WWE Hall of Famer “The Enforcer” Arn Anderson recently appeared on an episode of his ARN podcast, where he discussed a number of topics, including his initial reaction to WCW Nitro going head-to-head with WWE RAW.
Anderson said, “Scared me to death, because I knew you’re going to split your audience. You know, I didn’t know how many people were going — I wasn’t familiar enough with the way things work. Is some guy sitting there with a flicker, and he’s going, ‘Okay, break. Okay, click to the other show? Break, back to the other show.’ And how much of that would actually play into what your rating was going to be. I didn’t have a working knowledge of that. And it just scared me, I know that, ‘Man, I think this is going to hurt our rating.’ We were starting to build a little something. And the thing is, Saturday Night on TBS was established for years and decades. Aand people are, they’re just — unless you started hammering that fact that we’re now going to be, ‘Saturday night, 6:05 is not happening.’ Monday — whatever time it was. What was it. eight o’clock? Eight to nine started off, then it went eight to 10, then it went eight to 11? You know, people are creatures of habit. And they’re going to just automatically, go to Saturday and there’s nothing on, and they go, ‘Why is golf on?’ Or, ‘Why is the basketball owner? Where’s wrestling?’ Because people just don’t pay that close attention. And then you click over, and you just happen to be skipping channels at eight o’clock. That’s a pretty big gap, eight o’clock Monday.”
On WCW creating characters:
“What they’ll never understand — if you go back and look at the WWF at the beginning of time when they started collecting all the top guys, he was still adding characters to those top guys, Vince was. Each guy had a character. It didn’t matter how great your body was, any of that. He’s still going to give you a character. So anybody trying to emulate their success, which would have been WCW, would have naturally thought, ‘Okay, it’s working for him. It’s got to work for us. We gotta create characters.’ We weren’t qualified, to be honest with you.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
