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What's the story?
WWE taped both the Christmas Eve episode of Raw and the Christmas Day episode of SmackDown Live. It makes sense so that both the wrestlers and fans can spend the holiday with their families. But, since both episodes were taped after last week's episodes, WWE resorted to the old tactic of piping in crowd noise at particular moments during SmackDown on Christmas Day.
According to reports from both Ringsidenews.com and Wade Keller on the PW Torch Radio Show, WWE felt the need to heavily edit the pre-taped show.
In case you missed it . . .
Once the brand split occurred two years ago, WWE went to having both Raw and SmackDown go live on their respective nights. Since SmackDown was now live and not pre-taped, WWE wouldn't be able to edit the crowd responses to their liking.
So if the crowd booed for Roman Reigns instead of getting the desired cheers they felt he should always get, WWE couldn't do anything about it. But, with Raw and SmackDown falling on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2018 respectively, WWE felt its hand was forced in order to present SmackDown with the crowd reactions they wanted.
Anyone who attended either Raw or SmackDown in Fresno last week and decided to stick it out sat through six hours of Raw or four hours of SmackDown.
The heart of the matter
Since the crowd sat through four hours of tapings, it's no surprise that they weren't on top of their cheering game during the Christmas Day episode of SmackDown.
Ringsidenews.com reported that Keller relayed why there appeared to be a discord between the sight of the crowd and the sounds that came across on television:
“There was a completely comatose audience visually but an incredibly enthusiastic audience audibly for two straight hours in Fresno California. From on-site reports, a lot of the crowd left and they were exhausted. There were fans yawning and sitting on their hands but you’ve never heard a more enthusiastic crowd.”
Keller also mentioned that even though the crowd was super into a lot of the moments throughout the night, they were dog tired by the time the show ended.
What's next?
Hopefully, WWE won't have many pre-taped editions of Raw or SmackDown in the future. If they travel outside of the United States, however, the editions from the UK are also pre-taped due to the time difference.
While it may come across the way WWE wants on television, anyone with eyes can see that the crowd reaction and the actual sight of the crowd didn't sync up at certain moments of the show. It was pretty obvious throughout the night if you paid attention.
Although the matches between Andrade Almas and Mustafa Ali and Shinsuke Nakamura and Rusev were good, the fans didn't cheer at every moment it sounded like they did. Two of the few times that the reactions matched up with the audio was when the crowd did a 'Yes' chant for the pairing of Miz and Shane McMahon and when Rusev won the US Title.
It took away from the moment for Rusev capturing a title for the first time since his early push when he first debuted.
WWE didn't really have much of a choice since both shows fell on holidays, but they could have either run a retrospective of 2018 for each show or just had them live. Whatever the case may be, it just didn't seem genuine at all and it took away from wins by Rusev and Ali.
