Zitat:“I always use this as an example, imagine Ali vs. Frazier, the Thrilla in Manilla. It was an unbelievable, spectacular event, but imagine if those two same guys fought in a local YMCA. (Laughs) It’s not the same thing, the spectacle is a part of the show, the audience is a part of the show. I think Elvis Presley said it best, the best part of any show is the audience, it’s not the guy on the stage, it’s the audience, and the way they react. That’s what validates what’s going on, on the stage, and in wrestling’s case, it’s what’s going on in the ring. Imagine the greatest wrestling match you’ve ever watched. I don’t know what that is for you, let’s just pick Hogan vs. Rock, the PPV that they did, and the phenomenal reaction that they got. Imagine those two guys wrestling in front of 300 people and half of them are drunk. The people sitting at home would go, ‘Huh? Why am I watching this? I feel like an idiot.’ Conversely, when you get a giant crowd that’s engaged, and emotional, you kind of feel like you’re at a party, with 15,000 of your friends, just having a blast, and whether it’s concisely or subconscienly, you’re sitting at home by yourself or with a friend drinking a beer saying, ‘Wow, I wish I was there.’ That’s the importance of a good crowd.”

Zitat:“If they don’t look forward to the outcome of it, then you’re wasting your time. So you’ve got to check the story box, you’ve got to commit to the story; you’ve got to check the anticipation box. Any story has to be real enough, and believable enough, that whether you’re watching wrestling, or a feature film with a $200 million budget, or you’re watching a porn, it has to have enough of a story that the audience can suspend their disbelief and enjoy it. If you can’t engage the audience because what they’re seeing is kind of believable within the context of their expectations, they’re not going to buy it. Imagine if you went to a $100 million budget action film, and right during the most intense scene of the entire movie, you saw a boom mic dropped down into the shot. You’d go fuck, he just took me out of the moment! That’s unfortunately what happens so much in wrestling today, not enough commitment is being made to make those stories believable, which enables suspension of disbelief. So you’ve got story, anticipation, reality, you need surprise. You need to keep the audience off balance. When the formula becomes so saturated within the viewer, that they know what’s going to happen, you lose them.

You have to keep the audience off balance, and you have to do that within the context of everything else. But you need surprise, from all of the research that I did right before Nitro, that’s when my perspective really crystallized for me, there was one common denominator in that research when it came to people who identified themselves as wrestling fans. The one thing common denominator was that they really enjoyed about wrestling over other programming, was that you never knew what was going to happen. That’s one of the things that really compelled me to do things that had never been done before when I launched Nitro: Lex Luger, giving finishes away, going live, going backstage, having action take place on the backstage lot. All of those things had never been done before, and by doing them I created that feeling, ‘Holy crap, I’ve got to watch that show to see what’s going to happen.’ Then the last one obviously is action. It’s a wrestling show, you’ve got to have great action. Nowhere in that 5 element formula, story, anticipation, reality, surprise, and action, is there talking segments. That’s just a thread that kind of ties all 5 of the other elements together, but when you make that the kind of format heavy element of your show, you’re way off the mark.”

Zitat:“You’ve got to put everything in the proper context, there were no nWo shirts for sale before I turned Hulk Hogan heel. One disadvantage I had when I launched Nitro, compared to WWE, is that they had very sophisticated licensing and merchandise, WCW didn’t have any. This is one of the reasons I had to guarantee contracts, because if I didn’t guarantee how much money somebody was going to make, there was no chance in hell they were going to make enough to live off of if it was in part based on licensing and merchandising that didn’t exist. It is it is, and was what it was, based on what I inherited, when I inherited it. But it was also an advantage, because I didn’t have to risk the same type of financial impact that for example WWE might be analyzing, ‘Okay, what happens if John Cena merchandise goes away?’ I didn’t have that challenge, because I wasn’t making any anyways. I had nowhere to go but up.”