Top 7 Wrestling Show Theme Songs

What gets you more excited for a wrestling show than a kickass song?

One of people’s favorite thing about anything that airs on television is the song that leads you into the show. The main thing we remember about shows like Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Brady Bunch and countless others is their theme song. Even if we only watched a handful of episodes, we remember the songs. Sports has also had a collection of incredible theme songs over the years. People still want the NBA to return to NBC hoping that they would use John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock”, the network’s classic theme for their NBA coverage during the 1990s.

Pro wrestling is no exception. Every great (and not so great) weekly wrestling show has a theme song we remember to this day. Some were better than others. Today, we look at the seven most magnificent.

7. Marilyn Manson – “The Beautiful People” (WWE SmackDown)

After the Attitude Era came to an end, WWE has typically partnered with a mainstream rock band to use one of their songs as a show theme. Most of them tend to run together, if we’re being honest. At a certain point, the song just kind of fades away and gets replaced by something pretty similar. If nothing else, Marilyn Manson has always been different from the rest of the pack. “The Beautiful People” was briefly used in 1997 for Raw is War, but got brought back in 2002 for SmackDown. By that point the heat around Manson for his imagery & lyrics wasn’t as hot as it was when he debuted, so WWE could get away with that connection.

6. Animotion – “Obsession” (WWF Saturday Night’s Main Event)

The WWF’s first foray into network television was certainly a memorable one. Saturday night at 11:35 on NBC has been a pretty viable timeslot for the past few decades, & Saturday Night’s Main Event was a big part of that during the 1980s. Rock & Wrestling was hot at the time, and NBC’s production with the WWF Superstars led to some really good stuff. “Obsession” seems like a really weird choice for a wrestling show theme song when you listen to the lyrics, but on SNME the song rarely got to the lyrics. So that wasn’t an issue. Killer song though.

5. Jonathan Elias – “Monday Nitro Theme/Mean Streets” (WCW Monday Nitro)

Does it get more exciting than hearing the Monday Nitro theme with Tony Schiavone telling us about something that’s going to be one of the biggest events in the history of pro wrestling? I know I popped for it back in the day. WCW really hit a homerun with their original setup for Monday Nitro. Once the WWF retook the ratings lead, WCW got cute and changed everything around. The set, the logo, the song, everything. Even if the new opening theme had the Nitro Girls dancing, things just weren’t the same.

4. Richard Harvey – “Dynamics” (Georgia/World Championship Wrestling)

Your typical 1980s wrestling show had this electronic style of theme. They were pretty easy to get the rights to and the musicians were generally easier to deal with than rock stars. Especially 1980s rock stars, who at least 95% of were on some sort of mild altering substance. There are countless themes to choose from in this category, but I liked this Georgia/World Championship Wrestling theme the best. From 1982-1987 you heard this before some classic NWA studio wrestling. You even heard it during the WWF’s run with the time slot.

3. Dokken – “Into The Fire” (NWA Powerrr)

Sure, there’s some recency bias here because NWA Powerrr is a month old. What can I say, I have a bit of a soft spot for hair metal. It also stands out from the pack of wrestling show theme songs here in the year of 2019 in a very good way. WWE’s selection got a little bit better with AC/DC on SmackDown, but Skillet’s song for Raw kinda sounds like the rest of the theme songs since 2002. ROH & Impact have never really had memorable show themes. I can’t even really tell you what AEW’s is supposed to be, nor can I tell you about most of their theme songs outside of Chris Jericho’s “Judas”, Cody’s theme and a couple of others.

2. Jim Johnston featuring Slam Jam – “Thorn In Your Eye” (WWF Raw is War)

I heard this song several hundred times during Raw’s greatest level of mainstream acceptance. I still have no idea what most of the words are, which is part of the reason why it works. The WWF had never featured more loud & aggressive characters, and this type of music was what needed to play in the background.

“Thorn In Your Eye” & it’s sister song “We’re All Together Now” were featured as Raw theme music longer than any other songs. The switch to Union Underground’s “Across the Nation” in April 2002 was a sign that the Attitude Era was truly over. Sure, Union Underground was still hard rock, but it just didn’t have the same feel.

1. Harry Slash & the Slashstones – “This Is Extreme” (Extreme Championship Wrestling)

The original Extreme Championship Wrestling didn’t even last a decade, but its memories still live strongly with fans to this day. One major reason: this song pops into your head every time you think about ECW. It perfectly fit the anarchy & mayhem of the product Paul Heyman presented at the time. A TNN executive complained that the song was too “satanic” when they used it as the theme for ECW on TNN.

WWE using different theme songs for their version of ECW was one of approximately 15,000 reasons why that concept didn’t work. You had to have this playing at the beginning for anybody to buy it as extreme.