There have been a lot of site anniversaries posted lately, so here's another one! Mudwrestle.us turned 15 years old in January of this year!
As the old timers around here may remember, I started out in this business back in 2003 when I was running the sound, lighting, and video systems in a Pacific Northwest nightclub that hosted metal and punk shows on the weekends. The owner was looking to drag in more mid-week customers, so the promoter decided to try bands and female mud wrestling on Thursday nights. We mainly had the girlfriends of the band members at first, then word spread and we got a wide variety of local girls, strippers, and a few that just wandered in from the top-40 dance club next door. Luckily, I started filming the matches by about the 3rd week. At first I didn't really have any decent equipment and the first handful of scenes are basically security cameras recorded on VHS tape. Later I added some better analog gear and ultimately went with digital.
All the girls wanted copies of their matches, so I started putting them on VHS tape. I also started selling the tapes on eBay and they were fairly popular. By the end of the year, I was also distributing DVDs. Fortunately, every scene from the beginning was digitized, edited, and rendered to full 720x480 DV resolution and the edited DV tape masters were stored away for future use. At the time, very few people had fast internet connections, so when I finally started putting them up on the membership site and then ultimately building the Vidown download store system around them, I decided to render them at 1 megabit per second in WMV format so the file sizes were still reasonable. They were always watchable, but that data rate isn't terribly better than VHS.
Well, the future is NOW, so in January of this year I decided to re-render all 75+ original mud wrestling matches to modern MP4 format at 4 mbps. That took about a week and then I replaced all the original files in the catalog with the new bigger, better versions. I also created nine new entries for the DVD masters that include 7-10 matches with nearly and hour of footage on each one. Best of all is the price. Every vintage scene is now $2 each with the DVD images at around $15
Lastly, I replaced the previous 640x480 still photo galleries with the 1024x768 versions of the pics. All of this old-timey nostalgic awesomeness can be found at:
I was one of the horndogs who bought these on VHS on Ebay! Can I get freebies on the upgrades if I send you pics of the cassettes? (Wait, dangit, I digitized them a few years ago and tossed the tapes.)
These vids have mostly fallen out of my wank rotation, but I still have crushes on some of those hotties .... the kind of butch blonde who always wore denim shorts, the longer-haired blonde who liked to get gropey with the other chicks (I think that's her in the second pic), and the redhead with the star tattoos on their arms (closest to the camera in the last potting soil pic). Bring 'em back for a reboot, like THE X-FILES!
Had a quick scan through some of the vidown scenes earlier, I see some of the girls seem to be wearing a bit more than just bikinis - busy shooting at the moment but will have to have a good look through during the week. Don't suppose there are any fully clothed (as in full length jeans, not just shorts) scenes in there? Could even be tempted by denim shorts.
Congratulations on the 15 year anniversary! Still seems weird to me that the Internet is now established technology and not this strange new cutting edge thing is was back in 95.
Regis said: I was one of the horndogs who bought these on VHS on Ebay! Can I get freebies on the upgrades if I send you pics of the cassettes? (Wait, dangit, I digitized them a few years ago and tossed the tapes.)
These vids have mostly fallen out of my wank rotation, but I still have crushes on some of those hotties .... the kind of butch blonde who always wore denim shorts, the longer-haired blonde who liked to get gropey with the other chicks (I think that's her in the second pic), and the redhead with the star tattoos on their arms (closest to the camera in the last potting soil pic). Bring 'em back for a reboot, like THE X-FILES!
A decade and a half is a long time in rasslin' years. I suspect that none of those girls are spry (or drunk) enough to do all that again.
DungeonMasterOne said: Had a quick scan through some of the vidown scenes earlier, I see some of the girls seem to be wearing a bit more than just bikinis - busy shooting at the moment but will have to have a good look through during the week. Don't suppose there are any fully clothed (as in full length jeans, not just shorts) scenes in there? Could even be tempted by denim shorts.
Congratulations on the 15 year anniversary! Still seems weird to me that the Internet is now established technology and not this strange new cutting edge thing is was back in 95.
No fully clothed matches, but there were some where the shorts and tops stayed on. A lot of them just wore their underwear and we supplied them with extra-small tank tops that got real stretchy and tear-y when wet. It's all about presentation in this business
soundguy said: A decade and a half is a long time in rasslin' years. I suspect that none of those girls are spry (or drunk) enough to do all that again.
Let's track them down one by one and find out, though!