Bill Apter On Vince McMahon Creating New Characters For Established Names, Dusty Rhodes’ WWF Run, More

Bill Apter discussed Vince McMahon’s goal to own character gimmicks, Dusty Rhodes’ run in the WWF and more on the latest episode of Wrestling with History on VOC Nation. You can see some highlights from the show below:

On McMahon creating his own characters for wrestlers who came in with established names: “Vince is looking – and this is not in defense of Vince, I know in terms where he wants to take his business. He wants to trademark a Tony Atlas, change him into a character, make merchandise with him on it – he can’t own the Tony Atlas person but he can own Saba Simba. He can own Akeem (instead) of One Man Gang, etc. So his plan moving forward was to create cartoon like characters that he could not only have wrestle, but merchandize as well.”

On Dusty Rhodes’ polka dot gimmick: “With Dusty, as much disrespect as there was in that, that whole polka dot gimmick to him was in that whole cartoon vein of selling merchandise and branding it that way. He didn’t really care about the wrestling fan, he was trying to rebrand wrestling as entertainment.”

On getting ribbed by Wahoo McDaniel on the road: “I used to leave my camera bag in the safety of the dressing room, and I’d come back to the dressing room and my camera bag (was) gone. Everyone was like ‘somebody must have stolen it’. Then I’d go to the next town and Wahoo (McDaniel) just happened to have found it every time we went some place. All the time, all the time.”

On the amount of high spots in modern wrestling: “It’s nothing special anymore now. When you watch wrestling on TV, it used to be that one person per show would do (acrobatics). Now every match, everybody does the dive over the ropes to somebody on the floor. Everybody does the top rope (dive). I remember the first time seeing Pedro Morales or Mil Mascaras jump off the top rope; it was spectacular because I hadn’t seen it on a show before. Now everybody does the same things.”