At the beginning of the year wrestling fans were treated to a huge surprise when AEW Superstar Chris Jericho, along with the entire Jericho Appreciation Society, appeared at Pro Wrestling Guerrillas Battle of Los Angeles event, where they later competed and won a multi-man tag team match.
The Ocho spoke about this cameo during the latest edition of his Talk Is Jericho podcast, where he detailed the conversations he had with Excalibur about making the appearance happen, and how AEW used to do surprise appearances like this all the time when they first launched in 2019. Highlights can be found below.
How the JAS’s appearance at PWG came together:
For anybody that wants to know how that happened, Excalibur and I had spoken about it months ago. After a show, we were having some drinks and I was like ‘Yeah sure, I’d like to do PWG. Let’s try and figure it out sometime.’ Then, about a month or so ago, Danny [Garcia] mentioned that he’s in BOLA and that there’s always this tournament. He said ‘Why don’t you and Sammy come and we’ll do the six man.’ I was like ‘Why don’t we make it the whole gang, all eight of us and do like a ten man, but still have Anna and Tay and Jake on the outside with us as well.’ I think that was kinda the cool part was that the entire group showed up. Once I suggested it to Tony Khan, he was super excited about it.
How AEW would show up at a bunch of indies right when they launched in 2019:
When we first started AEW, I think the Bucks did a few of these [types of shows] and I think Kenny and I showed up at a small indie in Georgia. Not to have a match, but I think I did a run in. We were kinda like the new company that was just showing up wherever we wanted to and we kinda had this street credit because of it. I felt like this kinda took us back to that. No one’s gonna expect this and everyone’s gonna be talking about it. So no matter what we do in this match, it doesn’t matter because they’re going to be going nuts because it’s such a cool surprise.
(H/T and transcribed by Inside The Ropes)