On this week’s Wrestling with Freddie podcast from iHeart Media’s My Cultra Network, former WWE creative team member Freddie Prinze Jr. was joined by Chris Jericho.
Prinze Jr. brought up the fact that he hit a lot of brick walls in WWE when it came to pitching and sharing his ideas. He explained something that Chris Jericho told him that changed his whole pitching philosophy.
“When I went to pitch ideas, I would run into walls a lot,” Prinze Jr. explained. “And then you [Chris Jericho] and I had a conversation, again, I don’t know if you will remember this. But I was having a hard time pitching some of the smaller guys, and you just kind of smiled, and like, looked away like you remembered something way back when and I didn’t know what it was but I was staring at him ‘what’s he gonna say? what’s he gonna say?’ And whatever you were gonna say you changed to ‘Freddie, he’s his father’s son.’ I went ‘what do you mean?’ I grew up without a dad so it didn’t click with me. And you said, his Dad loved the big guys and he’s his father’s son, so he’s always going to see the big guy able to beat up the small guy, no matter how much evidence you show him because his father told him it was that way.”
Freddie said it changed the way he pitched for smaller guys. He says the change ultimately led to the success of a Kofi Kingston push, and also Jeff Hardy, who eventually went on to win the WWE Championship.
Chris Jericho responded to Prinze Jr. claiming that WWE does not know how to build new stars, and there was something he realized when he joined AEW that he had to do fast.
“From day one in AEW, Freddie, this is not a WWE bash, I worked there for almost twenty years, I loved working for WWE, but one thing they still have an issue with, and you can see it if you watch the show, is building new stars,” Jericho stated. “They really have a problem with that, and I don’t know why, but once again, it doesn’t matter to me what they do. From day one in AEW, we showed up on October 2nd, even before that. When we showed for the first couple of pay-per-views, we had no television deal, then when we got one on TNT it was an ad-revenue share. Now what that means for people who don’t know, is you make the money based on advertising.
“I realized early on, as being kind of the face of the company, and the one guy that the national audience knew, besides Jim Ross, but the one guy that was in the ring. They knew Cody maybe, not really. Kenny and The Bucks were kind of more independent, or popular in other countries. I need to make new stars as quickly as I can. Cody being one of them. Kenny Omega being another one. Then you move, and look at my first few programs, match-three at AEW was with Darby Allin, and Jungle Boy was around about that time. And then Jon Moxley, who had to be rehabbed when he came from WWE. Mox was not Mox when he first showed up. He was still Dean Ambrose, kind of the goofy guy that wasn’t funny, doing all that sh*t they made him do. We had to make him into a star right out of the bat.”
