MLW CEO Court Bauer recently appeared on the Wrestling Buddies podcast to discuss all things pro-wrestling, which included Bauer revealing a story of him pitching an exploding deathmatch to Vince McMahon, a match that eventually morphed into the Punjabi Prison match. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says he initially pitched an exploding ring deathmatch:
I was at WWE, when we did the infamous Punjabi Prison Match, as you might remember. Now, full disclaimer, I had pitched Vince [McMahon] on that match, but it wasn’t that match. It was–I’m not going to bury myself. Actually, I showed him a tape of an [Atsushi] Onita deathmatch with the exploding ring. I said I wanted to do that in WWE, and he signed off on it–members of the creative team have gone on record backing the story. And it goes to Kevin Dunn, who we didn’t hear from for a while, everything was close to the vest. But hey, if Vince says it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. We start seeing the mockups for what the exploding cage was going to look like.
Says without explanation the match turned into the Punjabi Prison match:
First of all, there was no explosions. This was about 10 days before the PPV. And the second thing we learned was it’s bamboo. And it’s almost like an Indiana Jones playset from Temple of Doom. And you’re like, ‘This is so perversely not what we talked about. Oh my god. This is going to bury the creative team once again.’ Of course, we took the heat for that one. But it’s interesting how you take risks, and sometimes, in different systems, it either turbo-charges the idea, or it mutates into a Punjabi Prison match.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)