The debut of ThunderDome on Friday night's episode of SmackDown was met with a mixed response, and the prevailing opinion afterwards was that some changes needed to be made. After all, most fans on the LCD screen were just sat there watching the show on TV, not really reacting to much of what they were seeing.
That changed to some extent during SummerSlam, and Dave Meltzer has explained on the latest Wrestling Observer Radio that fans taking part were being told how and when to react to the PPV.
"The basic gist is the ThunderDome is [like] WCW Orlando tapings," Meltzer explained. "The Orlando tapings from Disney World from the mid-90s where they would hold up signs and say ‘cheer,’ ‘boo’ and all this. What they do is, there’s a fan coordinator on the headset and all the people can hear him and he says ‘everyone put your thumb down.'"
"When I watch on the screen and you’re seeing all these fans at the same time putting their dumb down, it’s kind of like, this is so fake because no one does this in real life as a real crowd in synchronize other than in North Korea, they probably would...that’s what we got here," he continued. "If you notice, most of the time people just kind of sit there and don’t do anything and it’s all piped in crowd noise but every now and then you would have something where everybody would boo or everybody would cheer but it wasn’t the whole match, it would be in certain spots. What it would be is when the coordinator says, ‘everybody cheer’ and ‘everybody boo’ and if there was a chant, that’s what they would tell them to do."
Clearly, it's going to be a learning curve for WWE over the coming weeks, but telling fans how and when to react sort of misses the point of having a live crowd in attendance. Needless to say, it's going to be interesting seeing how the ThunderDome concept develops and whether it continues to be as phony as it was last night.