Royal Rumble Backdrop

Is it just me or was the backdrop annoying as hell at the Royal Rumble last night?

If you caught the Royal Rumble last night, you saw that the backdrop, the area of the arena directly behind the ring, was not the normal sea of the audience like usual. Instead, as is very common for broadcasts originating from Madison Square Garden, the walkway and the doorway were heavily lit.

I found this lighting to be extremely annoying and distracting throughout both the matches and the over-the-top Royal Rumble contest for several reasons.

1. The walkway was lit in the most annoying light blue. This hue caused a contrast that made it hard to make out some of the wrestlers' silhouettes while they were in the ring. Why is it MSG is the only locale where the camera is set up directly across from the dressing room?

2. The Royal Rumble symbol was too low and again threw off the contrast. If the wrestler was not huge like Mark Henry, Big Daddy V, and Khali, it was often difficult to make them out clearly. The looks of this horrid array kept reminding me of the ridiculous frame lighting that was mounted around the Monday Night Raw curtain back when the show first came on tv back in the early nineties.

3. Because of the position of the walkway and the way it was lighted, you could not help but see the eliminated competitors stroll back to the ring after being thrown over the top rope. Because most of them were worn out and walked very slowly, you could not help but watch them as they ambled back to the dressing room.

4. Officials and stage hands were darting back and forth, coming in and going out of the door, as well as leaning around the corner to check the action. At one time, I think I even saw some stooge in a bright gold coat lean out to look at something and then dart back under cover, but not before taking my attention away from my favorite Main Event in Sports Entertainment each year.

5. Was that a Titantron that was mounted above the walkway??? It looked like it was broken up in several smaller regions, each displaying a separate image, but I could not make sense of any of it EXCEPT the quadrant that would morph into the countdown clock when it was time for another wrestler to enter the Rumble.

I believe that the producers eventually realized they made a huge mistake with the layout of the lights. What other reason could be behind the random adjusting and panning of the camera throughout the Rumble match?

I sincerely hope that when WWE returns to Madison Square Garden for its next Pay-per-View, they make the necessary adjustments to ensure the qualify of the background is good enough and does not distract the viewers at home. The 2008 installment was my least favorite Royal Rumble of the last 10 years, and I can honestly say it had nothing to do with the quality of the matches - I simply could not take my eyes off the terrible backdrop that the epic battles were fought against.

-NAPALM-