On Saturday, World Wrestling Entertainment kicks off is five-year, $1.6 billion deal with ESPN by adding another premium live event (PLE) to its portfolio with the first Wrestlepalooza extravaganza. The show will also serve as the first major event to stream live exclusively on ESPN’s month-old app, ESPN Unlimited.
But will this PLE be the actual first “Wrestlepalooza?”
Well, it will be the first event by that name staged by the WWE, but not the first ever â because the name “Wrestlepalooza” has been around since the 1990s, and has a possible origin that might even surprise the most knowledgeable wrestling fans.
From Alt-Rock to Extreme Wrestling
The name, at least the “palooza” piece of it, came not from wrestling, but from the world of alternative rock music.
In 1991 Perry Farrell, lead singer of the Los Angeles-based alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction, came up with a bizarre idea for what he thought would be a farewell tour for the band â though the band ended up continuing, more or less, until 2024 anyway.
Instead of simply headlining their own tour, Jane’s Addiction would stage a music festival, sort of an alt-rock Woodstock. But unlike Woodstock, they would take the entire festival on the road. And it wouldn’t be just music, at least it in Farrells’ original concept of the tour. He also wanted the traveling show to be a food festival.
“For some reason, the Janeâs Addiction frontman was obsessed with the idea of a giant burrito that all festival-goers would share,” recalled Rolling Stone magazine.
To name the event, Farrell said he thought back to a Three Stooges movie, in which he’d heard an old-fashioned-sounding word that was supposed to describe anything outrageous or extraordinary. The word, of course, was “Lollapalooza.”
ECW Takes the Name
In 1995, a young wrestling promotion calling itself Extreme Championship Wrestling, or ECW, was looking for its own annual big event, along the lines of the WWE’s by-then-well-established Wrestlemania.
By that point, the alt-rock Lollapalooza tour was one of the hottest, and at the same time coolest happenings on the music scene. The connotations of the “Lollapalooza” name, meaning something incredible or, one might say, extreme, also seemed to fit. So ECW simply adapted the name to its own event â “Wrestlepalooza.”
ECW folded up its tent in 2001, and managed to produce only four shows under the Wrestlepalooza banner, and only one â the 1998 edition â made it onto a pay-per-view broadcast.
WWE Buys Out ECW’s Assets
In 2003, with ECW in bankruptcy, legendary WWE boss Vince McMahon bought out the dormant company’s assets, including all of it trademarks and brand names â including, of course, the name “Wrestlepalooza.”
McMahon had bigger plans â he wanted to revive the entire ECW promotion which despite its financial failure had become beloved by a hardcore following of wrestling fans. From 2006 to 2010, WWE ran a new version of ECW, under McMahon’s control. But Wrestlepalooza was never part of it.
A Different Possible Origin of the Name
Amidst a series of scandals, McMahon stepped down as CEO of WWE’s parent company, TKO productions, in 2004. When the new WWE corporate office was looking for an event to open its new relationship with ESPN, it dug into the ECW trademarks that it continues to own, and found Wrestlepalooza, attaching the trademark to Saturday night’s streaming event.
But was ECW really the first to use the name? Bizarrely, an October 29, 1995 episode of the popular 90s-era Fox sitcom Married With Children aired a wrestling themed-episode in which characters take part in a professional wrestling event named, yes, “Wrestlepalooza.”
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