WWE Hall of Famer and AEW Star Jeff Jarrett, who is also their Director of Business Development, took to an episode of his My World with Jeff Jarrett podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including how the TNA audience was drawn to their Knockouts division especially to Taylor Wilde, who was the all-American girl and had a youthful appearance and an incredible amount of fire.
Jarrett said, “The simplistic thing that I believe captured the TNA audience in such a positive way is when you looked at the knockouts roster, nobody was the same, right? I mean, the beautiful people, awesome Kong, ODB, Roxy, we go down the list. We didn’t have, you know, if you’re talking Ricky Morton language, that white meat babyface. The all-American boy. She was the all-American girl, even down to the red, white, and blue outfit. But she had, obviously, she was young. God, I didn’t realize she was only 22, but she had a youthful appearance and an incredible amount of fire, the energy in her, I’ll say that. And so she fits nicely into the knockout division.”
Jarrett also talked about who came up with the Full Metal Mayhem Match name.
“Rudy [Charles] said, ‘Hey, team, I hate to be the bare bad news, but for the third consecutive creative session, the marketing or Dixie [Carter] or maybe even Spike or whatever it may be,’ ‘Hey, can we re-look at October, November, and December, pay-per-view names or whatever, whatever needed to be branded or named or whatever may be.’ ’cause I was always of the mindset, and me and Dixie had healthy conversations like that. I said, let us start it in the creative room. ’cause we’re gonna have to create shows out of this. And look, marketing can tweak it, but it’s one of those things as far as the name of matches and look, full Metal Mayhem is our version of TLC, right? I’m trying to, uh, they, yeah, okay. You can’t call it TLC, right? So we call it something different that kind of fits and sells the match. And that’s where our mindset was. And I’m sure just like WWE does it to this day, I’ve seen a whole bible of a 50-60 page document of different match types, and they’re not the first to create it. We had one all that. But anyway, full metal mayhem. I don’t know exactly who came up with that, but it was a group team effort that we probably all said, yeah, let’s go with that name.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
