Vince McMahon Interview

[Promoter 0]

RavishingRickRudo, it wasn't Vince's creation. He used the same blueprint from his dad. He even admits this in a 1993 wwf magazine. What he did with Hogan was exactly what his dad did with Bruno Sammartino. Bruno was used to get the wwwf tv times and so on just like Hogan was. Hogan was dominating just like Bruno was. Vince Mcmahon use to book the tag team division when his dad ran things in the 70's. WrestleMania was a bite off Starrcade. Pay per view was also around before Vince used it, but he maximized it best just as previously mentioned with Vince taking things to another level.

 

When Vince went with his own vision of turning Walt Disney the company failed miserably in 1990-1993 compared to the past. His new generation campaign also failed when trying to wipe out the success of the 80's. I already went through the model he stole from wcw and the ecw for the 90's to return to glory.

[RavishingRickRudo 0]

By "Business Model" I mean the magazines, syndicated television, sponsorship, music, food, branding and licenses etc. It's traditional brand extensions applied to wrestling, not the formulas for pushing wrestlers.

[Promoter 0]

Yeah, I think that has to be credited to Vince Mcmahon.

[RavishingRickRudo 0]

I'd moreso credit Linda with that. She seems to have a better grasp on marketing and the business-end than Vince does (which is different from "promoting"). This is, of course, my impressions of them, where she -in interviews- talks like a business person while Vince, though he tries to talk the talk, ends up sounding more like a carny than anything else. Linda was hand-in-hand with Vince during the WWE's reign-of-terror and was involved in all the processes, especially on the business end. She didn't have to book like Vince did, so she had more involvement in developing their business model. If you look at it now, she's the one training Shane to take over the business-side, and Vince is with Steph at the creative-end.

[Promoter 0]

Good points. It would explain Vince wanting to hand things over to her in 1993 during the trial.

[Guest Mordecai's Cathedral]

Very interesting interview. Good to see he recognizes that his in-ring career is finally over. And what's he mean by "going outside of our environment," I wonder?

 

We're going to be spending substantial sums of money going forward promoting our performers in areas you'd think we logically should be in anyhow -- Nascar, places like that.

 

Because WCW Motorsports was so successful, and you really have to *push* to get that lucrative white trash/redneck demographic to get into wrestling.

[strummer 0]

Exhbit C would be the booker Vince had in the 80's from 85-88. I don't know what got into him after those years, but maybe it was Pat Patterson.

That would be George Scott.

 

As well as being as smart as the people around him let him be, because people are always trying to talk Vince in and out of things, he's also, nepotism aside, usually astute enough to know when someone has started to slip.

Scott's importance to the 80s WWF product cannot go overlooked, Vince adopted a lot of his booking philosophies, especially the credo that "Only main events matter, you just fill in the undercard" Once Scott left, and Patterson got his job, you could see the transition to almost a completely cartoonish product.