Chris Jericho reveals former boss Vince McMahon’s bizarre reason behind scripting wrestler promos around the late 90’s in the WWE.
Chris Jericho is now part of AEW. However, the man with a thousand holds spent a significant portion of his career in WWE. He was already a star before he joined Vince McMahon’s company. However, his work in the promotion cemented his legacy as a living legend in the business.
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Apart from being a phenomenal wrestler, Jericho was golden on the mic. This was instrumental to his success. In fact, he was part of a generation that were solid with their promos. So much so that they merely needed bullet points and worked their way around it on TV.
However, all of this changed when Vince brought in a writing team. The staff grew over the years and the promos gradually became heavily scripted. Jericho has now revealed why Vince made this decision and it is the most Vince thing you’ll read all day.
Chris Jericho reveals Vince McMahon’s reason behind scripting promos in the WWE
“The reason why writers became a thing was because when we started SmackDown in ‘99, Vince made it his motto that SmackDown was going to be bigger than the show ‘Friends’,” Chris Jericho told Court Bauer on “Talk Is Jericho.”
“‘Friends’ was at its peak or was still really huge. The bravado of Vince was we were going to beat ‘Friends’ on Thursday and his reasoning and idea and strategy was if ‘Friends’ had writers, then we need writers too. They suddenly went from no writers to 15 people in a room and not really knowing exactly who’s doing what and what is really happening or what is the story arc.”
SmackDown may not have had the same success as Friends. However, it has survived the test of time and is a full fledged brand of its own. To many, it is even superior to RAW, WWE’s flagship show, in terms of both storylines and wrestling. Not many however, are fans of heavily scripted promos and years later that is still a decision that has divided the fan base and even some wrestlers right in the middle.
h/t to WrestlingNews.co
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