Joined Mar 2014
11,729 Posts | 3,505+
Beneath a cold sun, a grey sun, a Heretic sun...
From its inception in the late 1930s, Roller Derby was a popular spectator sport. It first debuted on television in 1948, when there might be one person on your street that even had a set to watch it, but even that modest exposure caused attendance at bouts to skyrocket, and touring bouts were soon filling epic venues like Madison Square Garden, which, at playoff season, would sell out every day for a week. And so it remained through the 1950s, but by the 1960s attendance was already declining, finally leading to the sport's collapse in the mid 70s despite a genuine push to bring it to wider TV audiences. Today it exists only as a fringe anomaly in the sporting world, peopled entirely by unpaid volunteers, with only the Texas league maintaining any real semblance of what it once was, the remainder of the world having transitioned to flat tracks, which can be set up in any vacant space for no real cost, rather than an expensive banked track for speed and excitement.
What happened? The artificial story arcs and contrived violence used in the 70s (perhaps earlier, but I'm not that old) were the same things used at the time - and to this day - in so-called "professional" wrestling, which has only grown in popularity despite its clearly fraudulent performances. So I don't *think* that's the issue. But it died, and it died quickly and hard. Why?
What happened? The artificial story arcs and contrived violence used in the 70s (perhaps earlier, but I'm not that old) were the same things used at the time - and to this day - in so-called "professional" wrestling, which has only grown in popularity despite its clearly fraudulent performances. So I don't *think* that's the issue. But it died, and it died quickly and hard. Why?
