You guess it, there was some mud wrestling going on. The contestant had to try grabbing a key hanging from the ceiling in a room with a muddy floor, while a woman wrestler was trying to stop her. You could find some good fighting at times, since the contestants were quite eager to pass the challenge.

The show went on for years and was exported in many other countries too. It’s probably an ancestor of “Fear Factor”, except that the US show focuses more on eating or touching awful stuff and they seldom have games were there is a direct physical confrontation.

Source: Wikipedia

This is what I consider a negative example: a good wrestling event (probably, from other clips I’ve seen) turned into useless stuff after TV editing. We see the host, a lot of computer graphics but very little wrestling, edited in 2-second fragments so you can’t see any action.

Visit the Margarita Wrestling web site, it has better previews !

But the famous Pepsi advertisement is another proof that most people like seeing beautiful women in a combat/fighting situation. Good cast and good filming, they just needed a different writer who dared to choose a catfighting finale !

Sources: Well,Pepsi !

The real problem was being able to watch it ! During the Olympic Games the TV coverage was quite poor. The main networks were focusing on more popular sports, including the ones we can see every week on air. It may have been more interesting to focus on sports we can see every four years only !

In some cases it was possible to watch streaming versions of the competitions on the Internet, a simple way to bypass the limits imposed by the small number of channels used by broadcasters. But there were several restrictions imposed by the Olympic Committee, so each country had different sources and a different way to watch our favorite sport. Right now there are no recordings easily available: either you saw it live or… you missed it.

This is Carol Huynh (Canada), winner in the 48Kg category.

Here’s something different, a mud wrestling show from Ukraine. This is just a promo, so you see short sequences only, heavily edited. The girls are attractive and the setup is professional. The action is not what I really like to see. I’d call it “jump and fly”: the fighters are moving around too much, with plenty of jumps and throws. It’s not what you see in a competitive match, but it’s still nice to watch and it’s something that can appeal to big crowds, like disco shows or cable TV broadcasts.

The fighting style is usually fistfight-like. She plays an undercover spy and she’s supposed to be well trained in martial arts, so there’s no hairpulling here. The choreography is quite good, Yvonne is gorgeous and her foes are equally attractive and sexy.

Season One is available on Blu-ray too. Season Two is starting now, let’s see if the show writers are still inspired and the tradition continues !

Sources: DVD Chuck_at_NBC Wikipedia

I remember about five fights over the various seasons, usually based on classic movie-style martial arts. Episode “Tranformation” (season 1, episode 7) is a bit different: Tia Carrere faces Roberta Angelica in a mud wrestling match.

The sequence is quite long, but the action is not great, with disconnected scenes, heavy editing and some slow motion. No ground fighting, just a few punches and throws. Roberta has a nice attire, while Tia is too much dressed for my taste. Still, watching Tia Carrere fighting in mud a sight that can’t be missed !

Sources: DVD IMDb

Tawny Kitaen spends about half of the movie in a kind of futuristic bikini and she has a couple of catfights. You’ll enjoy the perfect body of this stunning woman. The nice thing is that most of the movie, starting from the 45th minute, is a nice build up for those fights. So you don’t need to fast-forward until the catfight scene and ignore the rest, but you can really enjoy the whole movie, waiting for the clash to happen.

The main fight is long enough and well-edited. It starts with some weapons but ends with hand-to-hand combat. Very nice outfits, if you like the genre !

This is the movie trailer, not the catfight itself. Believe me: buy or rent this movie !

Sources: DVD IMDb

It’s a TV show called “Gintarine Ledi “, shot a few years ago in Lithuania. Later on it was dubbed in English (more or less) and broadcasted in other countries as “Amber Lady“. The girls are very attractive and some of them wrestle with some energy. So we have the right ingredients: slim and fit women wearing a bikini, messy wrestling in honey, broadcast-level photography (well, maybe not on the web) and sometimes competitive action. Maybe not top athletes in 100% competition, but all of them doing some good efforts for pinning their opponent and winning the match !

Sources: I would love to find a good official source, selling the full show in DVD quality. I could not find any. If you know where to buy the Amber Lady matches, just let me know !

Even more interesting is the fact that catfights in advertising have been used a few times over the past two or three years, the most famous one being the “Miller Light Catfight“. Each time they create some buzz around them, with a few complaints but plenty of people looking for them and sharing them on the web too. This proves that catfights have some kind of appeal to the “general public” too.