Young Rock‘s latest episode, titled “In The Dark,” takes the show back to the 1987 time period when Johnson was 15-year-old and living in Nashville. At the time, Johnson’s father Rocky Johnson was wrestling for the Continental Wrestling Association down in Memphis and the episode cuts back to Rocky wrestling in the promotion multiple times. The flashbacks begin with Johnson facing Jeff Jarrett and winning with a diving clothesline, then cuts to later when Johnson is taking on Crusher Yurkov — better known today as Bam Bam Bam Bigelow.
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Jerry Lawler is shown at the commentary table and interviewing wrestlers (he makes a joke about “the clap” going around) while Downtown Bruno (Harvey Wippleman) manages both Jarrett and Bigelow. According to Cagematch, neither match actually took place, though Johnson would wrestle for the CWA numerous times throughout 1987.
Brian Gewirtz, a former head writer for the WWE and an executive producer for Young Rock, spoke with ComicBook recently and talked about how much fun it has been recreating classic wrestling promotions. The 1983 and ’87 time periods have both featured matches, while the ’96 era will feature Rock’s rookie year in the WWF.
“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,” Gewirtz said. “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.
“They start hanging out,” he continued. “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. 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.”
Photo by Mark Taylor/NBC
