You may be gaining your first exposure to WOW Women of Wrestling when they debut on AXS TV later this month. However, they've been around for nearly two decades, and have a connection to the GLOW promotion of the 80s.
David McClane created both GLOW and WOW, and brings the latter to television screens this month. Despite the all-women similarities between the two, McClane told Fightful recently that things are much easier to push forward athletically these days.
"I created GLOW and sold it after the second year tapings were put in the can, and my vision for what I wanted GLOW to be is coming to fruition some 30 years later with WOW Women of Wrestling. I think the parallels with anyone who liked GLOW or watched the Netflix series GLOW will be the colorful costumes and amped up characters. We make sure the programming is true to something that wasn't there to GLOW to grasp. Athletically, the most we had there was Jane Fonda's videos. Today we have female athletes," McClane told us.
McClane said that a post-9/11 world and falling ad rates caused WOW to lose their syndicated television deal in the early 2000s, but AXS TV, Jeanie Buss and Mark Cuban in particular helped make the 2019 re-debut a reality. There are some other heavy hitters involved in the television show, too.
"I'm blessed with a great partner like Jeanie Buss, I'm blessed with a great trainer Salina Majors, who many in the south will remember as Bambi. I'm blessed with so many great wrestlers. When we decided to bring WOW back, me and Jeanie Buss were on the same page -- to do it slowly, methodically. We wanted females to have a platform to wrestle long term. We looked for a marketing partner instead of just a television outlet. We looked for someone who was going to embrace WOW, and Mark Cuban does," said McLane. "Mark Burnett picked up the phone and said 'hey we do Lucha Underground, nobody does what you all are doing on the female perspective, we'd like to get involved.' They're going to produce some great shows for us, and they made the introduction to Mark Cuban during last year's Super Bowl.
McClane put over Cuban and AXS' idea to slowly move along New Japan Pro Wrestling and the subsequent success led to Cuban embracing WOW with open arms.
WOW Women of Wrestling debuts on January 18 on AXS TV immediately following New Japan Pro Wrestling.
