On a recent edition of his “83 Weeks” podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Eric Bischoff provided insights into the WCW logo change in 1999 and shared his thoughts on potential improvements for the promotion during that year.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On WCW changing its logo in 1999: “That was the beginning [of WCW’s hated era], right? And that is the point in time when Harvey Schiller came to me and said, ‘Eric, you’re doing too much. You need to learn how to delegate. If you want to be an executive at Turner Broadcasting, you need to learn that skill.’ Because I wasn’t good at it, I felt like I had to approve, being involve with every aspect of WCW, and it’s not realistic. So I took Harvey’s advice. Nick Lambros, I think he was an executive vice president at the time, was really my right-hand man in many respects. He was the attorney for WCW, but he was also involved in a lot of other aspects including marketing. Nick Lambros oversaw marketing, and he hired a guy by the name of Jay Hassman. Jay Hassman was hired to take over marketing in WCW.
“And for some reason, I guess the brain trust at that time decided that we needed a new logo. I don’t know why, in retrospect. But I went along with it, because I was a little bit — I had a jail food mentality when it came to all things WCW. And in an effort to learn how to be a better executive — yep, I let that happen. And that was the beginning of a lot of bad things. Not the cause of it, I don’t want to suggest that, but it was the beginning.”
On what he would’ve done differently to WCW in 1999: “Could I theorize here creatively what we could have done, and who could we put on top, and how could we have booked it differently? Sure, you could talk about that stuff until you’re blue in the face. Because there’s always fantasy booking applications that you can sit back in 2020 hindsight, 25 years later, and come up with a lot of great solutions. But none of that would have mattered. And I know it’s hard for people who subscribe to the dirt sheet universe, and those of the internet wrestling community that — you know, the majority of their knowledge or opinions are derived from chat rooms and dirt sheets and bulls**t from people that don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. And it just gets repeated and repeated and repeated. But the reality is, there was so much evolution at Turner Broadcasting, and it was not good evolution. You had the Time Warner merger, now we’re in the AOL merger. You’ve got two massive mergers are taking place between three corporate behemoths. And if you think the turmoil that exists today in WWE as a result of the acquisition by Endeavor — if you think that’s crazy? Try being in the middle — during the Dotcom bubble, by the way. So AOL had a tremendous amount of leverage in this whole process. But imagine being a part of a small division of Turner Broadcasting in the midst of the multiple mergers and acquisitions that were going on. And all of the changes that took place downstream as a result of it, that affected every division. It wasn’t just me. Take a look at CNN, look where CNN is today, and look where CNN was pre-merger.
“So it wasn’t just me that was affected. WCW was — I think it was more dramatically affected, and visibly affected. But there was so much going on behind the scenes that made really coming up with a plan and a sound creative resolution to the issues? Made it very, very difficult, not impossible. Could I have done a better job? Yes, certainly. But to suggest that, ‘Oh, if they would have just put the younger guys over,’ and all these dirt sheet Meltzeresque kind of solutions are just fantasy booking in a different form. It probably wouldn’t have mattered because the agenda that was clear as a bell to me at that time, was that nobody wanted WCW to succeed, and they were going to do everything they could to make sure that it didn’t in terms of slashing budgets and changing the format of the show, and putting different restrictions on us. They didn’t want it to succeed. So there’s really nothing in reality I could have done differently that would have mattered. I could have done it differently, and it would have been an improvement, but ultimately, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
