During a press conference ahead of WWE NXT Stand & Deliver, Shawn Michaels weighed in on using his stories from his own career as part of the creative for WWE NXT.
Michaels has reused quite a few storylines and angles from the past such as him throwing Marty Jannetty through a talk show set (similar to what Jacy Jayne did to Gigi Dolin, alongside Roxanne Perez collapsing at the end of a match as he did). Michaels said,
“Some of them, clearly, complete rip-off. We’re using them because we thought they were good. Nothing thrills me more than that, this stuff is 30 years old and people go, ‘oh, it’s the same.’ I’m fortunate that we have a fanbase that remembers that far, but we’re also appealing to a whole new fanbase. They’re still moving, they’re still impactful, they’re still memorable storylines. That’s what we want to do. A lot of this, I would go back to the reference of using action movies. They all have the same sort of diagram, but people do them differently with different actors and other tweaks to make them different. That’s what we’re hoping with all of this. I would argue that kind of everything…every once in a blue moon, we find ourselves venturing into new ground or something original. A lot of what we do in this line of work has been done sort of somewhere down the road. It’s just us sort of mixing it up a little bit. Guilty of doing those storylines that are obviously similar, but you’re always going to have turns in wrestling, you’re always going to have injuries. Some of these are a little more spot on than the others, but they’re all sort of basically derived from the same playbook, which has been around in storytelling from even before I was doing it.“
