Hulk Hogan did an interview on August 19 to promote his daughter Brooke and had some interesting comments. The interview is now available and here are some of the more interesting tidbits from Hogan:
About whether working wrestling was worth it, he said, “Yes, because my family’s secure. But it’s tough. I’ve got a degree in finance and management and I do marketing merchandising that sort of stuff, that’s what I do. I produce TV with the Baywatch guys, do a lot of stuff like that.”
When taking about how the business has been affected, “Oh, definitely. There’s too many choices now. It’s a bad Jerry Springer show now, brother. The art form is lost. Like when I would start a fight with you. If this was like November and I would start a fight with you, we’d start in November and maybe wrestle in March. Now you turn on the show at 8:00 and I’ll start a fight with you. We fight by the end of the show. TV moves so fast trying to keep up with the Joneses because there’s so many choices with Satellite and also the reality shows. People surf so much that they’re afraid to lose the quarter hour. They live by the numbers. If you have a bad quarter hour there’s all kinds of meetings, people panicking. They don’t let things ride. People are job scared. It’s a whole different business now. I think that if you really gave them something with some meat on the bones and really got back to the art form of creating emotion and good vs. evil. It’s real easy stuff. It’s the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. And they’re just over-thinking things.”
About the Divas he said, “Nothing against the women, but if you use them that way, they don’t draw a number. People have to be able to live vicariously through the characters and they have to like the characters and like the people. There’s a way to establish characters and keep interest and create emotion and draw money. Like I said, it’s an art form so you have to get back to the basics.”
When asked about his future, “I’m getting ready to do a VH-1 show on a consistent basis with my family. Fox and ABC have pitched shows to do a reality wrestling show. And I was like ‘How in the hell do you do a reality wrestling show?’ And basically the premise of starting out in minor league wrestling doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Basically, they approached me with Hulk Hogan with one foot in the glue factory. All of a sudden, he takes his foot out and saves the art form. Because of some of the guys who want to work for me that used to work for me when I ran Turner’s company like Goldberg, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and Sting want to work for me. The whole thing is that everyone knows that the WWF means wrestling but so does one name: Hulk Hogan. And the public opinion is to start my own thing like the past is now the future type deal. That with Goldberg and Sting and Stone Cold and Nash, we could probably take over pretty easily. I’m thinking about it. We may go back to the old days again for a while.”
The entire interview can be read here.
Credit: Dave Scherer, PWInsider.com
