Freddie Prinze Jr. discussed working with Kevin Dunn on a recent episode of his “Wrestling With Freddie” podcast.
Prinze recalled how frustrating it was to work with Vince McMahon and Dunn at times, especially when Dunn would kill pitches because the female performers involved weren’t “pretty.” Prinze described the experience on the writing team and pitching ideas to Dunn as “throwing sand at a tidal wave.”
Prinze Jr. was a member of WWE’s creative team from 2008 to 2009, and then again from late 2010 to 2012.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On the attitude toward the women’s division during that era: “It’s a very random, low-key era where the numbers weren’t great and people missed out on a few wrestlers’ peaks, like the Beth Phoenixs of the world. Like, she kind of had her peak. It was at a time where Total Divas wasn’t a thing yet, so the women didn’t get that much love. So if she was gonna get any time as champion, which she should have had a lot of, they’re like, ‘Well, we gotta pair her with Santino.’ So then she had like a thing with Santino where they were, they both had a title and Santino would do his comedy stuff and then she would save him when he would run like a girl. So it was this weird, low-key, under-the-radar time where we were all kind of held hostage by the whims of Vince and Kevin Dunn, man. One guy who loves wrestling, right, with all his heart – more than his family, more than his dogs – and then this other guy who I never got the sense liked wrestling at all.”
On Kevin Dunn: “He was trying to turn it into the NFL, or Tyson vs. Holyfield, which is cool, man. But it wasn’t wrestling. So, you just see this room of, they’re probably 20 writers when I worked there, and it was just 20 writers throwing sand against a tidal wave. You could pitch for 20 minutes. Kevin would be like, ‘Well, I don’t think she’s pretty,’ and all of a sudden, like six weeks of story, was just gone. It’s like, ‘Well, our champ has to be pretty.’ It’s like, ‘Yo, did you think Mankind was pretty?’ You could throw out a number of how many less-than-handsome male champions have existed, and I shall exceed it. But it would be dead, it would just be dead, because he would say one thing.”
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