Ring Introduction by Elliot Murnick

Elliot Murnick (Facebook)

If you're as old as I am, you will remember back to when Carl and Elliot Murnick did the ring introductions on Mid-Atlantic and Wide World Wrestling from around 1976-1978. They are the sons of Raleigh promoter Joe Murnick and were involved in several of the family businesses. Mr. Murnick did the ring introductions for years at WRAL, but by early 1976 had mostly turned it over to the boys.

As part of our Mid-Atlantic Gateway "Sound Bytes" series here on the Studio Wrestling website, we'll present a few sample of ring introductions from those years.

This one is from August of 1976 from Mid-Atlantic Wrestling hosted by Bob Caudle, who you will also hear in this clip, pitching to Elliot Murnick in the ring.

Ring Introduction by Elliot Murnick


The Death of Introductions from the Ring

In 1978, Bob Caudle and Rich Landrum started doing the ring introductions from the floor near their announce position using blue-screen chroma-key composting on the studio backdrops to show the wrestler being introduced in the ring. I always found this highly annoying and missed the introduction form the ring form the moment they were gone. Ring introductions should always be done form the ring. It's as if WRAL had this new chroma-key technology and just looked for any way to use it, rather than a useful way to use it. Fans never got the hang of it, and usually couldn't hear the intros that well anyway. Bob and Rich would be looking at the monitor off-screen (sort of like the weather people do when they use green-screen chroma key today) rather than looking at the ring or at the fans, so the fans sort of watched the monitor, too, and never reacted to the introductions. Those introductions most always fell flat.

TV wrestling mostly eliminated their ring introductions when they moved out of the studio to the arenas anyway, except when there was a main-event level match. But I digress.

More Sound Bytes to come.