WWE Heat (formerly known as
WWE Sunday Night Heat and capitalized as
WWE HEAT) was a
professional wrestling show for
World Wrestling
Entertainment.
It was aired on
USA Network,
MTV and
Spike TV in
the United States,
Channel 4,
Sky1 &
Sky Sports in the
United Kingdom and
CTV Sportsnet in
Canada.
It was most recently streamed on WWE.com on Friday afternoons for
North American viewers.
However, the show was still televised
internationally and showed in the United Kingdom on Sky Sports 3, Australia on FOX8, India on TEN Sports,
Germany on Premiere Sport Portal, France on Action, Spain on
Sportmania and C+ Deportes -both channels from Digital+, the Middle East on ShowSports4, the
Philippines
on Jack TV, and Japan on J
Sports. The final episode was uploaded to WWE.com on May 30,
2008. The show was replaced internationally with
WWE Vintage Collection, a
program featuring classic WWE matches.
History
Early years
The show was originally introduced as
WWF Sunday Night
Heat on the USA Network in 1998. The one hour show would be
broadcasted live on Sunday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern. It was the
second most important show in the WWF line-up serving as a
supplement to the
Monday Night Raw program.
Heat
would feature promos, vignettes and in-ring action just like
Raw, and in many ways, it was what
SmackDown! was to
Raw from 1999 to 2002. Upper mid-card and main event
wrestlers were no strangers to
Heat, appearing each week.
Storylines from the previous week would progress during the show,
and the next day's
Raw would be heavily promoted. The show
itself was a big ratings draw for the USA Network trailing not too
far behind the big numbers of
Raw.
1999-2002
WWF Sunday Night Heat logo
(1998-2000).
With the advent of
SmackDown! in 1999,
Heat significantly decreased in importance as well as
ratings. The debut of
SmackDown! also led to
Heat
being taped before
SmackDown! with matches for WWF
syndication programs like
Jakked/Metal to be taped before
Raw broadcasts. When
SmackDown! premiered in
August 1999,
Heat briefly became a complete recap show,
with exclusive interviews and feuds recapped as music videos. This
only lasted a few weeks, and the show began airing exclusive
matches again, this time taping before
SmackDown!. Near
the peak of WWE's popularity and as part of WWE's television deal
with Viacom, the show was moved to MTV.
WWF has also aired two special editions of
Halftime HEAT
which aired during halftime of
Super
Bowl XXXIII on USA Network. These specials ended following the
movement of
Heat to MTV. In 2000, the current logo and
theme song was adopted.
When the
show started airing on MTV in late 2000, it was broadcast live from
WWF New
York
. WWF Superstars would appear at the
restaurant as special guests while
Michael
Cole and
Tazz would call pre-taped matches
live.
2002-2005
This practice ended in 2002 and the show reverted to its original
format of taping the matches, again before
Raw, and have
the commentators call the action and have it burned to the matches.
It was at this time that (in the U.K.), Channel 4 ended their
syndication of the program, which was later picked up by BSkyB, to
compliment their existing coverage.
Since the
brand extension in
2002,
Heat has been broadcast with only
Raw
superstars and reverted back to being before
RAW. The
exception to this was on pay-per-view nights, which were broadcast
live from the pay-per-view venue and could involve
SmackDown! wrestlers. In May 2002,
SmackDown!
branched off its own sister show,
Velocity, which replaced
Jakked/Metal, and mirrored the same characteristics as
Heat.
Steven Richards, who at one time was
the most regular competitor on
Sunday Night HEAT, dubbed
himself "General Manager of
Heat" (though he carried out
no GM duties) and began calling the show
Stevie Night
Heat. Along with Richards ,
Jeff
Hardy also had several matches on
Heat around 2002-03.
Also during this time, divas such as
Molly Holly,
Ivory and
Jazz
would have frequent matches on
Heat either as an opening
match or main event.
2005-2008
Heat and
Velocity were not picked up by the
USA Network when WWE moved its
programming over to that network in October 2005, leaving Americans
no way to watch WWE weekend shows on television. To solve this
problem, WWE decided to
stream the shows on
their website exclusively for the U.S. audience, with new editions
posted every Friday afternoon.
Sunday Night Heat was soon
renamed to
WWE Heat, as it no longer
aired on Sundays.
Heat was still shown overseas to fulfill international
programming commitments. For a while, a special 30-minute live
edition of
Heat began airing in place of the traditional
pre-taped Free For All PPV preshow. The 30-minute PPV version of
Heat ran from No Mercy 2005 through Backlash 2006. When
WWE went
high definition,
Heat began using the same
HD set as
Raw,
SmackDown, and
ECW.
The final episode was uploaded to WWE.com on May 30, 2008. The show
was replaced internationally with a new show featuring classic
matches, called
WWE Vintage Collection.
Title changes
Though the majority of title changes would take place on
Raw,
SmackDown!, or
pay-per-view events, the
WWF Championship changed hands on a special
"
Halftime Heat" that aired during the half-time of
Super Bowl XXXIII on January 31,
1999 when
Mankind defeated
The Rock in an empty arena match to win the
title.
Additionally, the
Light Heavyweight
Championship changed hands on
Heat on three occasions.
The first took place on the
February 10,
2000 airing when
Essa Rios (in his
first appearance under that name and with the debuting
Lita) defeated
Gillberg.
The second change saw
Crash Holly
defeat
Dean Malenko on the
March 15,
2001 episode. In the
final change, the debuting
Jerry Lynn
defeated Crash Holly on a live edition before the
Backlash pay-per-view on
April 29, 2001.
Commentators and hosts
There have been many commentators in the history of
Heat.
Industry veterans and
Raw broadcasters
Jim Ross and
Jerry
Lawler have done commentary on the show. The show was also the
launchpad for
Shane McMahon's
on-camera career in WWE, originally placed in the role of a
commentator for the program. In October 2000, the show was hosted
by
Rebecca Budig and MTV VJ/Rapper
DJ Skribble when it moved from USA
Network to MTV.
During pay-per-view events and often outside the venue, hosts
introduce segments of the show, recently the hosts of
The WWE Experience (
Ivory and
Todd
Grisham) perform these duties. If a SmackDown brand
pay-per-view takes place,
Velocity's' announcers host the
in-ring commentary for the show.
Often wrestlers would take the role of color commentators on the
show with
Al Snow,
Tommy Dreamer,
Raven, and
D'Lo Brown
all holding this position mostly as a replacement for an announcer
who was unavailable. During the show's run on MTV,
Diva Lita also served as a
commentator following her major neck injury.
Before the WWE-produced,
Extreme Championship
Wrestling reunion pay-per-view,
One Night Stand 2005 took place,
a special
Extreme Heat episode was broadcast and hosted by
Jonathan Coachman and
Michael Cole.
During one episode when Jonathan Coachman was unavailable, former
ECW announcer (and then-lead
Raw announcer)
Joey Styles took part in the show. Styles then
quit in
storyline, however, on the following
Monday's'
Raw, meaning Grisham ran the show alone.
United Kingdom
Towards the end of 1999,
Channel 4 started
broadcasting the show at 4pm on Sundays, as a part of
T4. These one-hour shows were a
magazine-type show, usually featuring three or four
matches involving
mid-carders and
jobbers, brief highlights from
Raw and
SmackDown! - plus often a
feature such as a
wrestler filming a
TV commercial.
A separate
commentary was made for the UK
version,
with references aimed at the UK audience and about the show's
broadcaster - Channel 4. A unique
quirk was that during the commentary
Raw and
SmackDown! were referred
to as taking place on Friday and Saturday respectively, which were
the days they were broadcast in the UK on
Sky
Sports - as opposed to the usual method of them being referred
to by the
North American broadcast
dates of Monday and Thursday. The two-person
announce team was a mix of individuals including
Kevin Kelly,
Michael Cole,
Michael Hayes and
Jonathan Coachman.
During the middle of 2000
Heat started to get moved around
the Channel 4 schedule, usually between midday and 7pm. Towards the
end of
2000 the show was permanently moved to
being broadcast in the early-hours of Monday mornings. The show
stayed in the time-slot until December 2001 when
Channel 4's deal with the
World Wrestling Federation
expired.
In January 2003,
Heat replaced
Superstars on
Sky Sports. The show stayed on the channel until
it was discontinued by
WWE in 2008, and replaced by
WWE Vintage Collection.
Commentator history
References
- Josh Mathews blog confirming final episode of
Heat
- WWE.com UK television schedule
- Title history details
- 2000 WWF results
- 2001 WWF results
See also
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Misc
Search
