83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Episode 298: WCW Goes Disney

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

On this episode of 83 Weeks, Eric and Conrad take a deep dive into WCW's partnership with Walt Disney. Eric shares details on how the deal came about and the impact it had on luring Hulk Hogan back into professional wrestling. The discussion also gets a little heated when Conrad confronts Eric about the promotion of the Disney tapings and how WCW fans had no clue it was happening. MOINK BOX - Keep American farming going by signing up at MoinkBox.com/83WEEKS RIGHT NOW and listeners of this show get FREE ground beef for a YEAR. ROCKET MONEY - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions – and manage your money the easy way – by going to RocketMoney.com/83WEEKS HENSON SHAVING - It’s time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that’ll last you a lifetime. Visit HENSONSHAVING.com/ERIC to pick the razor for you and use code ERIC and you’ll get two years' worth of blades free with your razor–just make sure to add them to your cart. ZBIOTICS - Your first drink of the night for a better tomorrow - visit zbiotics.com/83WEEKS to get 15% off your first order of generically engineered probiotics when you use 83WEEKS at checkout. BLUECHEW - Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code 83WEEKS at checkout--just pay $5 shipping. That’s BlueChew.com, promo code 83WEEKS to receive your first month FREE MIRACLE MADE - Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made! Go to TryMiracle.com/83WEEKS and use the code 83WEEKS to claim your FREE 3 PIECE TOWEL SET and SAVE over 40% OFF. ADVERTISE WITH ERIC - If your business targets 25-54 year old men, there's no better place to advertise than right here with us on 83 Weeks. You've heard us do ads for some of the same companies for years...why? Because it works! And with our super targeted audience, there's very little waste. Go to AdvertiseWithEric.com now and find out more about advertising with 83 Weeks. Get all of your 83 Weeks merchandise at https://boxofgimmicks.com/collections/83-weeks FOLLOW ALL OF OUR SOCIAL MEDIA at https://83weekslinks.com/ On AdFreeShows.com, you get early, ad-free access to more than a dozen of your favorite wrestling podcasts, starting at just $9! And now, you can enjoy the first week...completely FREE! Sign up for a free trial - and get a taste of what Ad Free Shows is all about. Start your free trial today at AdFreeShows.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, hey, it's Conrad Thompson, and you're listening to 83 weeks with Eric fish off. Eric, what's going on, man? How are you? I'm good. I'm a little bit of a slow roll this morning, but I'm slowly, but surely getting into gear. Well, the holiday season is upon us. I hope everyone listening had a fantastic Thanksgiving and of course you hopefully enjoyed Survivor Series in full transparency we are recording this before Survivor Series so if you're looking for us to discuss a fallout from that show we'll have to do it next week I am excited about our topic today though Eric because we've spent a lot of time on this program talking about your role of course in the big seat as I like to call it at WCW and we get to relive some of the great time

some of the bad times some of the missteps some of the man i wish i had that one to do over but we also get to celebrate those big successes and i think one of the big successes that a lot of people maybe didn't see coming uh was a decision you made to say you know what we need an association we need to cut costs maybe we can kill two birds with one stone our topic today is wcw's affiliation with disney and this is going to be a fun episode because this really gets the wheels in motion for the winds of change for WCW. This happens in advance of Nitro. This is in advance of Hulk Hogan becoming a bad guy.

Like this is probably one of your first major steps in WCW. Is it not? I think that's, yeah, that's really fair to say. And this was also, you know, the association with Disney predated Hulk Hogan. Yeah. I think Hulk Hogan happened in, in some small part or large part, due to the fact that we were shooting at Disney. GM. I'm not sure that that, uh, that connection ever would have been made had we not been

there at the same time Hulk was. It just was fortuitous. Oh, another good word here on 83 weeks fortuitous. I mean, it's almost like a butterfly effect. I'm glad you said that because it's kind of like one of those deals where if this doesn't happen, man, it's all different. And the catalyst for the Monday Night Wars being as, as popular as they were. And, and the greatest boom period, you know, that the fans are still talking about all these years later really got kicked off because Hulk Hogan became a bad guy. But Hulk Hogan wouldn't have had an opportunity to become a bad guy had he not come to WCW. And had you not went to Disney, perhaps he doesn't come to WCW. It's, it's really interesting with the benefit of hindsight to look back and see,

and these one or two things happen differently and everything changes. I find that train of thought fascinating, you know, when you look at any aspect of your life, for but one decision, one choice, being in one place or another, so many different things in one's life doesn't happen. You know, it's, it's really amazing, but I think it's fair to say, very fair to say, had we not moved our production to Disney, MGM Studios, there likely would not have been a Hulk Hogan WCW, period. it. And then, of course, as you pointed out, ultimately his turn in 1996 and all the things that happened to the industry, really as a result of that.

Well, let's get started. Let's talk a little bit about where we are. I mean, we know that the idea is where we've got WCW out on the road and you're running live events, house shows, as they're called. You wrote this in your book. Bob Dew and I started budding heads early. some of the things Bob wanted to do made absolutely no sense for example his solution to increase revenues and live events side of the business was to produce more shows instead of doing say 150 shows a year he wanted to do 250 150 well the problem with that is it doesn't scale properly if you're losing money every time you go out the door why would you want to step out the door another hundred times until the perception of the

product changed, increasing the live event schedule would only increase our losses. Now, I want to take a time out right there because I think still to this day, so many wrestling fans when they talk about WCW, they talk about WCW as if it were a traditional wrestling company, meaning, you know, they made their money running live events, because that really is the, the very basis of what pro wrestling used to be. on some level, Eric, and you've said this very eloquently before, wrestling on TV was almost like an infomercial. You know, you were there to sell tickets to live events.

That's the reason, you know, we had all those fabulous promos on TBS for the Crockett days. You didn't see big time matches on the Crockett program. We saw enhancement matches. And they would tease that they're going to go toe to toe in the big fight down at the arena this Saturday night, get your tickets now. that is the way most wrestling territories were built but wcw is owned by a television company so right from the jump the whole goal alignment as jeff jarratt says on his podcast has to be changed right like we're not trying to run as many events like in a normal sense that where you're paying

talent on the house because that's the way the territories were built then yes right running more shows means more money. But if you've got guaranteed contracts, that's a whole new ball of wax now, is it not? Yeah, it changed everything. And that was, I think one of the reasons why it took so long for WCW to really get on track because the people that came before me were really focusing on trying to replicate or duplicate,

really, the WWE business model. and WCW wasn't set up for the WWE business model because it was a television company. What does that really mean? It means the television show is the priority. Yes. Not the pay-per-views, not the live events, not the licensing, not the merchandising.

The number one goal for WCW was to maximize the television opportunity and impact for Turner Broadcasting. Of course, live events were important in that equation. Certainly were paper views. because that was really the only profit center in WCW for, really, until about 1995, 96. But first and foremost, we're a television company, and I think a lot of people, well, I think most of the people that came before me, and certainly a lot of the people that were there, once I became executive producer, vice president, whatever, had a hard time adjusting to that

concept, because everybody came from the territory system. But everybody other than me, I guess, you know, I guess I could say I came from the territory system because that's what AWA was and that's where I got my beginning. But keep in mind, when I got to AWA, Vern was hemorrhaging money. He was funding the company out of his own savings in retirement, the things that he had acquired over the years, real estate, kept taking out mortgages and increasing the size of those second and third mortgages. just to keep the company afloat.

So AWA, although AWA toured occasionally, I don't even want to call it a tour, because most of the time they were one-offs within the Midwest, a couple hundred miles of Minneapolis. But for the most part, even Vern was really just producing his television show, one for syndication

and one for ESPN. But you look at Dusty Rose and the entire crew of people that worked with Dusty prior to me arriving and subsequent to me arriving, all of them, the Mike Grams, the Magnum TAs, the entire staff all came from that territory system. And it was an adjustment for them to think about the company as a television company only.

Certainly in the business side of things, Bob Do, who, by the way, I give Bob, I'm honest about Bob. I don't intentionally give him a hard time. Bob do, I don't intentionally give him a hard time or chair him down, but Bob, Bob was an arena guy, but that's what Bob's, Bob do's role was, is overseeing the arenas or the arena for Turner Broadcasting. Bob didn't think like a television person either until, you know, we made that move in 1994 to move to Disney.

That was the first time anybody ever made a decision based on the fact that we were a television company, not a wrestling company. I just think that difference needed to be said, you know, right up front, you know, that's not a traditional wrestling company. It is a television company. Bob Dew, you know, is a guy who we've said his name a few times here on the show, but I'm not sure that everyone who listens to our program really understands what his role was in the Turner organization.

And how big of a fan or proponent or supporter? of WCW, he really was. Bob was a great guy. I mean, he was fun to be around. He was the kind of boss you'd like to have because he was just a very social person, very easy to get along. He liked to laugh.

He very rarely took things too seriously or at least took them seriously in a way that, you know, created a dark cloud or any kind of tension. Bob was a fun guy to be around, which is why I think he was in the position he was in and Turner Broadcast, It's a very social guy, very well connected with internal broadcasting.

But he reminded me oftentimes of a 45 or 50-year-old frat guy. You know, he just didn't look at WCW really as a business that could grow. I think he looked at his opportunity in WCW as an opportunity to maintain status quo. keep your head down don't make too much noise don't let these guys end up in the newspaper try to keep the human resources out of the office

make sure everything runs smoothly and everything will be just fine. I don't think there was any real vision for growth with Bob dude. Well, let's talk about exactly what your role is when this whole Disney opportunity comes

to be because we've said that you know, obviously you started out as the C Squad announcer and we know eventually you're going to be in charge of television and i think there's sort of a triangle of power at the time if you will only anderson's handling wrestling and sharon sedello's handling pay-per-views and marketing you're handling production but i think this this move to disney happens when you get the big seat right no it actually happened uh before yeah happened in 94 i don't think i had been this was before i was promoted um to vice president first time. This is really one of the big moves. I mean, in fact, I think I got the promotion

to vice president and ultimately took over as president of the company in large part due to the move to Disney. I know that sounds crazy for some people, but from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about the idea because there's lots of people who look back and have done shoot interviews and and talk to this guy or that guy and that stuff is now on the record somewhere online where everyone claims credit for this idea I mean a lot of people Graham claimed credit for this idea uh great Ganya claimed credit for this idea uh I mean it's been said this was a hundred different people's idea when do you first remember hearing about this concept or is this your idea and how how does I

do you come up with this idea of it hey what if we go there it was a decision born out on necessity at the time we had we had three syndicated programs we had worldwide which was our a syndicated program that's the one that was distributed amongst more television stations across the country second to that was wcw pro which by the way was the show that Diamond Dallas, Page and I, you know, I did play-by-play, Pages of Color on WCW Pro. And then there was the third syndicated show called WCW main event. But what that was was kind of a little bit from WCW Saturday night, a little bit from the main event TBS show and maybe one or two original matches for main event, shot on the road. And then it was kind of all cobbled together, if you will.

But the primary show, the one that we really made the most money from, syndication was worldwide. And in order to produce those three syndicated shows, while WCW and WCW Saturday night was produced inside of Center Stage every week, the syndicated shows happened on the road. So we would travel once every two weeks or three weeks, whatever the schedule was at the time when I first started this, we would travel to Anderson, South Carolina,

or Rome, Georgia, or Huntsville, or somewhere close, reasonably close to Atlanta, so the talent could all drive and production could all drive. And there were a lot of great venues in those areas because, as you know, you live in the South, you know, there's a lot of small communities all within 75 miles of each other. You know, they're big enough, they're large enough population, 50, 75,000 people where you could run a wrestling event there, and theoretically, draw an audience when you have that much population. And there were so many of those markets around the southeast

that it made it easy initially to take the show on the road to produce. The problem was we were never hot to begin with. I say we, this is before I even got there. WCW was never hot as a ticket. Live events really never got off the ground before I got there or even while I was there initially as an announcer. When it came to producing television, we're going to these small markets, and these really nice arenas.

You know, you look at AEW now. They're typically going into, or they're configured at least. They're going into big arenas, which I don't understand, but they're cutting them down and scaling them for about 5,000 seats, on average. Some of them bigger than others, obviously, depending on the market. But NWCW tried to do the same thing. The problem is WCW couldn't get, if we, we got 1,200 people to show up to a television taping, that was a good day.

That was a good taping. It was not unusual for us to end up with 500, 600, 600, 800, 700, 700 people. We put 6, 7, 800 people, even 1,000 people inside a venue that's built and designed for 5,000. It gets to feel real empty, real quick, especially when the audience that you did bring in isn't really motivated. They got their tickets for free, for free. It was two for one, three for one, you know, buy a slurpy, get a ticket kind of thing. We were giving them away.

And WCW had been papering, as we referred to that technique or the strategy, we had been papering television tapings for years. That became the norm. Yeah. So those people that would take those tickets, use those tickets, were not, like an AEW audience that you would see today, even if it's a smaller audience, you know, you'll see 3,500, 4,500 people in an AEW television, Dynamite, for example, collision.

And yeah, it's not a very big crowd, but at least they want to be there. Yeah. You know, they took money out of their wallet. You know, they're interested enough in the product. And when they get there, they're animated. They're a part of the show. They're having fun. You can make, you know, 3,500, 4,500.

people work on camera because that audience is what brings the energy it's it's so subtle but it's so important you know when you when you're producing a show like wrestling a live action show you want the audience to feel like they're there or feel like they wish they were there ideally right and that's really hard to do with five or seven or 800 or even 1,200 people that are only there because they got a free ticket there's nothing else to do that night that was the reason why I had to find an alternative. Also, I really wanted to increase the production values. That was like the first thing on my list. And it may have been a mandate. That might have been one of the things. There was some, I'm going to slow down. I go all over the place.

Prior to me becoming executive producer, there was an internal audit at WCW. Now, not necessarily a financial audit, but an operational audit. And there was research that came along with that audit. It was really funny research, by the way. I'll make a joke about it probably later on. But it was just attempt to try to figure out, all right, how do we make this thing work? Every division within WCW, every department, you know, was a part of this audit. So everybody was looking for a way to maximize any opportunity in WCW.

and being, excuse me, increasing production values was my, like, first on the list of 10 things that I wanted to achieve or was told to achieve, increasing the production values was number one. Well, there's no way to do that traveling the show to arenas where the crowd, if they showed up, were unenthusiastic, which meant you had to turn down the lights because you don't want to sit at home and see an empty audience. That's the exact opposite of what you want to happen. You don't want a viewer sitting at home going, oh, man, look at that. I'm glad I didn't go.

There's nobody else there. Or the crowd just didn't have energy. It didn't look like a party you really wanted to be at. And it was my idea, not Greg Ghania's, not Mike Graham's, not anybody else's. It's funny how that, there's a saying, success, success has a million fathers, but what is it? Nobody wants to claim failure. Nobody wants to claim an idea that doesn't work. But if an idea works, then you had a line of people that want to take credit for it.

And I think that's the case here. Because when the idea came to me to shoot it, it wasn't Disney first. It was, okay, we've got to go to a soundstage. And I think I went to Universal. Universal was not bad, but it didn't have the co-branding opportunity, at least an unofficial co-branding. I really believe that, A, we had to go to a soundstage.

We had to control our environment. We had to go to a location or a soundstage where there were fresh audiences coming through all day long so that whenever we would tape there, we would tape five, sometimes six shows a day. We turned over five or six different audiences. So each audience that came in, and we weren't shooting live.

shooting tape so we could crank out an episode of 40 or 45 minutes. So there was a lot of high energy. The crowd was just there. You know, they were out on tour. They're going all over the Disney MGM studios or all over the Disney Park. And, of course, wow, they're shooting TV over there, Hulk Hogan's over there, Rick Flares over there, Arne Anderson's over there. Oh, let's go watch that.

If nothing else, we have a comfortable place to sit for 45 minutes because we've been on our feet all day. So, you know, you'd have 750, probably 800. members in your audience and each show had a fresh audience. That energy and that look and being able to control the environment with lighting and maximize the equipment that we did have was key. And one of the cool things about Disney, and I fail to bring this up sometimes,

oftentimes whenever we talk about Disney. But when we first got there, David Crockett and I, David was very, very supportive. When we first got there, Disney was showing us around, and they had an idea which soundstage they wanted us to use. This was before we signed any contracts. And we walked into the sound stage, and there was a big round pedestal right in the center of the stage.

I don't know what was being produced there previously, but this rotating sound stage, or excuse me, this rotating platform was right in the middle of the sound stage. And I said, well, are you going to take that out? He said, sure, we can take it out or you can use it. How would we use that? He said, well, look, Bob Allen. He said, let me show you.

And he flipped a switch and that platform, that round platform started to turn very, very slowly. So throughout a television taping, the audience is seated, but their perspective, their angle on what was going on in the match kind of changed throughout the show. that was really cool dude that was my favorite part of that sound stage i just absolutely love that there's a lot to unpack with what you just said there i want to circle back the quotes you were looking for i think as a jfk quote something like success has a thousand fathers but failure's an orphan yeah that's it yeah that's it uh but i'll tell you what there is a great idea that we would love both love to claim credit for but we can't i'm talking about our friends at moink i'm so excited to talk to you about moink it's a meat subscription box

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company. I can see why everybody got excited about it on Shark Tank. This is going to change the way people get their food. So I'm a big fan if you can't tell. Free ground beef for a year, moinkbox.com forward slash 83 weeks. So listen, Eric, let's talk about just the origin of your process about let's do a soundstage said differently what you're kind of doing is studio wrestling and that's something that i'm familiar with from jim crocky promotions but it existed in lots of places over the year i know they did it in memphis and you know that this is something that that was common in wrestling but it had sort of moved away like studio wrestling in large part was dead.

I know Memphis was still doing it, but outside of that, nobody was doing it in this era. Had you seen studio wrestling in your fandom? Sure. AWA, when I moved to Minnesota, was produced at WT, I think it was WTCN TV studios

in Golden Valley, Minnesota. The first taping I ever went to was in that studio when I was about 17 or 18. So yeah, I was very familiar with studio wrestling. In fact, I was unfamiliar at that point in time as a fan with anything other than studio wrestling and the live event at the St. Paul Civic Center

of the Minneapolis Auditorium that my brother and I would go to. So studio wrestling is what I grew up with. The difference I think between what we did at Disney and studio wrestling is that studio wrestling was one show, one taping, and Disney was, you know, gang shooting, meaning we'd shoot four, five, six, probably seven episodes occasionally all in one day. That was different. But the look of the soundstage or a television studio was very much the same.

So we've got this idea and you just sort of walked us through, you know, how you at least considered universal. Who are you presenting this idea to? And what does that presentation look like? Well, I didn't really make a formal presentation to anybody. obviously I had to go to Bill Shaw first because this was new in my role as executive producer and it was a big move and a somewhat controversial one internally believe it or not everybody has an opinion and and they chimed in and there was not

a lot of support for the idea from anybody other than Bill Shaw myself and believe it or not Dusty Rose was a big big supporter of it everybody else kind of crapped all over the idea. But Bill was the only one I made a presentation to. Once we kind of zeroed in on Disney and why Disney was the right partner for us, a location for us, David Crockett and I went down and presented, if you will, but it was an informal presentation. We didn't have a PowerPoint or decks or anything like that. We may have had some notes that we would hand out just to familiarize people who didn't know who WCW was, who we were and what we did. But there was no formal presentation other than the one that David Crockett and I made to

Bob Allen who was I think the VP of operations at Disney MGM Studios at the time and his staff I want to talk about that presentation but before I do I want to read a little excerpt from your book here I said screw that let's just produce television dump all of our resources into TV acquiring new talent and dressing up our product then eventually whether it's six months from now or a year from now or five years from now people would start parting with their cash and come to see us live people dropped over dead this wasn't just a problem for our live events business we shot our syndicated programming on the road in arenas we'd go out to produce a television show and we'd have a miserable looking crowd

half of them winos with a cheap bottle of wine and paper bags on their laps or no crowd at all it affected the performance of the wrestlers because they were performing in front of people who were dead. And forget about what a shot of the audience told the viewers at home. Even the best shows looked tired. They looked regional. They looked dull. And that was what the world thought of WCW. So that's some of your thinking at the time. But I do want to hear about the presentation that you give to Bob Allen and others. Like when you're putting this together with David Crockett, are you guys, I mean, I know this sounds silly, but when we hear presentation, there's a few different you know images that jump to mine do you guys have like charts and graphs for

this is this a PowerPoint are you passing out handouts with data or are you just talking through a vision I mean I don't imagine you had a Silva in the back room to work up a Photoshop of what this could look like so what did a presentation for this look like way back when I think the presentation and it was a handout you know I mean we did put together some facts and some data and we handed that out because it was Bob Allen, his staff, and I think somebody that actually Bob reported to. So we would hand out information about WCW, who we were, how many markets our show was syndicated in, what our audience composition looked like, a typical sales pitch. If you're selling somebody on the idea of wrestling in general, that's the kind of data

that we provided and we skewed it to make it look as good as it possibly could, obviously. but at that time we didn't have Hulk Hogan, we didn't have Randy Savage, we didn't have those big national names. Certainly we had Rick Flair and everybody in the room who Rick Flair was, but beyond Rick Flair, and even Rick was kind of recognized more as a regional superstar than a national superstar compared to guys like Hogan and Savage because of where the WWE was at that time. It had nothing to do with Rick or anybody else, but WWE was the 800-pound gorilla and we were the 140, 40 pounds soaking wet baby monkey, you know. But we, we gave out as much information as we could about WCW, its product, its relationship to the Turner organization.

A lot of it was smoking mirrors, brother. There was a lot of hyperbole in that pitch. But it was the handout and then David and I speaking, just answering questions and presenting our idea. Just to be clear, I know that sometimes, you know, a lot of wrestling fans myself included we just we hear oh they're going to do tapings here and then we take a look at the presentation and we decide whether or not we like it or we don't like it but there's a lot more at play here i mean basically what you're suggesting here is let's cut

all live events together i mean just completely whether it's a house show or television let's just let's shut it down we'll shoot less we'll do 24 times a year we'll do tv and paper views that's it. And you're really looking at the bottom line when you're making this decision. And, you know, certainly the look in the field. Because in a controlled environment, you can, I mean, listen, anybody who's seen a show in Vegas and then they've seen the touring version of that same show in your local arena, you know it's not the same. Just because you can have all of the, that facility set up to where it is just there for you ready at all times. It's a whole other animal when you're talking about.

we're going to load it up on a truck and then we've got to have guys in there early and hanging lights and rigging and you can just sort of set it and forget it the cost savings there just on the production piece alone is phenomenal right it it was it wasn't as significant as one might think because it was expensive shooting as is an EMGM the price of entry was fairly high but if you looked at those expenses over the course of 26 episodes, there was an economy of scale. Yes. Because we were shooting five shows in a day or six shows in a day for six days in a row

or five days in a row, whatever it was, initially when you looked at the price tag of going to Disney and what that would really cost, it was kind of like, oh my gosh, is this really going to save us any money? But if you looked at that same expense over the course of 26 episodes and what that would cost compared to producing those episodes out on the road because you probably would have to travel for 26 episodes, you're probably on the road 13 times. You might be able to get two episodes per taping for syndication before the audience just dies out completely.

So when you looked at the economy of scale compared to what we had been doing, it was a good move financially. And that was, in addition to the look of the show, in the production values of the show that I knew we could enhance at Disney, it was also a cost savings in the long run. And that's one of the reasons why Bill Shaw was so impressed with the idea, because it's the first time that anybody came to him with an idea to save money in production, not spend money in production. That is where the rubber meets the road.

Saving money and saving money in production. something a lot of people who listen to this program probably wouldn't think about. But Eric, we've never talked about this before, but I know it was a factor when you were trying to work a P&L, so to speak. Can you talk about the differences in expense with running a union building versus a non-union building? Oh, wow. I can give you some examples of a union building and why it was a pain in the ass. For example, Las Vegas. Yes.

We'd go to Las Vegas. we had Jackie Crockett, for example. Jackie Crockett ran our handheld camera there. Jackie Crockett ran our handheld camera and was one of the best shooters we had because he had experience. He could anticipate where things were going to end up inside of the ring so he could be there when it was happening instead of following the action. Yes.

That made sense. If you're following the action, you're going to be a half a beat slow. You're not going to quite be in the position. you should be in to get the best shot you can because you're following it as it's happening as opposed to anticipating what's going to happen. It's one of the things that made Jackie so good and other people like him.

But we would go to Las Vegas and obviously Jackie's full-time, WCW and a lot of our production people weren't, by the way. You know, our office production obviously was Craig Leather and Director and Yel Pruitt and Matt Yoder and, you know, the core team. But as far as cameras and lighting and audio, Out of that were either Turner Sports production staff that happened to be open that particular day or on a given week, or more often than not, we would hire freelancers.

But going back to Jackie Crockett, we go to Las Vegas, Jackie Crockett's a cameraman, I have to hire another cameraman to basically stand there behind Jackie Crockett and shoot. And I have to pay that cameraman union fees to stand behind the guy that I want to use. I'm paying essentially for two cameramen, one union and one that works for me. And you had to do that all the way around, you know, all aspects of production. The union had their hands and everything. It got to the point where you had to be careful you didn't pick up a broom and go sweep up a mess backstage because there's a union guy under contract. That's his job.

It becomes so expensive just in labor and in all the fees and all the costs that are kind of buried in the whole thing it's it's probably i don't want to say it's double but it's probably 60% more expensive to go to a union venue and shoot there than it is a non-union venue it is an extra added expense there's no doubt about it and by the way we're not on here saying we're anti-union we're just explaining those are the realities of running in those buildings so there's going to be increased costs and i'll be honest as somebody who's been doing these podcasts with with you know professional wrestling legends legendary promoters like yourself i myself did not really grasp what the production costs would look like until i was dumb enough to

actually run a show so we ran a show last year in nashville uh and that old auditorium where there were you know starcades once upon a time just to hang not like a w w level or a AEW level lighting rig, but you've got to hang those lights in the ceiling of an arena in downtown Nashville just to hang the lights, Eric, $61,000. Yeah. That doesn't get you the lights. You still got to rent those. That's the labor. Do you want them up there? That's going to run you a 61 grand. Uh, and that was our. And in Nashville or Tennessee, I believe it's a right to work state. So you imagine doing that hanging that scene. Lighting rig in Las Vegas. or New York, Madison Square Garden.

Well, remember I ran a sarcastic in Las Vegas. I found out about all about those extra union costs that I was not aware of ahead of time. So these production costs really, so I'm just trying to have this sort of sidebar conversation here just to demonstrate there's more to it than just, hey, how does it look on TV? You've got the real life behind the scenes. Oh yeah, this is a business. It's not just action figures. you know what we're actually trying to get this thing out of the red ink because and that's another critical thing we've not yet touched on at this point when you're making all of these

changes there's not one dollar a profit in wcw's windshield or rearview mirror wcw has yet to turn a profit and there's been lots of discussion about maybe that's the reason bill watts came in and cut all these contracts and got in a pissing contest with Brian Pilman. Maybe he was going to get a bonus based on the amount he saved or the idea is we're desperate to try to find a reason to keep this thing alive. And we know Ted likes it, but he can only like it in shoulder and sustain these losses for so long. He is a businessman. We need this thing to do, as we say, pencil. And it hadn't yet. So this effort to not only up the look and the feel and the presentation, but also too, let's turn a damn profit.

But this is a big piece of this whole decision, right? Maybe the biggest piece. It was at that time because I think I was made executive producer in 93, the year before in 92, WCW gross $24 million but lost $10 million in the process, I should say. $24 million gross, but they lost $10 million in the process. that's what we were up against. And when Bill Shaw, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, when Bill Shaw came in and said, okay, you know, Wats is out, Ted's going to give this one last shot.

This company has to turn a profit. That was like, no one believed that it could happen. And including me probably at the time, because it was such an insurmountable number. How do you reverse that? How do you increase your revenues and get to a point? when you're $10 million a year in the hole, on only $24 million gross,

I say only $24 million, $24 million, $24 million is a lot of money. But not if you look at what we were doing and how much it cost us to generate $24 million. It was one of the biggest reasons. The benefit was production values and even more nuanced than the production values because your average fan sitting at home is going to go, holy smoke,

Did you see those new graphics? Right. Those graphics are awesome. That doesn't happen. No. Right? Especially back then. But if you go back and look at some of those syndicated shows, I was able to use, and I had some real interesting limitations on what WCW could do within the park,

right? Especially in the very beginning. It was kind of funny now looking back at it. But one of the things that we could do is, There was a stock footage of a flyover of the Disney MGM studios, not the entire park, you know, but the studios. And there was a water tower there that had Mickey Mouse Sears on it. There we go. If you're watching this on YouTube or an app free shows, there it is.

That was part of our open. And I wanted to establish to advertisers and potential sponsors and even independent television stations that we were syndicating our show. to that this was different than just rassling, even different than WWF at the time, because there was a subtle co-promotion with Disney MGM Studios. I wanted to leverage the success, the commercial success of Disney. I wanted to leverage that and get as much of a rub as I could for WCW because it was my belief at the time, and I think it proved to be true. It was my belief at the time.

that that subtle connection to Disney changed the way advertisers looked at us and potential syndicated partners looked at us. You know, in radio, when they're trying to sell you a host red endorsement, like our buddy Cassio does mornings over at Rocket 95.1 here in Huntsville. And when they have a local sponsor, come on, the way that sold to that buyer for that local sponsor is to say basically hey we're going to have the morning host in this case casio lend you his credibility to the audience and that's sort of what you're trying to do there there is so much trust and value and uh i don't know i mean it the association yeah credibility

that's the word with those with those mickey mouse ears man that that's a high five and again you have to appreciate the person The reception of WCW at the time was way, way, way, way, way below WWF. Like, they had become the Band-Aid of the industry. They had become the Coca-Cola or the Kleenex. Those are brands. They're not actual like a product category. It's an actual specific brand.

But whenever someone would speak about wrestling, they would say, oh, that WWF stuff. WCW was not even in the conversation. So having that Mickey Mouse shot, man, that was. a stroke of genius. I assume that was high fives all around when you guys put that together. I think a couple of us got excited about it. You know, guys like Craig Leather and Neil Pruitt and Craig Leathers and Neil Pruitt. Keith Mitchell certainly saw the value in it. Dusty Rhodes, as I said earlier, was the only, you know, wrestling guy that was a supporter of it. Everybody else is funny. You say, you know, Mike Graham and Greg Gagne, you know, took credit for it. They were also first in

to crap all over the idea and give you all the reasons why it wasn't going to work. That was kind of like the common thing in WCW is anytime you wanted to make a move or a change, I'll speak for myself. Anytime I wanted to make a big move or a change, I'd have six, eight, ten people on any given day find their way into my office. And the guise of making it sound like they were trying to help me would give me all of their reasons why something would not hey I think this is a challenge here's perhaps how we can fix it we can fix it or how we can address it it was man I don't know if I do that if

are you because and I'd listen to this litany of reasons why not to do something but again we were on a cliff we were going to fall one way over the other we were either going to fall and land on solid ground or we were going to fall and take a ride didn't really have a lot of options at that point, but there was a small handful of people that were really supportive of it. And I'll never forget Dusty because he helped turn the tide with a lot of the wrestlers. And some of the wrestlers weren't excited about it. They didn't like the idea of wrestling five times on five different shows a day. And we oftentimes didn't have the same people on shows back to back. But oftentimes we did. Sometimes we did. And a lot of the talent because they

couldn't imagine it they couldn't imagine doing tv that way wrestling television so there was just a lot of internal resistance and dusty roads really he handled that for me he got people to support the idea and people that i couldn't convince necessarily that it would be a good idea and to be supportive dusty did that for me i'm sure it was all high fives when they saw hey the cost savings because man that's something we can all get excited about and you will be too. When you start using rocket money, you're going to find out, you know what? There's a whole lot of costs out here. I thought I had a handle on. I didn't know about. That was my experience. My wife and I both signed up for the same streaming service at the start of the pandemic.

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rocketmoney.com slash 83 weeks. That's rocketmoney.com slash 83 weeks. Rocketmoney.com slash 83 weeks. Eric, we have not talked about much about the universal opportunity. And I don't know if this is true or not, but there is a rumor that's been out there for a while that there was a wrestler, a journeyman wrestler who was trying to work on putting something together. And he was hoping to do this sort of studio type wrestling and set up with Universal Studios. Had you heard this idea from someone else? Because allegedly, uh, that idea gets pitched to you and they say that you stole it. I think the person I'm thinking about is Eddie Mansfield. I might be, I might be misremembering that. But, you know, you've got to

right okay talk to me what is the eddie mansfield from your recollection how does he fit into this story or what is the story he's told over the years he doesn't fit into the story at all i've never met any mansfield i never had a conversation with any mansfield i never heard any mansfield's name until after we'd been producing the show at disney mGM studios and i found out subsequently any mansfield to the best of my recollection um because he was kind of a blip on the radar, uh, was a small local promoter that either did shoot some shows at Universal or had planned on doing it. And I like I said, I never met Eddie.

I didn't know about Eddie Mansfield. I didn't know about any wrestling being produced there, um, until afterwards, but he was a, and he may have been around the local Florida territory trying to, you know, at the tail end of the territory era trying to reestablish it or trying to find a way to survive. But I had never had a conversation with him. He never pitched the idea to me. Neither did anybody else. Did you ever see Eddie Mansfield's interview with John Stossel back in the day that was so controversial? No. Well, he, uh, he demonstrated how some wrestling moves worked to, uh, John Stossel and then showed John Stossel on camera how wrestlers get color. And God,

That was a obviously a no-no in the wrestling business in the early 80s. So yeah, I guess this is his second little claim to fame. He was trying to do something at Universal. Why didn't you do something with Universal? You mentioned that you went and looked there, but ultimately you wound up with Disney.

And we know that you love the association with Disney and the flyover shot with the water tower and the ears. But was there another reason Universal didn't get the opportunity? I think it was the co-branding opportunity, you know, when I looked at Universal Studios and there was value there, you know, coming to you, you know, from Universal Studios in Florida, that, it's not without value, but it's not the same thing as Disney. Yeah. It's just not. That was part of it. That was a big part of it.

The other part of it, I think, was availability, to be honest. You know, these sound stages, for example, I don't know how many now are at Disney MGM Studios, but at the time, I think there were, four or five different sound stages. And you had, you know, Nickelodeon shows, you know, studio shows were being produced there. There were commercials oftentimes being produced there. Those sound stages were busy often. There was a lot of production going on down there with different television shows and TV commercials and things.

So we had to be able to slip our production needs into certain availability and windows at Disney and or universal. so I really it was the co-branding opportunity was the primary reason I just was fixated on that once I make up my mind about something like that it's hard to get me off of it and I had convinced myself right or wrong that the Disney partnership or perceived partnership had more value than a Universal Studios partnership when you're trying to work a deal out with Disney like once you get the the presentation sold and everybody's on board I know we're fast forwarding a little bit here, but how are the negotiations handled? Do you have, when you're making your presentation, have you already sort of beat them up on costs or do you, do you get the green light and then go to work on negotiating the dollars? Green light and then get to work. And that was really David Crockett's job at that point.

Once we got Disney to agree to, to even let WCW on the premises, and that's the funny part of the story looking back you know Bob Allen again Bob was a young guy he's probably my age at the time uh late 30s maybe early 40s very uh a big thinker you know he saw the big picture he wasn't job scared he wasn't afraid and he was the only one within disney that was really a big supporter of this everybody else was like when i say everybody else there might have been six to ten other people in the room during our initial presentation and

Bob was the only one that was outwardly supportive everybody else kind of, you know, when you walk into a room and you're there to make a presentation and everybody's sitting in and they get their arms kind of folded. Yep. Or they're looking at their phones or whatever. You know

they want to be anywhere else but in that room with you. And that was the way that I felt. I don't know about David Krock and we never talked about it, but it was a cold room, with the exception of Bob. And Bob really is the one to convince Disney MGM Studios to take a chance

on wrestling. It really was Bob. It wasn't me. That came with limitations. And the first taping, one of the conditions of our access to the studios was that they didn't want wrestlers showing up in their own vehicles. They wanted to come over on a bus.

They wanted to control. control the access to the parks by the WCW talent and production. They wanted to control that access. They didn't want wrestlers walking all over the park, scaring the kids. Shit you're not. So, of course, we agreed to just about everything they wanted to do. And one of those requirements was that the talent would come over on the bus, but the windows had to be covered because they didn't want visitors to the park to

see a bus full of wrestlers showing up on the lot. Oh, my gosh. It sounds crazy, right? Yes. But that was the perception of wrestling at that time. And if you look at how incongruent the Disney brand is with a professional wrestling brand, even WWF at the time, would have been a tough sell. Yes.

Because it was wrestling and the stigma that came with it. So we could bring the wrestlers into the park, provided we brought them in in vans or bus and that the windows recovered so visitors to the park couldn't see the talent in in the vehicle and then of course the vehicle had to go right to the sound stage and the talent was confined to the soundstage area you can get out in the park lot you know stretch your legs or whatever but they didn't want talent walking around the park in between matches so to speak let's talk about the whole way that deal is put together. I assume you have a calendar and you're looking at dates and you're trying to make sure that's available. And you're probably going to have to

pay a rental fee and some production costs and those bus transfers. I'm sure that's something they dinged you for. Then a block of rooms. I know that sounds silly. What are we, what the hell are we talking about but the reality is this is one of the biggest attractions in the world it's not like they just have an infinite amount of rooms i mean we know family we all know families who have saved up for a year or years in order to go and they have their reservation at a hotel you know a year or more in advance at times and now you're trying to fit in quite a cast of characters here talk me through how all of that came together and And, you know, did you experience the cost savings you were hoping for, or did we not quite achieve the number, but it was still a savings?

Actually, we couldn't afford to put any of the talent or production up at the Disney on Disney property. It was just too expensive. And throughout the year, we would probably be in peak season at least once or twice. So we weren't going to get any breaks on hotel rooms on the Disney MGM property. We went outside. We stayed, the first place we stayed, I think it was a Marriott Courtyard Suites, you know, five minutes from the studio, 10 minutes from the studio. And that turned out to be such a blessing in disguise.

Because again, I'm going to try to paint this picture clearly. And I apologize for not being as articulate as I try to be sometimes. But my gears are still loosening up here a little bit. Coffee's kicking in. But because we couldn't afford to put our staff up in a talent or their families up on Disney properties, because that was the goal initially. I wanted this to be a positive experience for everybody.

That was also part of the mission to increase morale. But we couldn't afford it. So I think it was Janie Engel and David Crockett working together, found a really good deal at the Marriott Courtyard suites, not far from the South Stage. And it allowed the talent to bring their families. Some of the talent had kids, wives and kids. And for the first time, their wives and kids got to come with them on the road to a wrestling event.

Because we were there for five days, six days, seven days sometimes in one location. And the hours were almost a typical working day for the average person. You'd show up to the studio at nine. start shooting at 10, we'd wrap by five. It was like a real job as opposed to being a gypsy and being on the road, going from town to town to town and doing it in your car with three other guys and drinking beer and whatever. Don't get me wrong.

There's some of that that's kind of fun. But this was the first time that, you know, wrestlers were in one location for four, five, six, seven days at a time. They got to bring their family. So we got done at five o'clock in the afternoon. And this is where Janie Engel, and I'm sure there were a lot of other people involved that I'm not giving credit to that I wish I could remember their names and how they were involved. But David and Janie and probably Keith Mitchell started organizing barbecues. So we'd get done working at the soundstage.

All the talent would go back to the Marriott Courtyard suites. And we would have catering start grilling hot dogs and hamburgers. and guys would, you know, bring their own beverages. And it became kind of a family picnic. And it really broke the ice. It made it fun for everybody. It made them realize that, yeah, this is different. We're shooting five shows a day, but it's workable.

I'm done by five. I'm hanging out with my wife and kids and my buddies, the people I work with. It really turned out to be something that we started looking forward to. It was a lot of fun. I wish I could have been in the hallways when you were presenting this. You wrote in your book, Bob Doe, Don Sanderford, Oli Anderson, Sharon Sadello, and Gary Juster, all thought I should be hung by the neck until dead.

And frankly, it wasn't just the Bob Dews of the world who thought I'd lost my mind. Dusty Rhodes, who I got along with just about as well as anyone, was reluctant at first. Most wrestlers couldn't imagine producing the show in the soundstage. it was a real battle there were weeks and weeks of meetings and debate back and forth everybody had a point of view and none of them agreed with mine finally bill shaw gets involved that's sort of the uh that's the hammer right when bill shaw comes in and says hey this is what we're going with into discussion yeah i went from a debate an internal discussion and the pros and cons and all the other things associated with it to a mandate you know once i sold bill

Once Bill could see the picture, then, you know, everybody else's opinions didn't really matter. You also wrote in your book, The Hark Core Wrestling Fans hated it, but there weren't enough of them to support the brand and I wasn't going to cater to them. That's, uh, sound familiar. Talk to me. I mean, that's it. All of the, you know, again, the internet didn't exist back then. Right. Social media didn't exist back then, but they were.

still the Dave Meltzers, the parasites like Dave Meltzer, who all had an opinion and so much of the opinion that, you know, I would read online before we even shot our first show there was all negative and it was just so dark. Everybody predicted the end of the world as a result and Bischoff doesn't know what he's doing and he wants to be a TV producer, not a wrestling guy. I mean, you name it. They wrote it. And that became the name. narrative, you know, not to the scale that it is today, obviously, but it became the narrative. And that narrative filtered down into the wrestling staff, the wrestling roster. A lot of them believe that shit, because they don't know any better.

Wrestlers don't know anything about the wrestling business. Wrestlers know a lot about what goes out inside of the ring, more than I'll ever know. But when it comes to the business of the wrestling business and what it takes to make it profitable or successful, most of them are clueless. Almost all of them are clueless. They have anecdotal perspectives and they can reach back in their bag of tricks. and talk about things that happened, you know, back when. But if you put a professional wrestler in the control seat and give them 20 minutes,

they'll be overwhelmed quickly when it comes to the business of the wrestling business. But again, once Bill Shaw came in and said, this is what we're going to do. Dusty jumped on board. Dusty got very supportive very quickly because Dusty was a visionary. You know, Dusty didn't see wrestling the same way everybody else that had come before him. or been a part, you know, he didn't see wrestling the way O'I Anderson saw it. That's a good example. Dusty was much more of a visionary.

Oli Anderson was more in the vein of Bill Watts or even a Virgaña. Let's go back and do it the way we did it in the 70s, because that's when Oly had the most success he had ever had in the 70s in the early 80s. So naturally he wants to go back to what he was most familiar with when he was most successful. And that's not a common. in any walk of life or in any business. The problem is the industry had changed so much. The television industry had changed so much between the time that Oli was successful

and familiar with the way the business operated and what we needed in that particular day. I, uh, your time, I should say. I wonder, is this almost like, be careful what you wish for? Like you're, you're really selling for this idea, campaigning for this idea for weeks okay now we've got it oh now what because i'm sure there were some challenges that you had to overcome like we've all heard because you're doing so much television in advance and if someone's contract comes due someone is injured you know

there's there's some sort of dispute like things change you know when you're doing when you're shooting the stuff as it happens on the road you can be a little more and sort of go with the flow, but when you've got all this stuff, quote, unquote, in the can, well, that's a whole new set of challenges that WCW hadn't really battled at this point. I don't think anybody in wrestling had. Um, was there anything else that was a challenge that you didn't foresee when you were first campaigning for this idea. No, what you're referring to really is the, the continuity of, of the shows. Because keep in mind, WCW Saturday night, which we taped every week. So it was relatively live to tape, meaning we'd shoot that show on a Monday and it would

air on a Saturday. It wasn't a lot of daylight. Whereas the syndicated shows at Disney, we would shoot a show on June 1st and it wouldn't air until August 5th. But in the meantime, the show, the primary show, the A show at that point in time was the WCW Saturday Night Show. And the creative for that show would change rapidly. Now, again, I wasn't booking at that time, and I'm not shirking this responsibility, but just illustrating that there was kind of a disconnect between the creative side of the business

and the production side of the business. The production side of the business needed to plan in advance. We need to schedule those tapings at the sound stage well in advance in order to have the availability, right? We had to shoot enough shows during the course of five, six, days that we were able to take advantage of the economy of scale that you and I were just talking about a few moments ago. So it's not like we could go down to Disney MGM studios and shoot four shows a month's worth.

We couldn't do that. We had to go down and shoot three months worth or four months worth. So that became an issue when, okay, we think we know what we're going to do over the next three months. We've got three pay-per-views in here, whatever it was, two paper views. but the WCW Saturday Night Show, which was evolving every single week, would oftentimes be inconsistent. You'd have somebody get fired, for example, or perhaps injured.

They were working during the syndicated shows that we produced out at Disney. Everything was fine. And then perhaps they get injured two weeks later or three weeks later. So they're out of the storyline for the A show. They're no longer in the A show because of injuries or contract. disputes, or somebody just comes up with a better idea, which happened. All of a sudden, the A show that's driving your primary stories going into your paper views is different than, from a creative, from a storyline perspective,

than your syndicated shows. Ideally, they were produced closely enough in time that you could have continuity between what people saw on WTBS on Saturday nights and what people saw. on their local television market. That was a mucker father. That was a real challenge. And we got bit in the ass so many times as a result of that. And of course, the, you know, the shit stains, the Meltters of the world and, you know,

everybody else had just wanted to be negative were quick to point all that out. And they were, they were right in doing it. They just found a little bit too much pleasure in it, I think. But it was a real, that was a challenge. And that was really the only one, Conrad. You know, we got into the rhythm. Again, we had never produced five shows a day, five days in a row. That never happened before.

But again, David Crockett, the entire production team, once they embraced it, and once they got the first couple under their belt, they loved it. They loved it. And we got into our rhythm very quickly. There were no surprises, no challenges we didn't really expect. We just got into that rhythm after the second or third episode. It was like, holy shit, we can do this. We're going to be done early today.

We only scheduled four shows. We could have done six. There was that kind of feeling and excitement over the process. But storyline continuity was a major challenge. And it never went away. There was no way to fix it. You can't lay out. a storyline for three months on one show and have the freedom and flexibility to kind of change

your mind and improve things or whatever on your A show and not get bit in the ass. Well, you'll never get bit in the ass with our friends at Henson's shaving. It's Eric and I's absolute favorite razor. Uh, we've used all the great razors, all the great marketing campaigns. We fell for all of them. We tried them all. Henson is the best. And what's great about it is It gives you that old school feel, but new school tech. Let me explain. Inson is actually an aerospace parts manufacturer that's family owned and, man, they've made parts for like the International Space Station and the Mars rover.

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Now, here's the best part. You know, I think we all know this. It's like if you were getting one of those coffee makers that you have to buy the little cups for. Like the idea was, hey, we'll sell them the stuff. coffee maker and then they've got to come back and they can only buy these cups from us that was their business model hinson didn't do that when you run out of a henson blade you could go put a regular standard dual edge blade in there but it's not going to give you the same shape you want the magic of these really thin razors that only hinson can get you not only that it's also

way cheaper than going and buying those other blades or any other blades let me explain when you own a henson razor it's three to five dollars a year to replace you the blades. That's right. Three to five dollars a year. Let's say no to subscriptions. Let's say yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit henson shaving.com slash Eric to pick the razor for you. Use the code Eric and you'll get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Just be sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-N-G.com slash Eric and use the promo code, Eric. So listen, you've got the Disney Operator. You've got the families down there. You've got the catering down there. It's a totally new vibe, a new experience. I know there had to be some hesitation from some of the boys at first, but getting to spend time with their families and catering. And it's not quite the rock and roll lifestyle they used to live. But this is a pretty cool thing. But my favorite thing as a fan was seeing, as you talked about it earlier, the way the ring would spin around. It was almost like a turnstile type display that you would see.

at a car dealership. If they had some new fancy car, they wanted to put out on the highway or whatever in front of their dealership. But the idea that this thing spins, man, I don't know why, but as a kid,

I thought it was the coolest thing ever. How was that received by the performers? I think initially people were a little bit taken aback by it because the idea of the ring turning, but keep in mind, it turned very slowly. Like if you watch,

you could see it, right? but because of the way wrestling is shot you're constantly cutting from one camera to another camera it wasn't real obvious uh occasionally we would take advantage of it maybe take a wide shot intentionally to show the audience at home that this ring was spinning very slowly but again you know how people i'm i'm the same way you know the first time you try anything you're somewhat hesitant yes you know you you hold back your enthusiasm until after you experience it I think there were some people that were like, whoa, I'm used to working a crowd and how

do I do that at the ring spinning and, but about 10 minutes in, it, I think the guys, they didn't even notice it. Right. It didn't affect them at all. But again, initially, it was kind of a, it was a concern with some of the talent. So I'm sure the other big piece of, you know, concern with all the talent besides, hey, where did our party go and wait, is this ring spinning? But now.

we're going to tape all of this TV at the same time. Logistically, you've got to know where your stories are going to go well in advance. And we're hearing about this even today that as the shows are happening sometimes, talent don't know exactly what's going to happen or maybe they find out right before. Wrestling has forever been, you know, a very subjective, subjective way to present creative. Like there's no, you know, our buddy, Jeff Jared always says creative is subjective. It could be good to you. It could be bad to someone else.

That's what makes it interesting and shows like this and the internet discussion that happens on social media. But when you've got to have a plan going in to one of these tapings months in advance, it has to require a little bit more preparation. Who would have been helping you make sure that you were on point and you had all that dialed in? Is that Kevin Sullivan? Is it a cast of other characters? No, no, no. This is Dusty Rhodes still.

Okay. Yeah, Dusty was the head of creative at that time. And I don't even think Kevin Sullivan was there quite yet. When Dusty was doing it for Crockett, though, Dusty had like a, for lack of a better word, an assistant and J.J. Dylan, who would keep everything straight. Because Dusty would almost self-describe himself in interviews I've saying is a big picture guy.

He had the big, picture, but he needed somebody behind him to just double check the finer points. Allegedly before Dusty had JJ in his back pocket with Crockett, he might have because Crockett was growing. They'd run two shows in a day, sometimes three shows in a day. He might have the same talent on multiple shows and Quantum Leap was not a thing. They couldn't actually do that. So JJ was there to make sure that none of those errors existed.

Who would have been in a support role for Dusty as he's mapping out weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of television you know if you walked outside at the time if you walked into dusty's office and had a chat with dussey you'd walk out and you had janey ingle was right there outside his office magnum t was there mike graham was there um jake's dad jake the snake rober's dad was there gris was a part of that inner circle so that that was dusty's team at the time now we know that you know your opinions are going to change on wrestling um because when you get the opportunity to do nitro you want to be live and you really make that a sticking point that's 1995 this is 1993 so in just two years time you're really going to do an about

face and maybe that's a different conversation but this is a taped opportunity this is the infancy of the internet it's not nearly as widespread you know i mean people are using dial-up modems at this point and it's not like everyone has a computer in their home and certainly no one has a computer in their pocket i mean that's just not where we are so i'm saying all that to say were spoilers a consideration for you at 93 and then because we know they were in 95 i'm just wondering was that the evolution of the internet or what changed with regard to spoilers and that concern for you. No, the spoilers were absolutely an issue for me. It drove me bat shit crazy. I hated it. I'm angry about it. Still get angry about it when I think about it because it's

harmful to the business. And it takes away from the viewing audience's pleasure. And a lot of, you know, the hardcore, you know, fans that like to live on the internet and Reddit and social media and all that, that's where they get their rush, right? But the average audience that just likes to watch a show, you know, they don't want to know in advance what the finish of a match is. It's just, it's like learning how David Blaine does magic tricks. Once he teaches you or shows you how he creates the illusion, the illusion isn't fun anymore. Yes. And I got hot about it, but I had no choice. The financials didn't provide me the opportunity in 93 or 94. to do anything live.

Occasionally we would do a WCW Saturday Night Show live if there was something special about it. But that was from center stage, fixed-based location, shitty little venue at the time. It's cool now, but at the time it was a dump. It was hard to work in. I didn't have the option. Spoilers were a challenge.

They were a thorn. They were more than a thorn. They were like a spike in my side. But I didn't have any choice, just had to learn to live with it and do the best we could. You know, Dusty did the best he could creatively to maintain consistency. But you don't have a crystal ball. You can't predict injuries occasionally. And Dusty was a visionary.

He was a big picture guy. And Dusty, I think, found himself a couple times caught in the middle of a syndicated series taping when all of a sudden he's sitting in his office in Atlanta and he has a great idea and he wants to execute it, but then it's inconsistent just what the syndicated shows are doing. That was a real problem, but there was no way to avoid it.

Realistically, there was no way to avoid it. Nobody was going to be able to sit down and produce 26, one-hour episodes with the roster and be able to anticipate all of the changes that were going to happen over that 26 or 13-week period of time. He just couldn't.

Meltzer wrote this at the end of May, 1993. While nothing has been confirmed, expect major changes within the structure of WCW to be announced eminently. It appears that from July 5th to July 16th, WCW will be taping 48 hours of TV in Orlando at Disney Studios. If that is for syndication, WCW main event and Power Hour, it means they'll be taping shows more than three months in advance. If it's just for worldwide and pro, then we're talking about taping some six months in advance. This lends itself to an entirely new structuring of the wrestling business. If an angle doesn't work, it can't be refined. No turns, angles, or title changes can happen at house shows unless they are well planned out ahead of time.

Injuries are people leaving the company or people holding out, quitting, simply not renewing their contracts or whatever, which happens with frequency in this business, can't be accounted. for if television is taped so far in advance. So your first set of tapings here happens July 6th to July 9th. You're going to tape three television shows each day for the show worldwide. So a total of 12 shows. That's three months worth of footage. It's going to get you through the middle of October.

And it's reported in the observer that the loose plan of having 10 minutes of each show be left open for an update segment. So you can fit in whatever you need to. too about injuries or title changes or storylines you did need to plan for that was that i mean that's the observer report do you remember thinking we need to leave a few minutes in here just in case we need to do a stand-up update of some sort with tony chivani or whoever we typically had a control center yes type holes in the show that could be used to promote tickets on sale or to address creative issues that maybe happen over on wcw saturday night

to kind of bring the audience up to speed if there were changes and direction. But that was that whole, if you will, or that opening for that particular update segment was something that was a part of the format anyway, for the most part. So it wasn't a special consideration. It was obviously more valuable because it did give us an opportunity to kind of course correct if necessary to the extent we were able to. but it was already, you know, part of the format. I'm really excited to talk about this next part because there's a note in the observer

that makes me think you didn't want wrestling fans there at all. Quote, WCW didn't even seem to want anyone to know about this taping. It was never mentioned on the local Orlando television show, nor is there any mention in the Disney ads in the newspaper about events on the facility. Calls to Disney about how to get tickets were given the response of, we don't know because. they don't return any phone calls is that the point you didn't want a traditional wrestling fan there you wanted family you know families to come through and just a totally different

look yeah we weren't promoting traditional wrestling much to the chagrin and dismay of shit-stained day melzer um we weren't marketing to wrestling fans disney mGM studios were marketing to their guests that was their job that's the way they wanted it's not the way necessarily I wanted it, or that I didn't care about wrestling fans. It was the agreement that we basically came to is that Disney would be in charge, if you will, of getting us a fresh audience for every episode. It was different than what Dave Meltzer and other people were used to, but it wasn't because we didn't want wrestling fans.

That's what Disney M. Jim Studios wanted. And I doubt that anybody. called him from Disney and we wouldn't return their calls. That's that's typical day belts are bullshit. Well, at the same time, I mean, they sound like they know who to call. You know, if you've got some ticket taker type person who just looks up WCW and calls a 404 area code and they get a front desk, I mean, that's not exactly, you know, or if a fan or if there were fans down in the, in the, in the, in the Orlando area,

yes, wanted to come to a taping and they were to call. Disney. Disney's not going to know. Whoever answers that phone isn't going to know how to get tickets to the South agency, CW. Yes. And a general information call. But again, we weren't marketing. It's not that we didn't want wrestling fans. It's just that because of the

nature of the agreement and what everybody's goals were, Disney wanted to be in charge of getting that crowd and loading them and unloading them. We were hands off in that process. You know, I like to say everybody hates change. I mean, I think everybody, I don't

think anybody likes change but everybody likes improvement yes they're afraid of it um one of the people who had to be a little nervous about this was gary jester i mean he's running around booking your buildings for you how did he take all this almost was like you're doing away with his job kind of accidentally right well gary jester was as impotent of an executive as i think existed other than maybe Jim Barnett. I mean, Jim, Jim was there because Ted was loyal to Jim Barnett. Gary Jester was there because, I don't know,

he wasn't effective. He was just the guy that had always been doing it. He was, I think he came over from the Crockett's, perhaps. He was certainly there when I got there. Never had an original idea. Never had a solution to a problem. It was always the first one to see. stand up and talk about how bad everything was, but rarely showed up to talk about a way to fix

anything. He was just there. And Gary wasn't the type of guy that's going to stand up and throw a flag and say, wait a minute, what are we doing? How are we doing this? Obviously, Gary Justin was very supportive of Bob Dew because the more buildings Bob Duke booked, regardless of how many people he could or couldn't put in it, Gary Juster had a reason to exist. Gary contributed very, very little, in my opinion to WCW. In fact, there's a handful of people that I should have let go

when I first came on board, and Gary Jester should have been at the top of that list because he was ineffective. It wasn't until Zane Bresloff came along and really, because Zane understood how to promote, Zane had a much deeper roll of decks. Gary Jester had three or four people that he had been doing business with forever,

and he booked the same buildings over and over again with the same deals over and over again, regardless of how bad those deals were. Gary Jester was on autopilot. But at the same time, he was kind of a gutless guy. He didn't stand up and say, wait a minute, what's happening to my job? Or how can I be more involved in what you're doing?

He just went into his office and spread rumors and talked about the drama. And my boy, what's the dirt today? He and Jim Barnett spent a lot of time together just talking about the dirt and riding it out. They were just there. He was like a potted plant. Oh, my goodness. Sorry, true.

You asked me a question to tell you the truth. And I was trying to, in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, how do I sugarcoat this? Because I don't like to be mean to people. I don't like to say things that I know. People are going to take exception with me here. But you've got to be honest about things. So I have to be. and Gary Jester was basically a potted plant.

He had no positive impact and he didn't have the ability really to have any negative impact other than he kept doing the same things over and over and over again while everybody was expecting something else to change. Well, somewhere Mr. Jester is having a few cold ones and, uh, he's not he doesn't care. He knows. I can only help that before he started those drinks, he started with zbiotics because, uh, Tomorrow's coming right on time.

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I'll tell you know it's a badass product. 100% money back guarantee. T. Remember, head right now. Zibiotics.com slash 83 weeks. Use the code 83 weeks. You'll get 15% off. We want to thank Zibiotics for sponsoring today's episode. So let's talk about one of the first problems you have, Eric. You've got Rick Flair appearing as the NWA champion. At the time of the taping, though, Barry Windham was the champion. And the NWA says they never agreed to the title switch, but yet here you are having Flair cut promos as the NWA champion. At this point, I know the NWA is not a real thing, but still, it's something you've got to deal with.

Do you remember getting a home from got to tell them? Yeah. Uh, what, do you remember dealing with this nuisance, I guess is maybe the best way to phrase it? I really don't. Dusty would have been the guy dealing with that issue. It didn't end up on my radar. Well, here's the good thing. I was aware of it, but I wasn't involved in it.

So one of the interesting things when you're thinking about a live event budget and things like that and you're trying to figure out how to cut costs. Well, with this cost savings, you've now afforded yourself the opportunity to do a few more pay-per-views. You're going to close the year 1993 with pay-per-view shows in September, October, November, and December. And Dave would say, while there's no doubt for short-term income, the company will make more money this year by doing monthly pay-per-view shows. Over the long haul, this will rapidly burn out and already burning out the company's main source of revenue. Whatever income is made this year, the company will have to pay

dividends on lessened interest in future pay-per-view events if it even survives into 1994. If the company is on the verge of shutting down, running like this, trying to make as much money as quick as possible does make sense. So he was critical and not so sure that monthly pay-reviews would work here in 1993. Here we are 30 years later. I'd say it's working out pretty good. Yeah, that shows you what Dave knows. Dave didn't know his ass from a bag of rocks back then.

He knows even less now for some reason. Predicted demise, right? It's never going to work. It's going to cost them in a long run. Little did he know that we would end up running 12 pay-per-views a year. WW would end up running 12. Before you know it, AEW is going to probably be running 12. And in fact, I think there was a point in time when WWE ran more than 12.

Yeah, they had a brand split. So, yeah, again, just another example of Dave, not knowing anything about the business that he's covering. After Halloween havoc, Dave wrote, another set of tapings was announced for early November at the same location where tapings would air through the end of February. So storylines will again be made public months ahead of time if there's even still a company by that point. Nearly everyone within pro wrestling was shocked that WCW would trot out in front of a live audience with wrestlers wearing belts and announced as being. champions that they are months away from winning apparently even within the company there's a lot of private reservations about this i get that that wrestlers would be uncomfortable with this they don't want to necessarily expose the business another reason why you would say maybe we just

don't let wrestling fans get in the audience maybe we just promote it to park goers that wasn't it wasn't the case though conrad i know it's not necessarily technically the case but you weren't marketing tickets to wrestling fans eric you you acknowledge that yourself you're not you're not promoting in your local Orlando shows, come on down and see our next set of tapings and so-and-so time. That didn't exist. No, we were producing a national television show that was driving a pay-per-view. We weren't, we weren't operating with the old territory model. But again, it's not like there was, there was never a conscious effort. I don't think there was ever a discussion about let's keep wrestling fans out of the arena because we don't want them to see

title changes or be able to expose the lack of continuity. That was, that conversation never took place not with me not with anybody i know maybe in you know the minds of some fans or people that wrote about wrestling it did but that was never an issue eric come on now i love you buddy but that's a little dog ate my homework right there when you're saying well we weren't we weren't saying we didn't want wrestling fans there dot dot dot dot that's an incomplete sentence we just didn't let the wrestling fans know how to come like we weren't able to promote our event on the Disney MGM property. I can't think of a better, easier, clearer way to state that fact.

We were not able, within the terms of our agreement with Disney MGM studios, to promote our events, our production on their lot. That was what they wanted to do. And that was their responsibility. If a wrestling fan would have happened to come to the theme park in order to be a part of WCW, that would have been an ideal. situation. And I think perhaps that might have been some of the thought process in Disney. I can't speak for them. But the idea of promoting two wrestling fans traditionally to come to the park,

first of all, to come to the park, you have to pay. You have to spend a lot of money to come to the park. If all you want to do is see a wrestling event, it didn't make a lot of sense. But the nature of that agreement we had with Disney is that they would provide the audience. They did not want us marketing wrestling. They didn't even want us being seen on the freaking bus. We weren't allowed to step outside of the confines of the soundstage in a parking lot area and go walk around and go grab a hot dog at some other part of the park. So it's not, it's not me trying to make an excuse because the dog ate my homework.

It was the nature of the relationship we had with Disney and Jim Studios. but never did you ever say if he'd like to see wcw in live in orlando buy a ticket to disney whatever the shit on such and such day that didn't know but we weren't hiding the fact that we're producing the show at disney for god's sake no but you're not telling people when eric i'm saying i'm saying on some level that i understand we we started this whole conversation by saying this a television company we're producing a television show who gives a shit. So, but what I'm saying is, you're not actively trying to look for wrestling fans to get in

those seats. No, we weren't, but we weren't discouraging them either. It's not what you implied in the way you said it was, well, you didn't really want wrestling fans to show up because then wrestling fans are going to see what, you're going to see the glaring inconsistencies or see in advance of a title change. The wrestlers will see that or the talent, wrestling fans will see that and go out and spread the word that there was no effort to discourage there was just no effort to promote the fact that we were producing live shows there because that's the way Disney wanted there's I don't

see the confusion there well because if you watch any other television show like back when the late show was on with David Letterman at the end of the program they would say if you'd like to attend the late the late show blah blah here's where you go for tickets tickets for free they weren't because that's because they weren't on a Disney MGM property I'm familiar with that but I don't even know what we're doing at this point you just like to argue for the sake of fucking argue I'm not sure you're the one that he implied Conrad that Paul you sure didn't want wrestling fans to show up because they would see some of the inconsistency you looking you did not want wrestling fans there

because you told no wrestling fans win or where that's a fact and what's also a fact just because that's the way Disney MGM studios wanted it. They did not want us promoting wrestling on their lot. They did not want us promoting professional wrestling on the Disney MGM studios because they felt that it was inconsistent with marketing to their demo. Then how did the, how did the, how did the,

but what you're saying there makes no goddamn sense. They don't want. I mean it doesn't make sense. How, how did they get fans in there then? if they didn't want to promote it. They promoted it. They didn't promote it.

Was it amazed? Did they go through a ride? And when they came out of a ride, part of the ride was you had to sit here and watch fucking Johnny Swinger do his thing? No. What they did is they had Wranglers that would go out about an hour,

45 minutes between each show, and they'd hand out flyers. They would tell people who were already guests that were on the lot, who would already be, paid their admission, would already come to the Disney MGM studios or Disney MGM theme parks who would already come and they would hand out flyers and say, hey, want to be a part of a television taping? Come on over. See this, see that. See Rick Flair, see on Anderson, see whoever was

on the card. They would promote it to the guests that were already at the park. That's what they wanted to do. It wasn't my staff doing it. They didn't want my staff doing it. They wanted to do it. That's how they got 750 or so. People to come in and turn that audience over every hour and a half or two hours. We'd shoot, shut down, reset, whatever we needed to do between that show and the next show. And in the meantime, Disney Wranglers would go out and about through the park and get people excited about coming over to the Disney MGM studios and see live wrestling bean tape. That's how it was done. And that's the way they wanted it.

let's talk about the the rumors and the narrative i mean dave has written and i've read multiple times just in today's program about how if the company even exists by that point i mean it's really doom and gloom did it feel that way to you in in late 1993 that because like tony shivani said when he came back to wcw from the w f he felt like at any given moment this thing's going to collapse this thing's going under now of course we know it didn't until 2001 but he felt that way way back in 1990 did you feel that way in 1993 like hey man what they might pull the plug on this thing because dave's writing like this is a doomsday scenario here so they've ever did look i i was familiar with dave bouncer

going back to my time in a w a towards the end i mean as well as wade keller could because way keller was based in minneapolis um but i was certainly familiar with the dirt shirts sheets and the people who wrote them and was very well aware of Dave Meltzer and some of the crap that he wrote about WCW was like his mission in life was to try to create as much negativity and pessimism about WCW, especially when I came on board. Dave Meltzer predicted everything that we touched was going to be a failure. Predicted Nitro was going to be a failure. Predicted that adding pay-per-views was going to end of the, was going to result in the end of

the company. It's just that's Dave. He's always been that way. He's a piece of shit. He's always been a piece of shit. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He lies. He distorts. He misleads. He's a piece of parasitic human vile garbage, in my opinion. And that's nothing new. That had been going on with Dave Meltzer for a long time. And certainly, like I said, once I got promoted and was in any position in management continued to, to write and predicted demise of WCW. I, uh, I'm not going to read you everything, Dave Roe, but he's pretty hot and heavy and heavy handed about, oh, they're exposing the business and blah, blah, blah, but he does

say, we're exposing the business. Yes. Do you see the fucking irony in that? I do. Yes. he is a piece of shit well it always has been real aggressive today but i know he's your friend so man i feel like you got a hard on for dave melzer you might have a hard on for anything you want though with our friends over at bluechew dot com uh eric uh sometimes uh he uses a blue chew

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The promo code 83 weeks gets you your first month free. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. We want to thank Blue Chew for sponsoring Eric's Good Time, has come down, if you will, from ranting about Dave Meltzer. Dave Meltzer did have some really nice things to say. From a production standpoint, these shows were said to have been near WWF quality, including the big screens and the background. ground a la WWF and easy, rabid fans.

The shows were held in a 628 seat building, packed for every taping with Disney World guests with the admission free to anyone who was at Disney World on the days of the taping. The crowd was composed of largely non-w wrestling fans who were shown a videotape telling them who to cheer for and who to boo, and they had signals given to them when to cheer and when to boo during the tapings as well. Those at WCW who had apparently embarrassed at their own fans, base largely wanted it this way since the tapings were ever advertised to wrestling fans figuring guests at an expensive amusement park are going to be cleaner better dressed and more upscale

looking than wrestling fans thus enabling television programmers to be more comfortable with the product so let's talk about that for a minute here because we've never really discussed this but i imagined it was the case back in any soundstage or studio where any television show is shot, they would have like an applause sign. I think most people are familiar with that, like a game show or something like that, but you guys, you're talking to non-restling fans, so you kind of have to tell them, hey, these are the good guys, these are the bad guys, because they want to be on TV.

They're excited at the idea that we're going to go get to be on TV. So maybe they're not a wrestling fan, but we're seeing a live television show or a live television taping and we're going to get to be on TV. So moms and dads and certainly little kids get excited about that, but talk to me. me about what's written here. They're shown a videotape, telling them who to cheer and who to boo. And then there's signals during the show. Talk to us about that. Not quite that. Clearly, Dave, being the lazy fuck that he is, never bothered to come to a taping or he would have been able to report more accurately what was going on. There was a tape, kind of like, uh, there was video

playing that would kind of remind people who were wrestling fans because there were wrestling fans in the audience. It's not to say that out of the 700 people that were sitting in those None of them were wrestling fans. Some of them were. Some of them were familiar with some of the talent. Some of them weren't. But what we would do is have a videotape up there that would show some of the action. And of course, you could tell by watching that video, who is a heel, who is a baby face,

who was doing dirty, dastardly shit outside of the ring and all that kind of stuff. You would set the tone and try to create some sense of familiarity with the audience while they're waiting for the show to start. It wasn't a how to boo and how to cheer and when to boo and when to cheer video. It was more or less a videotape showcasing some of the talent coming up and you got to know their characters just a little bit before you saw them come out to help educate the audience that wasn't that familiar or wasn't familiar at all. But to suggest that there were no wrestling fans in the audience would be wrong. There were some. Sometimes there were more than others. Sometimes there were a lot.

Sometimes there were very few. It was inconsistent. And we did have, much like any other studio show would have with a live audience, we did have, we had Wildcat Willie, who is, believe it or not, part of his job was to help instigate some of the reaction that we wanted to get, right? The crowd who wasn't familiar with the product necessarily or the talent in the ring could take their cue from, when I say take their cue, just because of the way that mascot Wildcat Willie was reacting. And we did have people that were off in the corner that would occasionally, if it was necessary, hold up an applause sign or hold up a boot sign,

much like any other television show that's produced in front of the live audience on the soundstage would. We did do that. It was part of the price we had to pay to get what we needed to get. It was like the lesser of two evils. Do we run this thing like a traditional wrestling show? or do we run this thing like a television show to try to get the end result that we were hoping for and we decided to run it like a television show and getting the end result we were hoping for, even though it was an ideal from a purely wrestling business perspective.

One of the first big issues you're going to have, you know, we sort of ran through, hey, what if somebody gets injured? What if they jump to another promotion? What if they're holding the company up for money? whatever. Well, boy, just bad timing. In the fall of 93, that's when the whole Sid and Arne thing happens across the pond. And you did have some shows that were in the can. Obviously, Arn's going to be on the shelf for a bit, but Sid's going to be out of here. So you were hoping to have Sid and Vader be the main event at Starcade 93. We know it's going to wind up

being Vader and Rick Flair because Sid's gone. But do you remember that being possibly the first thing that had to be different than what you had originally hoped when you were doing these tapings? Because that's the first one I can think of. May have been probably the first big one. Yeah. There might have been other issues prior to that, but they would have been relatively insignificant compared to sit and arm because that, you know, there's so much publicity surrounding it. There was no way to camouflage it. Uh, Meltzer's, um, just, uh, playing that tune over and over again about how bad things are at WCW. Maybe the key point from having done all this that hasn't been brought up is that it

effectively solidifies the managerial positions of the key decision makers, Olli Anderson, Dusty Rhodes, Sharon Sadello, Eric Bischoff, etc. Despite the company setting a new low attendance in May and completely botching up the return of Rick Flair to the arenas in June and producing perhaps its worst run of television ever, including all-time lowest rating sweeps during May, a change in leadership really doesn't matter at this point. If someone knew was brought in to replace Anderson or Rhodes, it wouldn't be until November before they could bring in any new talent, get rid of any talent, change the direction, et cetera, because everything is locked in place. There is little

point now in changing upper management in November. And man, when I read that, all I could think is, who the hell called and told Dave that? Like, oh, this is the way they all keep their jobs because otherwise, it doesn't make sense to change it now. Like that's sour grapes from a wrestler talking to Dave there. Is it not? Or a Gray Jester kind of guy. Yeah. Oh, I got some.

And I think Gary and Dave, you know, had a probably had daily conversations or weekly conversations. And there were disgruntled employee. There were people there that like Gary Jester. And I'm not accusing Gary necessarily of, of being responsible. for that comment that Dave Meltzer made. But let's just be real. You know, guys like Gary Jester had been around for a long time and they would

piss and moan and they would, you know, because they weren't going anywhere. Gary Jester wasn't climbing any corporate ladders. Gary Jester wasn't having any positive impact on the business. And Gary Jester knew how I felt about Gary Jester as well. I didn't pretend, you know, I didn't pretend I liked him to his face and then turn around and bear him behind his back. I was pretty straightforward with how I felt about Gary.

Keep in mind, when I first took over in management, I couldn't fire Gary Jester. I couldn't fire anybody unless they were a part of the production team. Gary reported to Bob Due. That was a very safe job to have because Bob Due didn't demand very much of anybody that was on his team, other than maybe laughing at his jokes at the end of the day. But, no, whether it was Gary or somebody like Gary,

that was a pipeline to Dave Meltzer, wouldn't surprise me and there were times when it was talent and wrestlers because everybody uses Dave still does to this day. Dave writes about all the people that, you know, talks to him inside of the business. The vast majority of those people are talking to him are feeding him bullshit. Sunk, whatever. I don't think anybody has any real respect for Dave Meltzer in the industry, anybody that matters, at least in the industry. But yeah, he'd been negative from day one and he got a lot of his negativity from people in the office who weren't necessarily in the best positions and probably knew it.

I do think people in the business respect Dave Meltzer. I know that you're telling me Tony Kahn doesn't. I'm not so sure Tony Kahn's in the wrestling business. He's in the vanity business. Oh, my God. I love it. Come on. You know I'm right, bro.

You don't want to say it because I know you're friends with Tony, but anybody that's working there is probably. banging their head on hard shop sharp objects right now he's not running it like a business he's running it like a vanity project well everybody has to eat crow when uh these tapings come to a close i love reading this dave wrote the company's brass was thrilled to death as was disney because the event proved to be very popular and a long-term deal to type all worldwide shows in Orlando months in advance may be inked from a wrestler standpoint there was a lot positive in getting so much television done in a short period of time and the ability to bring

the family down for a week vacation or Disney World, although most weren't comfortable with the ultimate business expose the show's turned out to be. Told that the crowds were hot because they only taped one hour before a crowd and then brought in a new crowd for the next hour, so the crowd never burned out. However, on television, the reactions may sound fake because crowd response wasn't dictated by the wrestler's ringwork. It was a man giving giving signals to cheer or boo based on who had the advantage, so the type of response doesn't come off like a traditional wrestling crowd. And finally, when it airs, Dave has to tell the tale.

The first Disney taped aired on August 7th on WCW Saturday Night, which is the only Saturday show taped at Disney. Virtually, visually, the show looks better than ever with special effects and the like, and in some ways it looks superior to WWF broadcasts. and certainly way superior to the look of the raw shows. However, content-wise, the show had little, although upcoming WCW shows are much improved in that regard, with flair and sting being all over every Saturday night main event.

While the crowd was up, it was downright embarrassing to hear the crowd cheer for Rick Rood and clap for his music and see the guy leading the crowd, point thumbs down on camera, and then have everyone start booing. It came off like you were watching a game show that wrestlers were performing on, and that all the wrestlers were interchangeable because they all got the same amount of reaction and arm locks got the same reaction as finishing holds there was some good to this as far as the look of the show which is more important in selling the show to syndicated stations than

having strong quality matches but it's questionable whether it's effective in getting ratings or garnering viewer interest to pay money to see paper views the crowd as it was is impossible to gain any real intensity or real heat which in theory is what causes impact pulse ticket buys that wrestling crowds have long been built on. So listen, some of that we'll just table. But I do want to talk about the actual emotional investment in the product because you and I have watched shows in this last year where we said the real MVP was the doggone crowd. Like when WWE ran that pay-per-view in Puerto Rico, the crowd was unbelievable. A few months ago when NXT was head-to-head with AEW, that NXT crowd was on another.

level it was super exciting it made me more interested in a product that i wouldn't have normally even been watching but i was like damn this is awesome i need to watch more of this the crowd can sort of become this is a basketball game the sixth man you know they're they're they're coming off the bench and they're making this thing even better but with a non wrestling fan audience that is going to be a little different but at this point you know you got to make the the list of the pros and the cons right so it looks better check it's going to be easier to sell check it's saving us money check okay the heat's not as good we got to hope that the stories and the interviews around it it's got to make up for it but was the heat a concern for you because if if nothing else we've learned from you heat is life

heat is life but again context is so important go back and look at the wcdb pro show or the wcd main event syndicated show or the worldwide show go back and look at any of those shows in the weeks and months leading up to Disney and tell me how much heat and crowd reaction you got nada that was the problem from the get go we weren't getting any credibility with our audience those people and you know in shit stay dave you know making fun of the odd making that making fun pointing out that these weren't even really wrestling fans and they had to be told when to boo and when to cheer guess what mucker father you should have been at some of the syndicated tapings that we were doing in arenas when 1200 people were sitting there half of them with a bag of wine in their lap or brown paper bag with a wine in the lap the other half not even knowing why they were really there other than they got a free ticket the quality of the crowd and the reaction of the crowds that we had in syndication at those tapings prior to the disney tapings were was absolutely Absolutely no better. In many cases, worse.

And more cases than not, I would rather have that artificial crowd who's reacting to Wildcat Willie or the person telling him to cheer or boo, I would rather have that reaction than the reaction that I was getting prior to shooting at Disney because that audience sucked even worse. That's the whole point. You know, Dave's, you know, pointing out the obvious because that's all he's really capable of doing because he doesn't know anything about the business of the wrestling business. But if you compare those two crowds in the consistency of them prior to Disney, it was even less of a reaction.

And there's no doubt. I mean, I learned it along the way. And that's why I went to live when we possibly could once we could build an audience and once we could predict that we would have an audience every week for our shows, live and getting that real reaction and making the audience, how many times have you heard me tell the story? However, Elvis Presley supposedly made the comment one day that the most important part of any show that he goes to

is out there in the audience. It's the energy and the reaction and the emotion of the crowd that really gives a television show its credibility. It's why T&A never got off the ground because they never got comfortable stepping outside of the soundstage. It was too expensive. It was too big of a commitment. But they also never got the credibility that they needed.

But going back to this scenario, the very reason I went to Disney is because the crowds that we were getting prior to Disney were even worse than the quote-unquote artificial non-wrestling fans that we had at Disney. Let's talk about some of these storyline issues. The tag titles are going to be a subject here in 1995. At Slambury in 95, we'd see the nasty boy. win the tag titles from Harlem Heat. That's on May 21st. But the Harlem Heat had already beaten the nasty boys for the title back on May 3rd, because they were done with this taping.

That makes the air on June 25th. Not that it's that big a deal. This is just the way it is. Mick Foley would also write that, you know, in his time in WCW, he was told by Kevin Sullivan, oh, we've got big plans. We're going to do some really big stuff.

We're going to win the tag titles. It's going to be awesome. And then at the tapings, he sees a promo with Paul Orndorff and Paul Roma talking about how they're the new tag team champions. So Foley knows, well, if we are, we're not champs for long. But sort of the accidental thing that nobody could have ever predicted way back in 1993 when you first start pitching this is in early 94, you find out Hulk Hogan is filming Thunder and Paradise.

Man, sometimes things are just meant to be, right? Yeah. And by this point in time in 1994, internally at least, not so much financially or even with the audience, but internally at Turner Broadcasting, there was light at the end of the tunnel. People were starting to believe we had, going back to conversations we've had in the past on the show, we were really managing our resources. We were watching our budget. We were cutting costs in the area where it was easy to cut costs like travel. one example, but there were others. Certainly the economies of scale that we were enjoying at the worldwide tapings and syndication was another cost savings. It was another indication that maybe this thing called WCW and Turner Broadcasting can actually become viable, which is why in 1994, because we had already had, from a management perspective, we were making good progress. we still weren't making money, but we were doing things

that made business sense to turn to broadcasting, which is why when Hulk Hogan's, you know, filming Thunder and Paradise at the Disney MGM Studios the same time we were there, the subject came up,

hey, what if we could get Hulk Hogan? Is there any chance? And that's, as we started the show out, that's the fortuitous part of this whole story, is that Hulk happened to be there. We happened to be there. The idea, you know, kind of went off in my head. And I had this guy by the name of Rick Flair, who was close enough to Hulk Hogan to kind of put us together and make it happen. Let's talk a little bit about

the tick or tape parade, you know, that famous Hulk Hogan signing and the parade and all of that that went down in 94, also done at Disney. I mean, when, when you're able to tell the folks at Disney, hey, we got Hulk Hogan. Hogan. That changes the whole conversation. Does it not? It did. It did. And not only with Disney, but with advertisers, yeah, advertisers, potential sponsors. And it gave our ad salespeople something fresh and new and exciting and incredible to go out and talk about. So it changed a lot of things. Well, let's talk about maybe the most interesting thing that we're still talking about all these years later, not just those syndicated tapings. This is directly from the Nitro book,

our pal guy Evans go out of your way to check that book out if you haven't already we went quote we went down to disney or Orlando where they had kind of a forced perspective city street back lot at the end of this three block street at a right angle they had built this huge plaque of new york city it looked like walking down the street in manhattan just a huge skyline but it was only about 20 feet tall we thought this is perfect when mcneely and his director carl returned to the Disney site in early August, however, the entire cityscape had been destroyed, a casualty of Hurricane Aaron. Quote, buildings were torn off. Chunks of metal were showing, laughs McNeely, who also designed the Nitro logo. We worked late until that night trying to figure out how to solve

this problem, redrawing storyboards and so on, and we said, this is going to cost extra money, because instead of using that backdrop, we don't have to put one in. We had to add a city which at the time was a little bit bigger deal than it would be now. We called Eric Bischoff at about 10 o'clock at night, and we said, there's a problem. The hurricane is knocked down part of our set here, and it's going to cost $50,000 extra to fix it. Bischoff only had one question, recalls McNeely. He just asked, is it still going to look cool? I love that.

That is the most Eric Bischoff response of all time. Is it still going to look cool? I mean, the opening scene of Nitro, the show that changed professional wrestling forever, that opening little title theme there, that video also done at Disney. That's pretty amazing when you think back on the importance of Disney for WCW. Is it not? Yeah.

And I know we're going to skip forward here, but, you know, 1996, when the Olympics were taking place in Atlanta and anybody that knew how to turn a camera on was booked for the Olympics, anybody that knew how to run audio was booked for, there were no freelancers available. everybody that knew anything about television and production from a live perspective was booked for the Olympics. Yes. We had nowhere to go. We had no crew to go there with Turner Broadcasting production staff when we rely,

and we rely probably 70% of our on-site production staff, 75% of them, were Turner sports people that were just happened to be free on that given day. All of those people were no longer available to us. Had we not had the relationship with Disney, I'm not sure where we would have produced Nitro during the Olympics in 1996. We ended up producing it outside instead of the inside of the sound stage. We shot it outside where the infamous, you know, Kevin Nash, Tchwan, Darding, Mysterio took place. But, yeah, I mean, Disney really saved our ass all the way up until 1990, 1996. And let's be real. it's five weeks of nitro here outside and in the summer in the summer but we start just one day

after bash at the beach so where Hulk Hogan turns heel in 1996 and Daytona the very next day you're outdoors at this park and that's where we get some of those scenes that you were talking about like the lawn darting and all that but that created a mood of a real takeover and an invasion and I don't know the atmosphere being outside and sort of exposed like this, as opposed to it being in a building, I thought really added to the credibility. Like, had that attack with Ray Mysterio and Kevin Nash happened with a TV truck parked out behind an arena, it just wouldn't have felt the same to me, Eric.

I don't know why, but the ambiance of this being at Disney outdoors did, I don't know, create the right sense and feeling and vibe of, hey, this is. This is a real happening. Yeah, and the reason why by 1996, we were able to shoot outside and some of the stills that you showed there, had the Disney ears and the Water Tower in the background, some of the other haunted castle or whatever the thing was there,

House of Horror. But, you know, Disney was no longer afraid of WCW. Initially, when David Crockett and I first went into that room with Bob Allen and the group of Disney executives and everybody sat there with their arms folded and looking down at their shoes was because nobody really wanted WCW there. Nobody wanted professional wrestling there, period. And everybody was afraid of it.

But after a couple of years of working with us in a relationship that we built, all of a sudden we had access to things that we didn't have access to in a beginning. For example, we could go out and shoot vignettes with talent in the park in front of other Disney MGM, or Disney, I should say, not even Disney MGM because that was a television studio, other areas of the Disney theme park. We could shoot out in front of Epcot Center, for example.

We could use some of that background to really enhance the quality of the show. We couldn't do that in the beginning. They didn't want anybody out there in front of the Disney. You see Jesse Ventura and Tony Schiavani, if you're watching with us on YouTube, around Edpreet shows. Those are all things that we couldn't do

previously. And now we had access to a whole park, which gave us the ability to shoot those nitros outside during the Olympics. Let's, let's take one last break here and tell you about our friends over at Miracle Made. The holiday season is upon us. We hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving. But unfortunately, now it's time to start thinking about everybody you got to buy for for the rest of the holidays. And man, that can be daunting. It can be stressful. What do I get this guy? What do I got that girl? It's a whole thing. Let me give you a, little pro tip something everyone will love we're talking about the best sheets they ever had from our friends at miracle made here's what makes these miracle made sheets so great by the way number one

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people were just losing their mind over this I mean they were calling the police and I mean it was really a special moment in WCW history it too happened at Disney um and during the nitro book our pal guy Evans he got some great quotes some former tbs and wcW employees questioned bischoff's ability as a boss but i thought eric was terrific said tom carch who was t&T's former VP of sports marketing, but I remember starting to hear visions of grandeur and things costing way more money. It sounded like things were starting to spiral a little bit on that level. For example, Eric went and signed a 10 or 20 year deal with Disney, said Dick Cheatham. I said, we got to unwind this son of a bitch.

It sounds like a good idea. And even people he checked with, the corporate said the same. The problem was, this is a recordable event. It's called a capital lease. If you sign a 20 year lease, you got to get that on your balance sheet. I said, let's find a way to modify it. We'll make a verbal commitment and then we'll just sign a one or two year lease. That way I kept it off the balance sheet.

This, Eric, is some of that stuff we've been talking about, you know, the questionable accounting at different times from TBS because I'm sure from your standpoint as an entrepreneurial person, hey, this is working. It's better. Let's lock it up. Oh, wait. You mean that somehow reflects negatively on the books? What? Honestly, honestly, this is the first time I've heard of a two. 20-year lease as a part of a discussion.

I certainly wasn't thinking about 20 years in advance now. It's quite possible that after having gone through the initial agreements with Disney and we were looking to extend or continue that, that perhaps it was a negotiation taking place that I wasn't a part of that involved a 20-year lease. But I can assure you there was never a conversation on my part with anybody about about a 20-year- at least to anything that that's news to me i don't doubt that it happened right but i'm pointing out that it could have happened at a different level between disney executives and turner executives including dick chitam hey so let's talk a little bit about some of our fan questions because

we got a ton of those i don't think we can get to all of them but let's do a few here on this day in w w w w wett was to know was there anything to showing the head of walt disney tv and barry bloom on camera at Slambury 93 just trying to give the rub to the Disney folks on the pay-per-view maybe just show them a little love yeah yeah nothing nothing too uh strategic about it just a little bit of a wink in a nod Francis Reyes wants to know which one talent do you think benefited the most from the WCW TV tapings Flair in some respects, just in terms of exposure and putting them in a different venue and in a different look, putting Rick Flair out in front of 1,200 drunks was not good for Rick

Flair or WCW or anybody else. Having Rick Flair in front of a brighter, more sophisticated looking television show was better for Flair. It was better for everybody, but I think Rick in particular. Call Me Lionheart, too, says, do you think we could see a company return to staying in one location and filming shows there like TNA did for years like would that be taking them as two minor league now or could they be taken seriously to do something like that today a live wrestling show or a wrestling show in front of a live audience tape or live needs to have credibility if you want a wrestling company to survive and grow here's the key word grow yes if you want it to grow you want the audience to build you want to become a part of that

pop culture conversation with your product, you have to do it in a venue that's going to give the viewing audience at home the sense that they're watching something that's worth their time. And watching a wrestling event inside of a soundstage isn't going to achieve that. Again, I did it. I did it for a reason and my reasons had nothing to do with trying to grow my business. When I brought Disney, when I brought WCW to Disney, I had everything to do with trying to survive economically in order to eventually grow. We had to stop the bleeding. Disney MGM Studios was a tourniquet along the way to getting healthy and becoming active

and growing. But to make that decision to shoot in a sound stage permanently, it's fine if you don't want to grow. If you just want to survive, you can probably do it. but you'll never grow your audience. You'll never generate significant revenue that way. TNA tried it. It doesn't work.

How would you say that these WCW Disney typings compared to the TNA Universal Studios typeings? Oh, probably very similar. You know, a lot of the people that were working at TNA, TNA in production worked for me in WCW when we started shooting at Disney. Keith Mitchell in particular.

So yeah, I think in terms of production values, probably very, very similar. Really a great question here from Tom. Every time a taping happened, there were newsletter reports of events that didn't air. Like Rick Flair cutting a promo about teaming with Kurt Henning at the August 94 Clash. Did you ever run something weird in front of a live crowd just to see if it would leak? of course I did that on a regular basis I got a lot

I had a lot of fun doing that I knew it I knew it oh yeah no that was intentional now there may have been some cases where we cut promos and decided afterwards now we're not going to go in that direction but there were regularly scheduled promos

that were designed to do nothing but fuck with people Mike Tedeshi says I remember as a kid being down there for vacation and going to a show you had to wait in line in the morning for tickets. When you left the show, you were able to touch the ring and the ropes as you exited, Sting rustled,

and that's all I remember from the show. I'm sure as a kid, just being able to touch the ropes was a big deal. This is a fun one. Aaron Sheik wants to know what was a typical day like when WCW would tape worldwide at Disney? I asked because Eric, I've heard some pretty fun memories from Rick and other folks

who would say, after the tapings, those big family barbecues. That was a fun time and having everybody down at the bar. and fellowshiping down there, having some sushi with the whole cast of characters and their families. What was a typical day like? Was it a marathon day or did you knock it out in the morning and in the afternoon or evening? It was a pretty easy day, really. I think we showed up usually at the studios by 10.

Okay. And we're probably shooting by 11 our first show. The shows were laid out night before finalized, distributed to the talent that we're going to be wrestling the next day. so everybody knew when to show up. Because if we didn't need somebody until the third or fourth show, there was no reason to have them showing up at 10 o'clock in the morning. And by the way, the south stages were relatively small. So when you've got 30 or 40 wrestlers,

you got production staff, there wasn't a lot of room backstage. So we would stagger throughout the day to the best we could, the arrival of some of the talent. We'd let some go early. But we would generally start shooting probably at 11, and we would wrap up by 5. Because a production staff would have to show up at 9 to get things fired up and checked and tweaked and set up to be ready to go.

So the day would officially start for production at 9, talent shows up at 10, shooting by 11, and we would shoot 2.5, maybe 6 o'clock. But I think for the most part, we were done at 5. And then it was over to the Marriott Courtyard Suites, and there'd be barbecue waiting for everybody when we got there. And it really was fun, especially when you, again, context, you're looking at 1993. The year prior, when Bill Watts was there, nobody wanted to be in that company. It was miserable. The morale was horrible. The worst that I'd ever seen, and I'd seen some bad morale.

But here we are in 1993 and 1994, and wrestlers are not only getting used to the Disney tapings, they're enjoying it and so are their wives and her kids and you know you mentioned the fellowship you know we got to know each other differently yes as a result of being together after those tapings than anybody ever would have normally it was a good thing you know was it the best thing from a wrestling point of view no because of everything we just talked about the inconsistency and continuity but overall you know you went through the checklist, better production values, economies of scale, better perception amongst advertising, potential sponsors, TV partners,

pay-per-view partners, all that thing was true. All those things were true, but on that list should also be kind of the morale-building aspect of it. And it didn't last forever. Like anything else, everybody got used to it and started taking it for granted. But in the beginning to go from the way we used to do things to the way we were doing things in 93 and 94 at Disney it was a it was a pretty big step forward when it comes to morale interesting question here from Ari he wants to know I've always wanted to know how a time

Warner owned wrestling company held their shows at Disney didn't Ted Turner and then Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner hate each other uh well it wasn't an aOL time Warner company when when we did that number one number two I don't know what the relationship was was between Disney and Eisner. And again, look, we were running a soundstage facility. Yeah. At the end of the day, that's all it was. I milked it for as much as I could get out of it in terms of the co-branding and the

imagery that I was able to get away with, especially initially. But basically, we were releasing space. So I don't think if there was an issue between Eisner and Ted, that it would have bubbled up to their level. uh michael wants to know did management of disney ever have any talks about cross-promotion with disney characters no yeah can't imagine no we were thrilled just to be able to shoot out in front of the upcott center that was a win you know getting uh mickey mouse involved in a wrestling match but is not on anybody's radar my man idc over on twitter wants to know

can eric please discuss the idea behind using the streets of america sets for the worldwide tapings and having the cool visuals like the likes of rick flair coming out of the hotel to the ring or Mick Foley coming up from the sewer. That was interesting. Yeah. I mean, there's just so much there to work with. You know, you think about it when you go to an arena, the Von Braun Center. Yeah. It's in Huntsville, right? It is. Yeah. Yeah. And Huntsville. You know, you've only got so much to work with. You've got the interior of the arena. And by the way, they all look the same structurally for the most part. Some are nice with another. Some are newer than others, but the inside of an arena is the inside of an arena. Whereas you go to

Disney, MGM Studios, and there's just a million backdrops to use. And some of it thematically, you know, I don't remember the Mick Foley coming up out of the sewer scene, but there's another example of something that's just sitting there and we get to go, hey, what if we do this? Because you have access to it. And it opens up the door creatively and from a production value perspective. well we're going to be opening up the door next week to talk about something pretty controversial we're in a march to our 300th episode next week will be 299 and we're going to watch very special edition of monday night raw went down 25 years ago september 7th 1998 this is the infamous austin on a cross episode it's the go home show before their big pay-per-view and whew a lot of controversy on the other side of that one I've never seen that. I'm anxious to watch this with you.

I've never seen that show. It's going to be fun. We're going to watch it together next week right here on 83 weeks. And we can be promoting your product or service on the program when we do. If you're looking for men 25 to 54, look no further than advertise with Eric.com. It's a great time to have a stocking stuff for a lined up for a wrestling fan in your life. Can we recommend Grateful by Eric Bischoff? It's Eric's latest book.

It's available now at Bischoffbook.com. You can also go ahead and interact. and ask questions about the show. It's very easy to do. It's 83 weeks on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Eric's pretty active on Twitter as well. He is at E. Bischoff over on Instagram. He's at the real Eric Bischoff. And you can support our show the easiest, cheapest way by checking us out over on YouTube. It's 83 weeks on YouTube.com. And of course, if you've already got the book and you're looking for some swag for another gift for a wrestling fan in your life, can we recommend box of gimmicks.com. Eric, lots of fun stuff today. I love.

talking about Disney, the business of the business and all that jazz, but as we get ready to wind it down here, I got to ask, what's your favorite Disney movie? I don't know off the top of my head. I do love when Disney does sports movies. They always make me cry. They're always very emotional. But I can't think of one off the top of my head. We'll have an answer next week when we watch something that was very un-Disney-like stone cold on a symbol next week right here on 83 weeks with Eric Bischoff hey hey it's Conrad Thompson here to tell you a little more about what ad free shows.com is all about get early ad free access to more than a dozen of your favorite

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