AEW announcer and Senior Advisor “Good Ole’ J.R.” Jim Ross took to an episode of his “Grilling Jr” podcast to talk about a number of topics including WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker’s influence on WWE creative.
Ross said, “If he had any thoughts, he kept them to himself or to a small group of friends. Taker is such a team player. Hey may have looked at it like a challenge, that ‘I can get a good match out of Dustin.’ And there’s a lot of old-school feelings there as well.”
On the importance of evolution with wrestling characters:
“Well all characters have to evolve, there’s no doubt about that. Whether I liked the exact direction step-by-step that it was taking is irrelevant. But evolving is very, very important. You can’t allow your character to get stale. And I think that Vince’s thoughts were at that time, ‘If we don’t do something, this character is going to get stale. And all the money that we have invested in getting him over on this creative journey would be for not.’”
On the 3:16 porta potty angle with Steve Austin being an example of crash TV:
“Some kind of TV. Something not too flattering. But you know, I guess it all tied together to some extent. But the farther down the road we went, the crazier it got, and hard to figure out, I guess in a way, that’s a good thing because people couldn’t figure out the next move. But it was disjointed, very disjointed.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
