While the comparisons between All Elite Wrestling and WCW have been around since the company first landed Dynamite on TNT, other fans have started making comparisons between the Jacksonville-based company and TNA, now known as Impact Wrestling. The comparison centers around TNA’s love of signing older wrestlers and placing them high on the card rather than promising young talent, and its only aided by the fact that Sting and Christian Cage — who both held world championships in TNA — have both signed with the company in the last four months.
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But Eric Bischoff, who worked as TNA’s executive producer in the early 2010s, finds this comparison to be utterly ridiculous.
“That’s so stupid, it’s so ignorant. I don’t meant that as a derisive term, I mean that in the literal sense of the word,” Bischoff told Chris Van Vliet earlier this week. “People who say those things have no real first-hand knowledge or experience. They have theoretical knowledge based on their fandom and their tangential knowledge because they watch about it, talk about it, and in some cases write about it. But they don’t really know what they are talking about.
“I think what AEW is doing is by no means ground-breaking. They’re not inventing an idea heere, but they are smart,” he continued. “Bringing in former WWE talent with international brand equity, facial recognition and a fan base, what is wrong with that? That’s silly. Now, if you have to rely solely on that I can see the argument. If AEW is bringing in legends — Sting for example, Tully Blanchard, Arn Anderson… these are all people that still have a presence on camera. Are they old? Hell yeah, there’s as old as I am. But they have value. The wrestling audience is not one demo… it’s much broader that that. It’s also family viewing. If people today understood the challenge of building a television product in primetime on a large cable outlet like TNT or USA, you have to appeal to a wide variety of people. You can’t just focus on one demo. You can’t just bring in a bunch of young, fresh talent. Everybody goes, ‘oh, young, fresh talent!’ Well these are young, fresh talent that nobody knows or cares about.”
Do you agree with Bischoff? Or are the AEW/TNA comparisons starting to get more accurate? Let us know in the comments below!
