During an interview with 6abc.com to promote AEW Dynamite, Bryan Danielson commented on how AEW is different from WWE:
“I mean there’s a litany of differences. But I think this is one of the things that drew me to AEW and why I kind of wanted to come to AEW: It’s that AEW is a wrestling-first company; it’s a wrestling company for wrestling fans. Sometimes WWE is more just based on general entertainment where they want to reach as many casual viewers as possible, where I think AEW is like ‘hey, if you love wrestling, here’s this.’ But also even if you’re not a wrestling fan, we’re putting on wrestling, and the wrestling itself is going to bring you in.
If you were to do a comparison just watching the shows, you’ll see that there’s a lot more wrestling in the two hours of Dynamite than there is even in a three-hour WWE Raw. Sometimes there’s more wrestling on an AEW Dynamite show than there is in RAW and SmackDown combined. So that’s one of the things that drew me to it because as a fan, when I was in high school everybody loved the Rock and (‘Stone Cold’) Steve Austin. They were my least favorite people because all they did was talk. I like the ‘wrestler’ wrestlers.”
Danielson also commented on how wrestling in Japan was his dream when he started:
“It’s just a different style marketed towards different people. It’s just a different philosophy on wrestling. My dream when I started wrestling was not to be in WWE and to main event WrestleMania or anything like that; my dream when I started wrestling was actually to be a big star in Japan, because I loved the Japanese wrestling style which is very wrestling-based. I also liked the idea because I was scared to death of public speaking. I loved the idea of being able to go to Japan- you could be mildly famous over there, and then come back and nobody would know who you are, and I loved that idea. ‘For sure, that’s what I’m going to do,’ and then, yeah, that didn’t happen.”
