Bruce Prichard Recalls Vader As A Shell Of Himself in WWE, Changing Raw’s Approach After WrestleMania 13

On a recent episode of Something To Wrestle, Bruce Prichard discussed In Your House: Revenge of Taker. Bruce talked about changing RAW’s approach after WrestleMania 13, the importance of Bret Hart’s promo to form the Hart Foundation, and Vader not being the same wrestler in WWF compared to earlier in his career. Some highlights are below.
On changing the approach to RAW following WrestleMania 13: “Well, I think we had changed the approach to RAW prior to that. May have been a new opening and everything, but it had already been changed. We had already started to make it a little bit edgier of a product and now you’re all in and it was after WrestleMania, as I said, which is kind of a new beginning for everything. So, it looks like alright ‘hey there’s a new open, there’s a new feel, there’s an energy overall and especially, you know, we’re around the Chicago area which has always been a great market for us and I just think things were hot in that regard.”

On the importance of Bret Hart’s promo to form the Hart Foundation: “Well, I think that it helped allow Bret the opportunity to express why he felt the way he felt. There’s nothing that Bret said that wasn’t true. Everything Bret said was true. I think people look at our country a lot of times that’s what they see. You look at it you go ‘wait a minute. When did we become a country that we can bash our president. When did we become a country that we were no longer patriotic and we didn’t get behind what the country was about at the time and the country had lost its way. So, I think that Bret could pick on that and look at that and point out things where you celebrate a man like Charles Manson who got people to murder innocent people for no reason other than to murder the. You have people like O.J. Simpson that you’re fascinated with for the reason that he allegedly killed his wife and you make him a hero. You put him on a pedestal. Then you have a guy like Stone Cold Steve Austin, he’s putting Steve Austin in that same category, and the audience is like ‘no man, that’s no, Steve stands up for himself. Steve’s the guy that is a badass who didn’t quit, by the way Bret. That kind of s***, and there were just nuggets of truth all throughout Bret’s promo that made people think about it and get angry about it. Because, they sat there and said ‘Well, yeah I tuned in to see what’s happening with the OJ trial. Yeah, I tuned in to see what’s happening with things that are atrocious going on in our country and that was the intriguing time where the negative was the celebrity of it all, and we were making celebrity of just really horrible people in our culture and in our time.”

On if Vader was considered for the main event spot with Undertaker: “Look at Vader. This was also during the time that Vader had put on an awful lot of weight. People romanticize about Vader when he was in Japan would just go in and beat people up. I don’t think anybody ever accused Vader of being a great worker. He was a bully that liked to beat people up. They let him get away with it, but you go back and look at his Japan stuff that’s what he did. By the time he got to WWE he was a shell of that guy, of that character. From the time that the incident with Paul Orndorff happened in WCW and Vader left. Orndroff allegedly kicked his ass in flip-flops. Vader was not the Leon White, the confidence of Leon White and all of that ship had sailed. In many ways I think we got damaged goods in that regard. Because, you didn’t get the guy that you had seen for years. No, you got a guy that got his ass whooped in the shower by somebody in flip-flops. It’s no shame to get your ass whooped by Paul Orndorff, okay? But, I think when you’re supposed to be the tough guy and the bully, yeah, I think there was shame in that for him.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Something to Wrestle with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.