EMN Pro
EMN Pro File List | EMN Pro Interstitials/Ads File List
EMN Pro is full of professional wrestling 24/7. Here are a few of the wrestling shows and federations you'll run into while watching.
All Elite Wrestling
Notes: Founded in 2019 by Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes, The Young Bucks, and CEO Tony Khan, AEW aimed to make independent wrestling as of 2017-2018 mainstream and they succeeded, becoming the first true competitor to WWE since WCW folded in the early 00s.
All Japan Pro Wrestling
Notes: AJPW popularized the King's Road style, a brutal wrestling style full of heavy hits. Packed full of gaijins like Terry Funk wrestling their hearts out against Japanese legends like Toshiaki Kawada. One of my favorite wrestling federations because of how intense every match is.
All-Japan Women's Pro Wrestling
Notes: The reason for the joshi boom in the 80s and 90s, AJW featured tough-as-nails women like Bull Nakano and Dump Matsumoto among many others beating the hell out of each other. Notably had a predominantly female fanbase. I love this fed.
American Wrestling Association
Notes: Though it often lagged behind the National Wrestling Alliance and World Wrestling Federation, the AWA was packed with great territory talent, including one of my favorites, Nick Bockwinkel.
Beyond Wrestling
Notes: A wrestling promotion done for workers, by workers, featuring wild independent matchups and bookings that weren't really being done anywhere else at the time.
CHIKARA Pro
Notes: A Philadelphia-based promotion full of great talent that peaked in the early 2010s. It stood out with its colorful masked characters, its annual King of Trios three-night event, and its involved, often outrageous stories and angles with a splash of comedy wrestling. It helped get me get into independent wrestling and can be argued as one of the forefathers of the modern independent style along with PWG, ROH, and CZW. I actually attended CHIKARA A Piece Of The Action, which is of course on the channel.
Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre
Notes: Founded in 1933, this lucha libre promotion is the oldest active pro wrestling federation in the world.
Dark Side of the Ring
Notes: A heavy wrestling documentary series focusing on the more controversial stories and mysteries that surround the sport. Not always the easiest watch, but consistently fascinating.
Deadlock Pro Wrestling
Notes: A new independent wrestling promotion gaining a lot of steam, run by the hosts of the Deadlock Podcast. Said hosts include jawnny from NewLegacyInc! Consistently books high-level talent and has buzz.
Documentaries & Originals
Notes: ICP's StrangleMania, WWE Network and DVD documentaries, WWE Confidential, Legends House, Table For Three, classic shoot interviews like Paul London and Brian Kendrick's Excellent Adventure, movies like Ready to Rumble or Scooby-Doo! Wrestlemania Mystery...and so much more!
Dramatic Dream Team
Notes: Initially a parody of WWE and NJPW both, DDT marries comedic undercards with incredible top-of-the-card wrestling. A consistently electrifying promotion, and where Kenny Omega among many others got his start.
Extreme Championship Wrestling
Notes: An infamous indepedent promotion out of Philadelphia from the 90s. Known for bloodthirsty crowds, hardcore matches, and the furious passion of the owner, Paul Heyman, who sold each show like you were watching the most punk rock thing you'd ever seen. We were able to find reconstructed versions of all their special shows and PPVs, including One Night Stand 2005, that restored music and commentary missing from the WWE Network editions.
Florida Championship Wrestling
Notes: WWE's old pre-Performance Center feeder league. While it trained a lot of great future stars, it also gave us wrestlers with names like Buddy Stetcher or Buck Dixon and characters like Nick Rogers (who my friend Lazer got fired!), and the photo department always made everyone look bad. It's still fun to see developmental matches that previously only broadcast on local TV.
Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling
Notes: Atsushi Onita's infamous deathmatch federation that started in 1989 and made Cactus Jack, Terry Funk, Onita himself, and others into hardcore legends. Notable for its use of fire, explosions, and barbed wire.
Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide
Notes: Another long-running lucha libre federation. While it often has great matches, wrestlers, and shows, it does have some completely wild and weird booking decisions and presentation. Sometimes there are multiple Psycho Clowns! Sometimes a guy shows up dressed in full WWII regalia! You really never know what you're going to get here.
Lucha Underground
Notes: A mixture of lucha libre and telenovela, featuring some top names like Johnny Mundo, Pentagon Jr, and more, all taking part in a wrestling show held in an Aztec temple under the watchful eye of crime lord Dario Cueto. High drama and theater through the lens of pro wrestling. It's, for the most part, pretty great.
Major League Wrestling
Notes: An independent federation with strong presentation and solid talent, though the real highlight are the Battle Riots, basically big time independent Royal Rumble matches packed with great surprises. I'm a huge fan of Filthy Tom Lawlor and it's all because of how good he is in these.
Miscellaneous Other Shows
Notes: A selection of miscellanous matches and single shows both great and terrible, including Keiji Mutoh's Last Love, Rodman Down Under, the XWF, 666 TripleSix, GLEAT, Sendai Girls, a selection of some major historical joshi and lucha libre matches, and even some classic black-and-white wrestling shows. A special mention goes to 3PW Raven's Rules, the first independent pro wrestling DVD I bought because it was inexplicably at a store in Italy and cost $5. It's quite bad.
New Japan Pro Wrestling
Notes: One of the biggest names in Japanese wrestling today and a huge catalyst of the shift in the wrestling landscape in the 2010s.
Ring of Honor
Notes: At one point the top independent wrestling promotion in the US, creator of stars like Bryan Danielson, the Kings of Wrestling, Nigel McGuinness, Kevin Steen, Jimmy Jacobs, the Briscoes, Dalton Castle, and so many more. One of the first iPPVs I ever bought was Final Battle 2010, just to see Steen vs. Generico. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Mandy did the same. The promotion suffered a dip in quality for a few years near the end of the 2010s before being bought by AEW and Tony Khan in 2022. It's been delivering quality shows ever since.
Rockstar Pro Wrestling
Notes: Dayton, Ohio's local wrestling federation that lasted from approximately 2013-2020. While much of it is lost due to Pivotshare's closure and a loss of the masters, some of their weekly show, Amped, is available on Fite. I was part of it in 2017 and 2018, doing ring announcing and commentary on separate shows, running social media, and I even designed the main championship seen in that picture. The Rockstar Pro Arena, a WWII-era warehouse converted into a punk rock venue, is one of the most magical wrestling venues I've ever been to.
Smoky Mountain Wrestling
Notes: Jim Cornette's comically bad early-90s territory stuffed to the gills with characters leaning on racial stereotypes, cheap heat, and outlandish gimmicks.
Southpaw Regional Wrestling
Notes: A WWE Network original featuring wrestlers of the time parodying Smoky Mountain Wrestling with outlandish gimmicks and ridiculous storylines. Usually made up of five-minute episodes that end in the promotion running out of money and folding.
Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling
Notes: A modern joshi federation that mixes wrestling and idol culture. It thrives on strength of character with defined and consistent character relationships and big emotional storytelling beats as well as a card that mixes entertaining comedic matches with hard-hitting ringwork. It's one of the federations that helped me fall back in love with wrestling in early 2023.
Total Nonstop Action/Impact Wrestling
Notes: An infamously-messy second-tier promotion started by Jeff Jarrett and Dixie Carter. Soundtracked by the incomparably high-energy Don West and the much lower-key Mike Tenay, this promotion mixed incredible high-flying action with some of the most earnestly-baffling booking ever, constantly signing veterans and taking shots at WWE while never really competing. It started with a six-sided ring, but after bringing in Hulk Hogan in 2010, moved to four. Consistently entertaining, both ironically and unironically, and it's been long enough that even when it's a joke it's a joke you can laugh at. No one has any idea how it's still alive after all the financial trouble it had.
World Championship Wrestling
Notes: For a time, the only wrestling promotion that ever went toe-to-toe and even surpassed WWF/WWE. Operating out of Atlanta and delivering on a wide variety of wrestling styles including territory talent, luchadors, Japanese talent, and more, WCW also had problems with mismanagement and behind-the-scenes egos causing complicated and confusing booking. It's also extremely, extremely entertaining and watchable as a result. I'm a huge fan of WCW Thunder, which isn't at all a "good" wrestling show, but constantly features wild moments like Terry Funk attacking people while dressed as a janitor or Scott Steiner beating an inflatable duck to death with a stick.
World Wonder Ring STARDOM
Notes: One of the biggest joshi wrestling promotions running today, founded by former AJW talent and producers. Consistently produces big wrestling stars with its focus on attractive wrestlers wrestling high-impact styles.
World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment
Notes: The biggest wrestling promotion in the world, and home to the Attitude Era, the one time pro wrestling wasn't quite so niche. Its pageantry and focus on "sports entertainment" and car crash TV allowed it to succeed in both the 80s and 90s, and its the promotion I started watching in the late-00s to get into wrestling. As a result, we have a ton of shows that are considered classics or feature interesting talents, but also a lot of shows we're particularly nostalgic for. Also of note are the NXT shows, which after a certain point became WWE cosplaying Ring of Honor or PWG (and doing a pretty solid job of it).
Wrestling Society X
Notes: MTV's wild independent wrestling promotion featuring talent that would later go on to make a splash, such as The Human Tornado, El Mesias, and Tyler Black. Frenetically-edited, often with post-production explosions added in, and an entire kayfabe explanation of being a federation set in an underground bunker. This fast-paced soap opera style could be seen as a precursor to Lucha Underground.