On a recent episode of his Something to Wrestle podcast, Bruce Prichard discussed WrestleMania V, touching on Hulk Hogan’s request for a time check leading to a major angle on Saturday Night’s Main Event, his preference for booking a heel champion over a face champion, the NBC folks at the time not being great at producing live wrestling (leading to a sloppy Saturday Night’s Main Event production in Milwaukee and a rather hilarious incident), the first instance of WWE doing scripted and staged promos, and much more.
When asked about his preference for booking a heel champion over a face champion, Bruce said that it depended on the situation. He was brought up to always have a heel champion and groom a babyface to face the heel champion, but he got used to the Hogan stuff, which had a different psychology. For this event, Bruce wrote out every promo point for every wrestler, including Randy Savage and Hulk Hogan, and shot all of their promos in one day. This allowed them to reinforce their points with footage and to respond immediately to each other without having to go back and watch the footage again.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
Bruce Prichard on NBC not being good at producing live wrestling: “First of all, it’s live television. Absolutely nothing can go wrong, ever. It was meant to be, damn it. But, when you’re watching this and you have people — look, the NBC folks came in for a post-produced show for Saturday Night’s Main Event. Excellent at what they did, excellent in post-production, excellent putting shows together. I learned an awful lot from them. Also, very good at live, but they weren’t good at live sports entertainment. So, what they thought they knew they would forget because they just assumed — I don’t know man, but it was not the greatest.”
Detailing two rather bizarre instances on Saturday Night’s Main Event in Milwaukee: “Because you know, on top of not keeping Hulk informed of ‘Hey man, you know, we’re coming back from commercial in so many seconds and be working,’ you had sending Beefcake in too soon to go in and get Savage off of Hulk, and then, ‘Well I know what we’ll do. We’ll just take his shirt off of him.’ So, you’ll forget about that guy that was in a shirt five seconds ago.”
“I believe this was in Milwaukee and I had done a Rougeau match, Rougeau versus the Harts as a special referee. I had already worked, but I’m still in my Brother Love stuff and I’m running around with a headset, you know, selling Brother Love gear. And I remember they came around the corner to shoot Hulk, there I am at the end of the hall with my headset on and everything, and about had a conniption fit because they were shooting down the hall. ‘You can’t see Brother Love with a headset, oh my God!’ It was just a little crazy, but this had to be, I think, even looking at the live television we’ve done since then, one of the sloppiest live productions that we ever did. We just let too many other people be involved.”
Bruce Prichard on if he enjoyed booking a heel over a babyface as World Champion: “It depends. I think that that’s how I was brought up was, you always have the heel champion, and you always were grooming the babyface to face the heel champion. So, for me, it was kind of second nature. But, then I kind of gotten used to the Hogan stuff, and it’s a difference in psychology.”
On Savage & Hogan being one of the first instances of scripted promos: “But the beauty of this was, I was able to… we shot all their promos for the entire promotion in one day. If you want to go back and say, ‘What was the first time you really started scripting, writing out promos?’ This may be the best example [of that], at least from my point of view.
Bruce Prichard on how he produced the promos leading up to WrestleMania V: “Because I had every single one written out — not verbatim of what they were going to say, but of every point to hit in each one of these. Randy’s side of it, Hulk’s side of it, Randy’s side of it, Hulk’s side of it, and be able to tell that all the way through. And then be able to go back and show the footage to reinforce it. And sometimes we had the reversal, we had the reverse ISO, the shot from a different angle. So that you see what Randy sees, but then you see from the other side what actually happened. ‘No, Hulk didn’t grab her ass, no man, he picked her up underneath her legs everything was good.’ But, from Randy’s perspective it looks like ‘hey man, he’s going in that son of a b****.’ I think that those were just so important, but I literally had the whole thing laid out for them.”
Prichard on why they did a few weeks’ worth of promos in one day: “I think it was either four or six weeks’ worth of promos that we did one day, and Randy would do his and Hulk would do his and answer right away. So that it was fresh in their head, so you didn’t have to go back and watch them. They sat there and listened to each other and responded immediately.”
