MLW CEO Court Bauer was a recent guest on Busted Open Radio to hype up the promotion’s upcoming Blood & Thunder taping, as well as discuss all things pro-wrestling, including Bauer reflecting on his time as a writer in WWE. Highlights from the interview are below.
How the WWE format has not changed in decades:
“Even when I was at WWE, I’d sit in the writer’s room and be like, ‘guys, we have to change this format.’ At that time, they had been doing this format for ten, twelve years, now you’re going on two decades. It’s the same format. The format from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s, they changed to where by the 90s, it was the crash TV format. Now, it’s kind of a dialed down crash TV format and a very flat crash TV that (Vince) Russo used to do. It’s still essentially the same format; how you open the show, you have a guy do a 20-minute promo and there is an invisible wall where his rival sits on the entranceway and listens patiently as this guy talks about his feelings.”
How the entire WWE product feels very rehearsed and tired:
“This doesn’t feel real. The evolution of fighting, you watch UFC and watch all these big fights, they don’t sit there and let someone talk about their feelings and not do anything about it. It feels very rehearsed and it feels like it’s the same voice coming out of 15 to 20 people’s mouths. You have to have continuity. If all of a sudden you shift gears, that’s a problem. The other problem is being authentic. In this day and age, rebranding a guy and having him have a different name after you’ve established him, it’s impossible to not have pushback. Authenticity matters now more than ever. If you try to have a fake product, a plastic product, artificial product. It’s kind of like McDonald’s. It’s readily available, but I don’t know if you’re going to feel good digesting it.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)