usually operate in those environs. Back in those early days, wrestling was still a legitimate professional sport. It was also usually pretty boring. Matches could sometimes go for three hours, with combatants basically clenching each other in the middle of the mat and not doing anything. Even when they were doing something, fans could barely tell they were doing anything. Basically, if any of you are old enough, and were paying attention enough to the UFC's earliest days, before they came up with a round system, a judging system, or any stand-up rules...well, you know how dull this type of sport can get.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before the carnival hucksters explained something to the wrestlers: "If you scripted the matches some, and played up the action like theater instead of sport, you'd sell a lot more tickets." Thus, the pro-wrestling as we know it today (i.e. "sports entertainment") was soon born. Along with it, that secretive code-speak used among its practitioners: carney talk.

In pro-wrestling carney, there is a set of booking practices designed to create and maximize a dramatic story arc. Every match tends to promote an 'angle' or storyline. The dramatic arc is designed to take place, usually, over a series of matches. Just like fiction, you have a protagonist (usually 'the babyface'), an antagonist('the heel'), the resulting conflict, and, if done properly, a climax and resolution. The climactic match is usually one with a more action packed stipulation ("This one is hair vs. hair!"--"The loser must leave town!!!"), where the stakes are high, along with the drama. Carney strippers used to call their third act (the one where they 'Take it all off!') the 'Blow-off', so naturally, so did the wrestlers.

The key to the drama is really how much the fans can get behind the face character, and how much they can really despise the heel. This is called 'getting over.' When a heel had a crowd really good and riled up, it was called 'getting heat' from the crowd. Soon, 'heat' and 'pop' from the crowd was the indicator of how well the performers were doing.

Sometimes the performers might need a little help though. Heels and promoters would often 'plant' people in the crowd for the heel to have confrontations with (one of the most famous tropes is for a child to hold a sign declaring devotion for his hero babyface, only to have the heel march up, snatch it from his hands, and tear it up in front of the youngster's now tear-soaked eyes--fans used to each this shit up). 'Building heat' was a tough and sometimes experimental skill set, which often depended on the changing sensibilities of the audience. One crowd in Minnesota might lose their shit if you called Fran Tarkinton a fag. Another crowd might not budge if you turned and punched someones grandma. You never knew.

Then technology got involved, and things got weird. That weirdness, amazingly still goes on today. You see, wrestling never really reached its golden age until it was televised. It didn't really, REALLY reach its gift for the con, until something called 'pre-recording' came along. When that came along, we have the entrance of what became known as the artificial Heat Machine. Today, it's called 'Canned Heat'.

I'm amazed it took me as long to notice it, but the first time I caught wind of Canned Heat was watching an episode of WCW Thunder back in the '90s (like I said, can't believe it took me that long). This was during the spectacular rise of Bill Goldberg as a superstar, a guy who was legitimately big, legitimately strong, legitimately at least semi-tough--and legitimately un-skilled. Looking back, for all his charisma, he couldn't talk a promo for shit, he had about four total moves in the ring (all of them inordinately stiff and therefore brutal looking), and if the match went past five minutes, he'd probably have 'blown up' (in carney, that means to run out of gas, become too exhausted to perform properly).

The powers that be looked at a guy who could pretty much make folx want to shit their pants when he marched out to the ring, and had to figure out how to get this guy over, when he couldn't perform for shit at all once inside the ring. The answer? Artificial heat--in any way shape or form. First, promoters put him in squash match after squash match (a 'squash' is a match where the performer you're trying to 'push over' goes in the ring and basically kicks the shit out of some hapless victim assigned to 'do the job' for him). With each stunningly short victory, Goldberg became known as an unstoppable monster, an irresistible force that no one could dare get in the way of). The 'Winning Streak' replete with exagerrated numbers ("How'd he go from 32-0 to 49-0 in only four days?") was a means of building heat. But that still wasn't quite getting the deal done.

Unlike WCW Monday Nitro, which was aired live, Thunder was generally a pre-recorded show. You could edit out the gaffs, make more ordinarly moments look a little more extraordinary...and you could tweak the sound edit. Enter: Canned Heat. As Bill Goldberg stalked ruthlessly out to take on his next victim, an audible roar of "Gooooooldberg!....Goooooooldberg!" emanated from the crowd. It was illustrated as part of the phenomenon. This big, scary, mean bastard had won over the crowd. And it was mostly bullshit. When you actually watched the crowd, especially when shot behind the wrestlers in the ring...nobody was doing anything. The roar seems like it can be heard from all over the arena, yet there isn't a single fucking person opening their mouths out there. In fact, it almost looks like no one hardly gives a shit.

Eventually, the heat machine actually worked. After weeks of showing matches of Goldber with the canned heat of his named being screamed from the rafters, crowds figured that was actually what they were supposed to do, and started doing it legitimately. THEN the producers were smart enough get the camera on them as often as possible.

It's basically a tool to fool the unobservant television viewer. Much like artifically inserted cheering between tracks on a live concert album, it's a notion of 'keying' the audience in on the excitement, whether the excitement is there or not. It's also more prevalent in wrestling than you think. All year ESPN Classic has been airing old episodes of 'AWA Championship Wrestling' from back in the late '80s, and the amount of canned heat used to sell the product of a promotion that was clearly dying a painful death makes its imminent demise all the more painful to watch now. As the arenas became more and more empty, seated mostly of old folx and special-ed classes (not a stretch) who were likely given the tickets for free to simply TRY to put an audience in the building for taping (another common aspect of the heat machine, BTW); it just made the canned heat all the more flagrant and pathetic. I don't how I never spotted it as a kid back then.

Unfortunately, Canned Heat lives on, even though it's a very old trick, one smarter viewers and wrestling fans can generally spot in a second today. So, when it's spotted, it's usually regarded as a very dismal sign of things not going well for the promotion. Exhibit A: Spike TV's current episodes of 'iMPACT Wrestling'--formally branded as TNA (Total Nonstop Action), the promotion decided to brand itself after the name of its show this year as another example of a perennially hapless promotion forever grasping at straws. TNA has been a promotion always placing a distant second to the virtual monopoly that Vince McMahon's WWE product has had on the industry for the last decade. Its existence was once built largely on sheer spunk, the ability to hire talent often shirked by McMahon (which is considerable), and its promotion of what it called the 'X Division' (highly choreographed wrestling devoted greatly to what are called 'high spots' in a style often comparable to Mexican Lucha Libre wrestling).

Recent years have drifted away from that notion. Money was spent hand over fist in search of gimmicks, angles and booking that made it look like a lukewarm version of WWE. Hulk Hogan was infamously brought on to help run the creative teams, even though the guy never ran a book in his career. In spite of every attempt to garner more attention, the results have proven more and more futile. Enter: the Heat Machine.

Until recently, TNA (now iMPACT Wrestling) did nearly all of its recording and pay-per-views at the Universal Studios facility dubbed the iMPACT Zone, nestled in the heart of Universal's Orlando theme park. As a means of filling the studio for its twice-weekly tapings, the promoters merely had to open its gates to the general theme park populace. While audiences got in for free (since nowadays gate sales rank a distant third or fourth in importance to things like TV ratings, PPV buy rates, and merchandise sales), thus assuring an always full studio, Orlando did wind up providing a pretty hardcore base of genuinely interested fans. Free or not, if enough of the hardcore fans got in, the (admittedly modest) studio arena could get plenty loud. Often, remarkably, in spite of not even requiring Canned Heat, production never figured out how to take advantage. The sound on the recording was, amazingly, rather low-key.

Nowadays, in an attempt to 'spread the word' (I GUESS), iMPACT Wrestling has recorded many more episodes outside of the iMPACT Zone. Problem is, now you don't have your hardcore audience to show excitement (even if you can't hear it). And so, you guessed it, producers started canning the heat. I can't tell you how often you can watch an episode, where the heel walks in, I see half a dozen folx out there with their arms raised--and they're cheering!-- amongst a crowd of dazed seeming drones of apathy, while the canned heat of incredibly fake sounding boos seems to rain down from, apparently, nowhere.

Want to smell failure? Sniff an iMPACT show nowadays.

For the record, canning heat has been regarded as a mainstay of wrestling recordings, even if things were considered on the right track. It just becomes more feeble and apparent when the audience is clearly not reacting. Wrestling forums claim that iMPACT has been canning its heat all along (which strikes me as funny, considering how badly they once must've done it, no one recognizing much vocal crowd reaction after all, even when they were visibly pretty animated). It's also said WWE, taking a lesson from their tapings in the 80s (which were remarkably successful without requiring 'piping it in' as its called) has been canning the shit out of its 'Smackdown!' tapings for a while now. Ratings for WWE programming have dipped over the years (mixed martial arts garners more of an audience now), but are by no means unsuccesful. It seems producers, with the luxury of a taped episode, simply can't resist piping a little extra oomph in.

How do you, however, as a producer, ignore the reticence of a crowd on camera, while you dredge up some absurd sound track that sounds like it's come from a 1938 Nuremburg rally? Do you still regard your TV audiences as this dismally unaware? We've all actually LEARNED the carney, and know what canned heat means, after all. Don't you think we know how to spot it when we see it by now?

Well, as the industry says, 'marks' (people who buy into the program) come in many shapes. Maybe the industry is, perhaps accidentally, in the process of creating an all new type of mark. Maybe it's one like me!