Former WWE star/producer Shane “Hurricane” Helms was the latest guest on the ROHStrong podcast to discuss all things pro-wrestling, including how he felt about being furloughed by WWE back in April due to COVID-19. Highlights are below.
On getting Furloughed by WWE back in April due to COVID-19:
I mean, obviously that sucks, you know? But it wasn’t something that was unexpected, not from me. I know that company well and I had already been at home for a couple weeks already not doing anything and I knew that company wasn’t gonna pay me to sit at home forever, not doing anything, and I was in a transition period because I had a talent contract and I was switching over to an employee. I wasn’t even an employee yet, and because I was in that vague window of a temporary employee or whatever, low man on the totem pole and it didn’t matter how good I was at the job or not. Just on paper, I was the low man on the totem pole so that was one of the easy cuts for them to make.
Says that Asuka using the green mist was his idea:
It was my idea for Asuka to start using the mist, and we had a lot of fun with that. This was a great story. So that was when her and Kairi Sane were turning heel that night and they’ve never been heel. Kairi Sane specifically never had and so I tried to think of something for them to do. It needed to be somewhat heelish but they haven’t — there’s no reason for them to go full murder-mode heel yet, you know what I mean? And they were already called The Kabuki Warriors. So for me, it wasn’t a big stretch. I hear ‘kabuki’, I think of old school Kabuki, there’s the mist. For me, that was my train of thought. But then I had this weird idea in my head. I said, ‘Is it weird? I mean, I don’t want to assume all Japanese wrestlers [can] do the mist.’ You don’t want to stereotype either so I wanted — I had to dance around how to ask Asuka about this and finally I just said, ‘Let me just go ask her. Let’s see what she says,’ and she got super excited about it and she told me she had did it once before and I was like, ‘I knew it!’ And so now, I got to figure out — and I don’t want to give away the secrets of the mist but there’s certain items you have to purchase because of it, and so, and that was a very entertaining conversation in and of itself. But it came off super well. That was fun.
Check out the full interview below. (H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)
