WWE Senior Vice President Bruce Prichard recently took to an episode of his “Something To Wrestle With” podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including WWE Hall of Famer “Stone Cold” Steve Austin being the leader of the Alliance.
Prichard said, “You know, I did [like it] from this vantage point: we got to do different stuff, and we got to do different things. And you got to feel — you know, once Steve really understood, ‘They’re not going to let you turn heel, man. They’re going to love you and love everything you do.’ We started playing, and we got to play with this character from the standpoint of, Steve did comedy. Steve was just completely off the cuff. And even when he would do bad comedy and laugh at himself, that was funny s**t because people didn’t get it. So it was different, it was different than what he had been. So for that, I liked it.”
On WWE losing momentum in 2001 after purchasing WCW:
“Yeah, because we had — look, we had a completely different plan coming out of WrestleMania. We had a plan of Steve and Triple H running roughshod over everybody and being the main focus. And it just kind of blew up as soon as soon as Hunter tore his quad, and he’s out. And the Invasion, you have a vision, you have hope anyway. I don’t know if there was so much a vision as there was a hope that this WCW thing, with talent that came in from WCW after the buyout, was going to be accepted. And that the audience would believe them as a threat and that the audience wanted to see them. Instead, we got the guys that the audience didn’t want to see, which was evident while they were at WCW. They certainly weren’t making any changes or big waves in WCW at the time. So what would make you think they were going to make waves coming up here? And they didn’t, and it just wasn’t good.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
