Wrestling's favorite docuseries hits play on the analog tapes
If you told someone in 2006 that a brutal indie brawl from a high school gym in Philadelphia would eventually spawn a prestige cable documentary and a collectible physical tape, they would have called the men in white coats. Yet here we are in July 2026, and Vice TV's Dark Side of the Ring is going full retro for one of the most infamous matches in modern professional wrestling history.
The creators are officially celebrating the premiere of their latest deep-dive—focused entirely on the legendary 2005 IWA Mid-South clash between Samoa Joe and Dylan Summers, better known to hardcore maniacs as Necro Butcher—by releasing a limited edition VHS tape. That is not a typo. You can actually pop open a shell, blow into the tape deck, and re-watch the carnage like it is 1999 all over again. If you prefer to stream your violence without tracking errors, Vice also released the full episode online for free.
Blood, concrete, and the TNA narrative problem
For those who were not haunting wrestling message boards twenty years ago, Samoa Joe versus Necro Butcher is the holy grail of indie garbage wrestling turned art form. Joe was an absolute killer on the rise, freshly minting his reputation as an unstoppable focal point of Ring of Honor and TNA. Necro Butcher was a guy who treated his own forehead like a pinata and walked into deathmatches barefoot across thumb tacks and broken lighttubes. When they collided, Necro famously took a brutal concrete dropkick off the apron directly onto his skull, creating a clip that has been looped millions of times across the internet.
Naturally, wrestling media had a field day breaking down the documentary's release. Over on the Wade Keller Pro Wrestling Podcast Flagship, Keller and ProWrestling.net's Jason Powell dug into the episode, taking specific issue with how the producers framed the TNA Era. While Dark Side of the Ring excels at atmospheric drama and tragic retrospectives, critics were quick to point out that the show often glosses over crucial backstage context to push a sleeker narrative. According to Keller and Powell, the show's handling of TNA history left plenty of detail on the cutting room floor.
The romanticization of indie self-destruction
There is an inherent irony to wrapping an episode about CTE and concussions in a sleek, hipster VHS shell. Hardcore wrestling has always eaten its own young, and while we love to celebrate the sheer lunacy of guys taking brain-busting slams on cold concrete for two hundred bucks and a hot dog, the reality is far uglier. Necro Butcher's body paid every single cent of that mortgage long after the crowd went home.
The documentary handles the sheer spectacle of the violence well, but like many episodes of Dark Side of the Ring, it rides a delicate line between exposing wrestling's exploitation and capitalizing on it. Packaging the bloodbath into a fun retro gimmick proves that nostalgia remains the single most lucrative weapon in the wrestling promoter's playbook.
Why this match still resonates twenty years later
So why are we still talking about a match held in front of 300 people two decades later? Because Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher was the absolute collision of two completely different philosophies. Joe proved that a main-event hybrid athlete could step into the gutter and gain street credibility without compromising his star power, while Necro proved that pure, unadulterated madness could compel even the snobbiest workrate purists to look away from their laptops in awe.
Whether you catch it on a free web stream or hunt down the physical VHS tape for your shelf, the episode serves as a time capsule to an era of wrestling that simply cannot exist anymore. In today's corporate wrestling landscape, no insurance company on Earth would let a performer take a bare-skulled bump onto cinderblocks. And honestly? That is probably for the best, even if our inner bloodthirsty fan misses the noise of magnetic tape clunking into a VCR.
