Tonight’s episode of WWE Friday Night SmackDown will feature the premiere of the ThunderDome.
The concept, which will emanate from the Amway Center in Orlando, FL, is to provide an enhanced viewing experience with there not being fans in attendance.
The ThunderDome will feature “a state-of-the-art set, video boards, pyrotechnics, lasers, cutting-edge graphics and drone cameras, [that] will take WWE fans’ viewing experience to an unprecedented level.”
WWE executive vice president of television production Kevin Dunn spoke to Sports Illustrated about what fans can expect.
“We can now do things production-wise that we could never otherwise do,” Dunn said. “We’re flying drones in the arena, we are putting a roof inside the Amway Center, and we’ll be able to project content onto the roof. So when a big star like Drew McIntyre comes down to the ring, the whole arena will turn into his content with lasers, pyro, smoke, projections on the top of the building and on the floor. It will be a big, beautiful entrance, better than WrestleMania.”
As previously reported here on WrestlingNews.com, the experience will include virtual fans.
“Like the NBA, we’re doing virtual fans, but we’re also creating an arena-type atmosphere,” he said. “We won’t have a flat board, we’ll have rows and rows and rows of fans. We’ll have almost 1,000 LED boards, and it will recreate the arena experience you’re used to seeing with WWE. The atmosphere will be night and day from the Performance Center. This is going to let us have a WrestleMania-level production value, and that’s what our audience expects from us. We are also going to put arena audio into the broadcast, similar to baseball, but our audio will be mixed with the virtual fans. So when fans start chants, we’ll hear them.”
You can watch a video preview of the ThunderDome embedded above.
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