Eric Bischoff on Giving Sting a Vulture in 1997, How the Segment Went Wrong

– Eric Bischoff discussed the decision to give Sting a vulture for a 1997 segment during his feud with the nWo on the latest 83 Weeks. The vulture appeared after the main event of WCW Clash of the Champions XXXV, when Scott Hall and Randy Savage had just defeated Lex Luger and Diamond Dallas Page. The nWo came into the ring to celebrate before Sting appeared in the balcony with the vulture. A voiceover played and the lights went off; when they came on again, the vulture was on the top rope, supposedly delivering a message.

The segment didn’t play well to a large group of the audience at the time, and Bischoff discussed why it didn’t quite work as well as who came up with the idea. Highlights and the full podcast are below:

On where the idea came from: “I think the vulture — and again, like so many of these ideas, it’s just all of us sitting in a room and, ‘Okay, what can we do next? How do we elevate this story, how do we elevate the character? What can we do that we haven’t done before?’ That was always a big topic of conversation. And I’m not sure, it might have been Ellis Edwards, because Ellis was very much involved in a lot of the stunts and different things.”

On Edwards: “Obviously, you know, the repelling was all Ellis Edwards, all that stuff. Ellis was often a part of those conversations, and I think — because you know, Ellis Edwards, for our listeners who don’t know him. Ellis Edwards came to WCW through Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan had met Ellis Edwards on a number of different movie sets that Hulk had been on, and Ellis was also the stunt coordinator for Thunder in Paradise. So Hulk had a lot of experience with Ellis, that’s how I got to know him. But Ellis had worked also on a lot of other television shows and movie sets. So he had a lot of contacts, and he knew a lot of people.”

On Edwards making the suggestion: “So as we were talking about different ideas that we could do to enhance the Sting Crow-type character, I’m pretty certain that started with Ellis, and he was able to find — he was a vulture wrangler, [laughs] I guess. Oftentimes when you do movies that involve animals, they call the people who coordinate that stuff ‘wranglers.’ So I’m pretty sure it was Ellis Edwards who reached into his bag of tricks and came out with a guy that had a trained vulture and thought it was really cool.”

On working with the vulture: “He brought it to the arena, had the guy bring it to TV the week before, and show us what it could and couldn’t do. And we explained to him what kind of shots we wanted to do, and how we wanted to sue the vulture. So we tested the vulture in different situations, and see how ti would react in different parts of the arena just to figure out what we could do, and what we couldn’t do. So that’s how it all came about, but I thought it was pretty effective. It was pretty cool.”

On the segment being ‘weird’: “Yeah, it was different. No doubt about it. [laughs] It was different. Look, you’ve gotta try different things, you know? Did anybody think that you could build an angle with a guy for over a year without him talking? I mean, if that wouldn’t have worked, everybody would have said ‘Oh, that was just f**king weird. Why would you do that?’ Look, the only people that can consistently find new ways to criticize other people’s work when it comes to creative are people who have never been in creative. It’s really easy to do. It’s simple after the fact to have all the answers and to have all the best ideas. But when you’re building television 52 weeks a year, year after year after year, when you’re constantly in a position of trying to come up with new ideas, new ways of telling stories, new gimmicks, new angles, new this, new that. Some of them are gonna work, some of them aren’t. But I think the dumbest idea is to not try. And you know, for people that like to criticize when a new idea doesn’t work, yeah you could do that. And the alternative is, you watch the same thing over and over and over every week. And that gets pretty boring too. Look, if it didn’t work the way it was originally intended, it didn’t work. It was a high-risk move. You’re bringing a wild animal, in this case a bird, into the ring to perform a stunt. And even though it was a trained bird as we talked about earlier, it was trained to work on movie sets and hadn’t done this type of thing before over and over and over again. The fact that this was live TV. It’s not a movie set, you don’t get a take two or a take three, or a take 20. Which is often the case when you’re working with animals.”

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