During the latest edition of his ARN podcast pro-wrestling legend and current AEW manager Arn Anderson spoke about Hulk Hogan’s creative control in WCW and why the 1996 Uncensored main event was a complete miss for the roster and the fans. Highlights are below.
Talks the Doomsday Cage main event of WCW Uncensored 1996
So, this is three cages, smaller one, bigger one, biggest one. You’ve gotta drop down from the small one to the middle one, and then you’ve gotta drop down from the middle one to the bottom one, and then you have a decision. Well, number one, I got added into this someway, somehow once Kevin [Sullivan] must’ve looked around and said, ‘There’s not a lot of guys who are gonna do a lot of falling down in this thing.’ Look at the monster roster. Then you look at the babyfaces. I guess my job, which I had nothing to do with the storytelling to get to this match, was just to be inserted to be a flow guy or somebody to keep getting his ass kicked and take some bumps and try to make it exciting. But boy, 8 on 2.
Talks Hulk Hogan having creative control:
“Creative control to me has always been a nasty word. That night it became really relevant on how much strength and stroke and power those two words carry because that was god awful. There were people in it like Jeep Swenson who was a monster. The biggest arms I’d ever seen up until that point. You had Zeus, Barbarian, Meng, and all these guys. Two guys beat them all. That’s not making babyfaces, that’s making you want to puke. It was shitty in its design and lousy in its preparation. The whole concept made no sense, and if you think two babyfaces were made at the end of the day, then you’re not a wrestling fan. No way, no how should that have ended that way. No way, no how should that match have ever occurred. A lot of dangers. It’s a miracle you didn’t have four guys blow out their knees dropping from one cage to another. It’s a pretty good drop.”
How the fans saw through the match and no one got over:
“It was just surrounding Hulk with as many monsters as he could possibly defeat. I don’t Hulk even realized at the time that the audience saw through it…..and again, Ric and I were tossed in there as cannon fodder. I don’t complain about it. I showed up every day at any company I worked for and whatever they want, that’s what they get. This is not about me. But you had a couple of professionals in there, and you had more people who were disinterested than not. You had a couple of people who were completely lost. And then you had a couple of babyfaces try to take advantage of that mass confusion and somehow get over. It didn’t, and it’ll be viewed in history as the streaming shits.”
(H/T and transcribed by 411 Mania)