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Eric Bischoff On What AEW Needs To Do To Make the Young Bucks Fresh Again

October 2, 2024 | Posted by Andrew Ravens
AEW All Out Young Bucks Image Credit: AEW

On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff talked about what to do with The Young Bucks, the state of AEW and more. You can check out some highlights below:

On Tony Khan not knowing how to produce TV: “Yeah, I think that’s the core of the issue. Tony doesn’t understand how to produce television. He’s producing television for Dave Meltzer and Cagematch Wrestling, and worrying about how many minutes of wrestling. What you should really be worrying about is how much emotion per minute are you creating in your show, and how many people come back to watch it again next week. That’s the only thing that freaking matters. You know, how many minutes you’re wrestling, to equate that with somehow a higher quality product? It’s like, you know, Michael Bay deciding he’s going to produce an action film and, ‘We don’t need any stories. We don’t need any plots. We’re just going to have guys chase each other around in cars.’ Nobody knows why they’re chasing each other. ‘We had a really cool car chase. S**t blows up, spent a fortune on all the the special effects. It’s the coolest car chase ever filmed.’ But nobody cares, because nobody knows who’s chasing who or why. But we got more minutes of car chase than any other action film. I mean, it’s just asinine, and I think that’s the core of the issue.”

On what to do with The Young Bucks after the lackluster takeover storyline: “If somebody came to me today and put a gun to my head and said, ‘Come up with a solution.’ The only thing that I could think of without having to take a bullet would be to get them off TV for about six months. Let the audience forget about this garbage, because that’s what it’s been. Their storylines, the use of their characters has been nothing but pure garbage for quite some time. And you can’t just go from garbage one week to over the next.

“I would take them off TV for six months. I’d sit down and really think through their characters. I would keep them babyfaces, because they’re never going to be heels. They just can’t be heels effectively. Bring them back as babyfaces, but you gotta give them a rest. You’ve been cramming them down everybody’s throats, and they’ve been gagging on them now for quite a while. This audience is dead. They do not care — not only about the Bucks, they don’t care about Ospreay and the other cat either. There’s nobody in that ring right now that’s over.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.