Eric Bischoff On KISS Performing On WCW Nitro, Original Plans For New Year’s Evil PPV With KISS Concert

In a recent edition of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff discussed KISS performing on WCW Nitro in 1999, the original plans for a joint pay-per-view and KISS concert, and much more. You can read Eric Bischoff’s comments below.

Eric Bischoff on WCW bringing in KISS for Nitro in 1999: “Another example of expanding and growing the audience rather than serving the audience. There’s no way I would remember just how well KISS merchandise was selling at the time, but it was a very successful line of merchandise. KISS was huge. They were huge all over the world. For anybody to not see the value of creating an architecture that would allow a merger of the KISS world and wrestling world, it seemed like a no-brainer to me. Now granted there were gonna be some hardcore wrestling fans and dirt sheet readers who were gonna be like, ‘They’re bringing in more celebrities, what does KISS have to do with wrestling? This is bullshit.’ But just from a business perspective, it made a lot sense, and it had a lot of potential. Look, it got the plug pulled on it – AOL Time Warner pulled the plug on it.

On the proposed New Year’s Evil pay-per-view idea on New Day’s Day in 2000: “Context is king, and if you go back and look at the headlines in November or December of ’99, people were actually afraid to leave their homes. Businesses were trying to come up with plans on what was going to happen when the millennial changed – the internet was gonna crash, television stations were gonna go down. I thought it was a great opportunity to take advantage of all that fear and paranoia and be the only ones out there celebrating and exploiting all of that. It would’ve worked. We were coordinating ways for us to put on our pay-per-view, which was essentially gonna open with a KISS song on one end of the football field and go right back to the other end zone area where we’d have a wrestling ring set up. When the match is over, back to the KISS concert, then back to the ring. It would’ve been a phenomenal event and done a tremendous amount to promote that line of merchandise and the branding of it, along with the KISS army characters that were gonna be part of our regular roster. It would’ve been a phenomenal opportunity, but Harvey [Schiller] pulled the plug. People in WCW were so afraid. One, they were afraid and didn’t know what was gonna happen when the clocks turned. And then the other part was, nobody wanted to work over the holiday weekend. That’s the truth, and that’s why the plug got pulled.”

On how much money WCW spent on KISS on Nitro: “I know exactly what it was – $250,000. You’d call that an investment. It was an investment into a much larger business plan. Any business plan that is going to be successful requires an investment. It was an investment into a line of merchandise and long-term plan that we were convinced would’ve had a great return on investment over the course of a year or two. It was nothing more than an investment.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.