WCW Monday Nitro | TNT | Promo | 1999

WCW Monday Nitro, also known as Monday Nitro or simply Nitro, was a weekly professional wrestling telecast produced by World Championship Wrestling (WCW), created by Ted Turner and Eric Bischoff.

The show aired Monday nights on TNT, going head-to-head with the World Wrestling Federation's (WWF now WWE) Monday Night Raw from September 4, 1995 to March 26, 2001, when WCW was purchased by the WWF.

The debut of Nitro began the Monday Night Wars, a ratings battle between the WWF and WCW that lasted for almost six years and saw each company resort to cutthroat tactics to try to compete with the competition. Although comparable to Raw in popularity from the beginning, Nitro began to dominate its rival in television ratings by mid 1996, based largely on the strength of the nWo storyline, a rebellious wrestling stable that wanted to take over WCW. Nitro continued to beat Raw for 84 consecutive weeks, forcing WWF owner Vince McMahon to change the way he did business.[1]

As the nWo storyline grew stagnant, fan interest waned and Raw began to edge out Nitro in the ratings. The turning point for the organizations came during mid-April 1998 after Stone Cold Steve Austin won his first WWF Championship. From that week forward, Raw beat Nitro in the ratings by a significant amount, and WCW was never able to regain the success it once had.

Besides broadcasting from various arenas and locations across the country (such as the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota, from which the very first episode of Nitro was broadcast), Nitro also did special broadcasts from the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando in 1996, and did annual Spring Break-Out episodes from Panama City Beach, Florida starting in March 1997. The rights to Nitro now belong to WWE.

As of June 30, 2016, all episodes have been made available for streaming on the WWE Network.[2] WWE has released three Best of WCW Monday Nitro DVD sets as of October 2015.[3

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