As most of you may know, I’m been a fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship for a while now. Not a huge fan (I’ve never bought a live PPV), but I follow it on Spike regularly and keep an eye out for the Classic DVD releases.
Anyway, I’m almost done with my UFC 7 recap (link available if anyone wants it). It’s been a ton of fun writing these, but you can tell that I’m getting a little jaded by all the predictable results, and it was around this time that the wild 'n crazy early days were nearly at an end. IMO, The Ultimate Ultimate, the last event of '95, is a good place to stop.
However, there’s been no DVD release; Blockbuster Video has 7 and 8, but not Ultimate Ultimate. There’s been no mention of a DVD release on UFC’s website, and when I click the “Buy DVD/Video” link on the event results page, it goes to a generic store page. (This previously happened with the UFC 4 link for some reason.)
What’s the story here? Does the league want to excise this event for some reason? Given that it’s the first ever “all star” tournament, I can’t think of any reason they wouldn’t want to push this.
Anybody? Just to give a little background, this is the first “all star” UFC, every competitor a champion or runner-up of a previous tournament (well, and Keith Hackney, but with Royce Gracie, Ken Shamrock, and Patrick Smtih out of this, they were understandably a bit shorthanded). It was in December of 1995.
Well, Zuffa was only recently able to purchase the rights to the older UFC videos from the previous owner (SEG, I think, although it may have gone through some other hands) so that would introduce some delay.
Who knows, maybe they’re going to slice it up and repackage some fights into “Greatest Knockouts” collections or whatnot.
Dang…not sure what the point of that would be. This was a complete tournament, and a pretty landmark event in UFC history. It happened after 7. What reason could there be for not releasing it complete and in order.
Guess I’ll just wait for further developments. Nothing new there.