AEW’s Jim Ross revealed on this week’s Grilling JR podcast that he’s teaming up with Dwayne Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions for a new series centered around the pro wrestling territories. He explained, “I’m going to be doing some work with Rock’s company coming up soon,” Ross said. “We’re going to go back and look at the territories. I’m not sure of the platform that it’s going to be airing on, but I was really happy to have the opportunity to participate. It will be a nice little gig.ย
I think I’m going to be joined by Jake, Michael Hayes, and Ted DiBiase,” he added (h/t WrestlingNews.co). “We’re going to look at the Mid-South territory first, so it should be fun.”
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Prior to Vince McMahon buying up competition and airing WWF nationwide, the territory system dominated American pro wrestling for decades. Mid-South Wrestling, also known as NWA Tri-State and later the Universal Wrestling Federation, was owned by Jim Crockett Promotions and featured stars like Junkyard Dog, Jim Duggan, Butch Reed, Magnum T.A., Terry Taylor, Steve Williams, Skandor Akbar and Terry Gordy.ย
Young Rock, another series made by Seven Bucks has recreated multiple iconic eras of wrestling while looking back at different portions of Johnson’s childhood. That includes 1983 WWF, the Continental Wrestling Association in 1987 and 1996 WWF. Brian Gewirtz, the executive producer of Young Rock, talked about the fun of recreating classic wrestling shows in an interview with ComicBook prior to Season 2.ย
“It’s so much fun to basically step into a time capsule and every time I’m on set, I just start picturing the Land of a Thousand Dances music video [from] the WWF: The Wrestling Album [from]1985, which I had on vinyl. These guys, the actors themselves, they take such pride in emulating the characters and really doing deep dives and research, reaching out to the real life people when that’s possible. In Season One, they almost universally, not only the actors, but the crew as well became gigantic wrestling fans. It’s hard not to when you’re embodying these characters and on the set every day. And obviously working side by side with Chavo Guerrero, our wrestling coordinator, he’s really best in the world at this as far as putting these scenes together and his work on GLOW and various other projects,” Gewirtz said.
“They start hanging out. It almost was like being in the locker room again, seeing these bonds forming and everything. It’s tough when we shoot in Australia, it’s not like there’s a ton of wrestlers on speed dial that we could bring in. Fortunately Chavo forged some relationships and we were able to bring in some local Australian wrestlers to play local Hawaiian wrestlers or wrestlers in Hawaii and able take bumps and do that sort of thing. Mostly, the actual actors are taking the bumps. Obviously we’re doing it safe on a crash pad and everything else at various angles, but Joe Anderson is learning how to dropkick. He could do a natural kip-up too,” he continued. “Andre the Giant, Matt Willig, he’s slamming people. Kevin Makely is Randy Savage, he’s doing an elbow drop off the top rope… All these guys really, really take pride in it and have become essentially huge fans. That’s always, personally, and I think I’m not alone in this on the Young Rock set, when we shoot the wrestling days, especially with the 80s group and all those people together, it’s always the most fun.
