While WCW failed to be a long-lasting wrestling company, its legacy is debated today. Not one person was as close to WCW as Eric Bischoff during their WWF Attitude Era levels of success from the early 90s. In his Under The Ring podcast interview, Bischoff summed up what he perceived to be the legacy of WCW. One word – “insanely innovative.”
WCW did a lot of things differently at the time, focusing on reality-based storylines and putting an emphasis on wrestling its smaller competitors. However, for Bischoff, one thing that he immediately thought of when the company was going up against Vince McMahon himself was “to go live”.
Being taken on by WWE Big Show was “not something I anticipated,” and it was something I “didn’t want”. Even though it did catch me off-guard, my creative side took over before I even reached my office.
“I stopped on that bridge and had a conversation with myself in my head and I knew right then in that moment that the only way to be successful was to be different than WWE,” he said. “I sat down with a pen and paper and I made a list of all the ways I could be different than WWE … WWE was taped, alright I’m going live, I’ve always believed that live television was better than taped television anyway, but now I had a reason to do it and I could justify it, because it’s more expensive.”
Bleidner’s plan to go live was beneficial, particularly because WCW was able to spoil the results for “Monday Night Raw” every week on their very own broadcast.
