On the latest edition of VOC Nation’s Wrestling with history legendary journalist Bill Apter spoke about a number of different topics, including high-spots in matches, and how Vince McMahon cares more about IP than he does about name recognition. Highlights are below.
Says Vince cares more about IP than he does about a wrestler’s name recognition:
“Vince is looking – and this is not in defense of Vince, I know in terms where he wants to take his business. He wants to trademark a Tony Atlas, change him into a character, make merchandise with him on it – he can’t own the Tony Atlas person but he can own Saba Simba. He can own Akeem (instead) of One Man Gang, etc. So his plan moving forward was to create cartoon like characters that he could not only have wrestle, but merchandize as well.”
Talks Dusty’s pokda dot gimmick:
“With Dusty, as much disrespect as there was in that, that whole polka dot gimmick to him was in that whole cartoon vein of selling merchandise and branding it that way. He didn’t really care about the wrestling fan, he was trying to rebrand wrestling as entertainment.”
Talks Wahoo McDaniel ribbing him:
“I used to leave my camera bag in the safety of the dressing room, and I’d come back to the dressing room and my camera bag (was) gone. Everyone was like ‘somebody must have stolen it’. Then I’d go to the next town and Wahoo (McDaniel) just happened to have found it every time we went some place. All the time, all the time.”
On the large number of high spots in matches:
“It’s nothing special anymore now. When you watch wrestling on TV, it used to be that one person per show would do (acrobatics). Now every match, everybody does the dive over the ropes to somebody on the floor. Everybody does the top rope (dive). I remember the first time seeing Pedro Morales or Mil Mascaras jump off the top rope; it was spectacular because I hadn’t seen it on a show before. Now everybody does the same things.”
Check out the full episode below.