During an appearance on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, Christopher Daniels compared AEW to TNA/Impact Wrestling:
“I do feel that AEW is similar to TNA in the sense of the young locker room and in the same way that TNA back in the day had these guys hadn’t had that opportunity on the national spotlight. Now, you’ve got AEW where you’re looking at guys like Jungle Boy, and Luchasaurus, and Marko Stunt, and Private Party and a list of guys who I’ll forget and afterwards go, I wish I had mentioned, Scorpio Sky. We are very similar in that respect.”
“The one thing that I do think is different and one of the things where I don’t think we’ll make some of the same mistakes that TNA made is that I feel, in the creative process, that there’s a feel of collaboration rather than a feeling of exclusion. There were very many times where I tried to comment on things that were happening with me, and there was immediate fight back, push back. Not always but often often enough where I ended up getting a reputation as being a guy that asked too many questions, and it ended up hurting me at TNA.”
“There was even a point where they put a clause in our contract that said, if you keep pushing back, we’ll fire you, even though that’s in every contract any wrestlers ever wrestled ever signed. I feel like here at AEW, there’s a feeling of collaboration because I feel like Tony and the guys that are doing the creative, they want to hear opinions, and they want to hear the devil’s advocate. If they have an idea and someone goes, wait, this won’t work because, they want to hear that. They don’t want to find out, oh, this didn’t work because and no one said that. They want to hear those things, and so that’s the difference at this point.”
