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Why Lucha Underground is not a Wrestling Promotion

By Yair Galaviz

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Lucha Underground is not a wrestling promotion. Lucha Underground is a TV Show ABOUT a Wrestling Promotion.

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Lucha Underground has received both praise and negative comments by many people. Although I would break it down to an 90/10 scenario, even those who love the product don’t really understand what it’s trying to accomplish. They see the show as a wrestling promotion just like WWE, NJPW, TNA, etc. The problem is that Lucha Underground is not a wrestling promotion. Lucha Underground is a TV Show about a Wrestling Promotion.

In 2010, WWE launched NXT. At the time, it was promoted as the evolution of reality TV and wrestling. The fact is, that WWE had no idea what they were doing and it seemed that the show was written on the fly. For WWE to say that they would revolutionized the way wrestling and reality TV was portrayed was more than a little farfetched.

So 2014 comes along and we see the introduction of Lucha Underground. Although this is not a reality show, it is the evolution of wrestling as an entertainment option. In order to understand what Robert Rodriguez is trying to pull off with Lucha Underground you have to understand the history of Lucha Wrestling in Mexican Cinema.

What Lucha Underground is trying to accomplish is what Mexican fans have grown up watching on their television screens. Robert Rodriguez is bringing back the old Santo and Blue Demon movies into the small screen. What you see now in movie theaters with Iron man, Batman, Superman, and the Avengers, is the equivalent of what Mexican and Latin American families were watching at movie theaters during the 60’s and 70’s.

The wrestlers were the super heroes of the time. You would see movies of El Santo vs The Mummy, or El Santo vs Dracula, Zombies, Werewolves, among others. These were very popular movies that even today you can find at certain film festivals around the world. The popularity of El Santo and Blue Demon skyrocketed at the time and helped their wrestling careers with packed arenas all around the country. It was like having the character of say Batman show up at your nearest arena and you can see your hero fight bad guys.

Roberto Rodriguez is a fan of the grindhouse genre of film. Lucha movies fit into that category. What Robert Rodriguez and subsequently El Rey network are trying to pull off is to bring that type of storytelling into a wrestling show. What they created is a TV show about a wrestling promotion. A throwback to the old Lucha Cinema. It’s a show on which you have a female assassin being kidnapped and learning the way of the Lucha to get revenge for her parent’s death. You have back stories of wrestlers who have 1000 lives while others carry 1000 deaths. You believe a Hunter such as King Cuerno is after the head of a Dragon for his mantle. Those fantastic cinematic packages create that aura of a movie or in this case, a TV show.

Lucha Underground is not your regular run of the mill wrestling promotion. It’s a TV show with a Beginning, middle and end. Season 1 will conclude in August which is not a bad thing. Who knows what stories will end and what cliffhangers we will have. Lucha Underground is a love letter to a great tradition in Lucha Libre. This first season could easily be called “Lucha Underground: The Black Lotus vs Matanza.

What do you enjoy most of this show? What has been the highlight so far halfway through the first season? What do you expect to happen in the coming episodes? (No spoilers). Leave your comments below.

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