During a new interview with Chris Van Vliet, Zack Ryder commented on WWE killing his “Z! True Long Island Story” YouTube show, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On enjoying the show at the start: “One of the things about the YouTube show that I loved was, the first year it was all me. There was no one editing it, and literally I was putting it right to my YouTube channel. There was no one from WWE ever watching it and saying, ‘You can or can’t do this.’ Because I was just doing it. Like, I was just doing it. But then it got moved to the WWE YouTube channel, and that’s when it kind of fell apart.”
On moving the show to WWE’s YouTube channel: “It sucked, it sucked. [It required approval for each episode’s content] 100%. And when I started the YouTube show, my goal was not to be this YouTube guy. I wanted to get on TV. So once I had ended the year, won the US Title, I’m like, [dusts hands off] ‘That’s it, thank you very much! Z! True Long Island Story’s over.’ And in that run, towards the end, WWE tried getting me to move it to WWE.com. I’m like, ‘That’s not cool! Nobody goes to WWE.com!’ You know what I’m saying? Like, people go to YouTube. I’m like, ‘No, I’m not moving it. And I can’t believe I had the balls to say that back then. But then, when the year was coming up, WWE had just signed this YouTube deal. Because before, they had a YouTube channel but it was just clips. It was like a clip show. There’s no content like how it is now. And I think the main thing that was going on that channel, was the only proven thing that was out there, Z! True Long Island Story. So if I could — I don’t have regrets. Don’t live in regret, right? I wouldn’t have done it. Because it just killed the whole show. It ended up killing me, you know? The worst part was doing all this hard [work]. I was still doing all the editing, filming. It was still my money. They gave me a little camera and a laptop that was out of the box. Wasn’t even new. [laughs] And I was still doing this on my off days, but now I had a deadline. And I had to send it to somebody, and they had to review it. And there was a lot of times things were cut out. There was one time an episode wasn’t put up. So, it wasn’t the same. And people saw that, and there were a couple hidden gems in there in the last 50. I’m very proud of a couple of them, especially the last one, the last episode 100, I’m very proud of. But it just wasn’t the same.”
On the ‘lost episode’: “It’s funny, because we just talked about this on the Major Wrestling Figure Podcast. So we will not see the lost episode, and I’ll tell you why. So I was doing something called ‘Where’s Trent.’ Trent Baretta was out injured, good friend of mine. So I would give him like 30 seconds to a minute each show to just be weird. Do his thing, right? And he’d been doing it for a couple weeks. And then he sent me like the finale, which was like 10 minutes, over 10 minutes of just weird stuff. And the big finish of this is him as his alter ego Foil Man, with his head covered in tin fol, taking on Box Man who is John Cena with this giant cardboard box on his head covered in Dolph Ziggler vs. Zack Ryder stickers for this WrestleMania match we never had. It’s this big blow-off. And I uploaded it to WWE, and they said, ‘Uh yeah, we’re not using that. Just make us a new video by this afternoon.’ I’m like, ‘Make — ? What do you think, I’m just taking out my cell phone selfie-style, and that’s how I make these shows?’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s not how it works.’ They’re like, ‘No, we need it today.’ I think at the time the videos had to be three minutes. So I filmed it, I said, ‘Hey, this Zack Ryder, welcome to Z! True Long Island Story,’ I don’t know, ‘Episode 75. WWE rejected the episode and each episode needs to be three minutes, so here you go.’ And I just walked off and it was the set for two minutes and 30 seconds. And that didn’t get put up either. [laughs]”
