WWE debuted the Thunderdome last Friday on Smackdown. Orlando’s Amway Center has been transformed into a new set complete with LED boards featuring images of fans watching the show. According to comments made on Wrestling Observer Radio, WWE had a production team giving instructions to virtual fans throughout the show.
“The basic gist is the Thunderdome is WCW, those Orlando tapings, same city even, from Disney World from the mid-90s where they would hold up signs that say ‘cheer’ ‘boo’ and all this,” said Dave Meltzer. “What they do is there is a coordinator, fan coordinator, on a headset and all the people can hear him. And he says like ‘everyone put your thumb down’ and that’s why when I watch on the screen and you see all the fans at the same time put their thumb down, it’s like this is so fake.”
“No one does this in real life as a real crowd, in synchronized,” he continued.
He would continue to say that there would be points throughout the show where the coordinator would tell fans to clap, give a thumbs down, or make similar gestures.
“Most of the time the people just sit there and don’t do anything and it’s all the pumped in crowd noise but every now and then you would have something where everybody would boo or everybody would cheer but it wasn’t the whole match, it would just be in certain spots. What it would be is when the coordinators says ‘everybody cheer,’ ‘everybody boo,’ if there was a chant, that’s what they would tell them to do.”
“In some ways this is better for (WWE) because they can control the fans, which they could never do before,” Meltzer continued.
