The Final Testament faction was originally supposed to feature an MMA-theme.
During a recent edition of the “Insight With Chris Van Vliet” podcast, Kross discussed the group’s origins and his belief that an MMA-style faction wasn’t a good idea.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On the initial notions of building the group: “For quite some time, I had several people in creative tell me there was an idea being entertained of me leading a group. They had a bunch of people they were interested in putting together with us. I had a certain set of people I was interested in bringing in. Maybe at this time, I don’t say who, but one day I will say who. I don’t want it to be taken the wrong way and those people wind up getting disappointed. Someone had mentioned to me that AOP was on the roster with Paul Ellering. I was like, ‘Wait, what? Since when?’ Apparently, they had been there for a while and were looking for the right time to bring them into the fold. I said, ‘Okay, we can try that, for sure.’
“We meet at the Performance Center and start shooting these cryptic vignettes. It was almost like Iron Man 3 with The Mandarin when he had the TVs behind him, Ben Kingsley, ‘They’ll never see me coming.’ These propaganda videos. It was really cool. I loved the set up. Initially, it was supposed to be, the direction we were going in was sort of a militia-cult group. I’ve always been one to try to stay away from reoccurring archetypes. There is nothing wrong with reoccurring archetypes in professional wrestling, films, and movies, they are what they are. I wanted to present something new to people, something fun, with nostalgia callbacks. That’s how it started. We’ve gone in different directions.”
On the group being an MMA-style group: “At one point, they were like, ‘We kind of want you to be a mixed martial arts group.’ I was like, ‘That’s not a good idea.’ When you think about the times we’re being given to work, a mixed martial arts type of wrestler would be good in a 20-30 minute format because you have time to get into the holds. When you put people in holds and you’re doing submissions, it’s a lot of flat time. If the show is moving quickly and you keep the action going, what am I going to do? Put on a kneebar for three seconds? All of us can do that stuff, but we thought leaning more into the character direction rather than that would be a better thing to do. I wish we had 20-30 minutes. I would have walked out to Ken Shamrock’s theme.”
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