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=Show History=
| Table of contents |
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2 Brand Extension 3 The Current Smackdown! Titles |
Pre-Brand Extension
WWF SmackDown! (as it was originally known) was set up to compete against WCW's Thursday night show, Thunder. In the spirit of the the WWF's Attitude Era, the show was originally planned to be 2 hours of WWF Divas in Prime Time TV. However, this didn't pan out, and instead SmackDown! became a complementary show to Raw Is War.
Brand Extension
In early to mid 2002, World Wrestling Entertainment underwent something they called the “Brand Extension”. In a nutshell, this meant that the two WWE Television shows (RAW and Smackdown!) would become competition for each other. This came about when the then WWF purchased their two biggest competitors, WCW and ECW.
The Brand Extension would bring about a change like nothing the WWF/WWE has seen before. Wrestlers would become “show exclusive”, wrestling for their specific show only. This at the time excluded the champions as originally, the WWF/WWE titles would be defended on both shows. However, in later 2002, Brock Lesnar, the at the time WWE World Champion, refused to defend the title on RAW, causing the title the become Smackdown exclusive. Following that, both shows then got their own exclusive titles.
{| border="1" cellpadding="1"
|Title Notes:
|Current Champion(s)
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|WWE Championship Title 1
|Eddie Guerrero
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|World Tag Team Title 2
|Rikishi (Solofa Fatu) and Scotty 2 Hotty (Scott Garland)
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|World Cruiserweight Title 3
|Chavo Guerrero Jr
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|United States Heavyweight Title 4
|The Big Show (Paul Wight)
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1: This is the original WWE World Championship Title. It became Smackdown exclusive when the champion Brock Lesnar refused to defend it on RAW.The Current Smackdown! Titles
2: These are completely new Tag Team Titles. The original WWE World Tag Team Titles became RAW exclusive.
3: This title originally was the WCW World Cruiserweight Title. The WWE adopted it and dropped their own World Light Heavyweight Title in favor of it. It also became Smackdown! exclusive.
4: The original WWE US Heavyweight was once disbanded when it was unified with the WWE Intercontinental Heavyweight Title. However, the title was revived with Stone Cold of RAW reintroduced the Intercontinental Title for RAW.