In late 2000, Eric Bischoff nearly purchased WCW with a group of investors. This deal would eventually fall through and WCW’s assets were bought by Vince McMahon in 2001.
Bischoff spoke about almost buying WCW on the latest episode of his podcast, 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff. Specifically, he revealed some of the plans that he had for WCW if the sale did go through.
Here is what he said (h/t to Wrestling INC for the quotes):
“Tony Schiavone. I have always liked and respected Tony. There were never any thoughts of firing Tony, but we did want-we knew that we needed to hit the refresh button in every way possible. We knew that we wanted to rebrand WCW and get as far away as how people had perceived WCW to be as possible as far as we could, which included the announcers. That would have included the look of the show and the location of the show and where we were going to produce the show. It would have included a lot of things including the announce team. It was going to be Joey Styles and Don Callis.”
On if they were going to fix creative issues:
“We didn’t really focus on future creative. We talked about what talent we did keep and wanted to keep but there was so much work to do on rebranding, repositioning the company that creative was really the last thing we needed to think about”
“The intention really when we were going to acquire the company was going to shut it down for a period of 3-6 months thinking that absence makes the heart grow fonder. We needed to build some anticipation. We had to make people anxious to see what the new, rebranded WCW was going to look like. You couldn’t do that by taking it off of television for a couple of weeks and then coming back. You had to be gone a long enough period of time to really build up anticipation and to market it properly.
“We were focused more on where we wanted to produce the show. How could we help reduce the cost of producing the show? What talent were we able to afford? Who did we want to keep? Rebuilding relationships with sponsors. That was where I really was focused on, not on what we were going to do with a certain talent.”
Your thoughts on any of those changes?
On a related note, you can read the latest on WWE applying for some WCW-related trademarks here.