Some more information on Carlito’s current status within WWE has come to light. He and Santino Marella were locked in to win the World Tag Team Titles at one point, yet the decision to bring up Ted Dibiase Jr and have him form a team meant that the plans for the belts changed. Carlito had been assured by Vince McMahon that he was going to be given a bigger push when he decided to stay with WWE at the end of last year and this set him off again. Brian Gerwitz apparently had no plans to push Carlito or think of his long-term future, since with Raw’s ratings falling he has been told to focus more on the established stars on the brand and less on the mid-card. Carlito’s friends urged him to try and get a move to ECW or Smackdown instead. He would of course be a headline act in ECW, yet the brand is slated to start touring with Raw on July and there are a lot of political and logistical issues with that switch. The consensus is that on Smackdown he would at the very least be given a chance to prove himself by Michael Hayes and they are lacking top heels on that brand anyway.
Vince McMahon came up with the Million Dollar Mania idea several weeks ago. The marketing team were told to come up with out-of-the-box publicity ideas for Raw and pitched a live trivia game along the lines of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, hosted by Vince. He then eliminated the trivia aspect to go with the straightforward give-away. The legal department then nixed the idea because of fears that stockholders would have a backlash against them using company money in that way, so Vince decided to just use his own money and press ahead with the plan.
Credit: Wrestling Observer Newsletter, 23 June 2008 (subscribe here)
