Booking style & presentation. Solie was just damned good. He brought the right gravitas for the TV presentation. He made what they did believable and plausible.
I was listening to a podcast with Arn Anderson & Dave Meltzer. Arn's a salty guy, but he was also booker in Georgia's glory years. He said they were running four concurrent spot shows, nightly, in GA. Plus the TV show. I don't know logistically how this worked: team 1 does Macon on Monday, team 2, Macon, on Tuesday? ... and so on? Or did team 1 have the northeast portion of the state; team 2 the northwest, and so on?
Regardless, you wouldn't run that many shows if you couldn't fill the venues. Nightly. 1) That's a shitload of booking, 2) You don't/can't do angles where other guys' rep is destroyed. He can be defeated but not devalued.
Mid South? They were good because they HAD to be. Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma weren't what you'd call very affluent states; you go to a crap show, you don't go back. And face it, you had young JR and Bill Watts announcing. Look at the pacing of that show -- slam, bang! Watts' delivery equated things to athletic excellence and patriotism -- a heady mix. He might sound unpolished as an announcer, but he was actually damned good. His LACK of slickness contributed to the believability of the show. As for Boyd Pierce? He was so old school it didn't matter
[Edit]: Look at young Tony Schiavane or David Crockett: you often saw them do the interviews, and you'd see the sly smiles as the wrestlers go into their over-the-top harangues. No resistance to the wrestlers taking their interviews outside of 'normal frame "x"'.
The former is irritating, they were that close to breaking up, laughing. The interviewer is a straight man: if he treats the interviews as serious, it lends credibility. The latter is hugely important: there must be boundaries of outlandishness. The boundaries can be pushed, but when Solie did them, he'd interject "hey, wait a minute--!" and push them back into the bounds of what an interview is.
An over the top: one that Bob ran here... Ric Flair doing a spot, leaves, walks back for a "Woo!", leaves, comes back for another "Woo!", leaves... does this about 4 times. Crockett's about to burst laughing. Beebo's subconscious takeaway is "Ric Flair will give you a farce instead of a match performance." And that wasn't incredibly bad, it's just one I know you've seen here...
What's bad is, when the interview becomes performance art, and everyone outdoes the other. The equivalent to tables, chairs, scaffold & ladder matches: one doesn't shock any more, so let's throw people off the scaffold onto a pyramid of tables...
