Eric Bischoff On Why WCW Wanted To Create Mystery With Crow Sting Storyline, How Mystery Sparked nWo’s Success

In a recent edition of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff discussed why WCW wanted to create mystery with Crow Sting storyline, how mystery sparked nWo’s success, and much more. You can read his comments below.

Eric Bischoff on Sting’s character change to The Crow and why WCW wanted to create more mystery: “Going back to the Sting character, the reason that the Sting character had gone dark, became the Crow, became that moody and mysterious character, is because things had been said about Sting to question his loyalty in the weeks previous to him emerging as this Crow character. That was the catalyst, that was what launched the Sting character. People who were friends of his, who were his peers in WCW, were beginning to question Sting’s loyalty. We wanted to build on that, and we wanted Sting to be this autonomous character where you were really sure whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. The mystery is what drove the Sting story for a long time until it became clear, and it took a while to get there – I don’t know how many months it took before Sting revealed that he really was anti-nWo. But for a period of time, he was the prototype tweener if there ever was one. He may have created the tweener concept at that point because you weren’t sure. That’s what I wanted, that’s what Sting wanted, and that’s what we needed. We needed a mystery within WCW.

On the company needing more mystery elements and how it was essential to the nWo’s success: “You quoted Dusty Rhodes saying wrestling needed to be like a circus – I’ve said something similar about wrestling needing to be a buffet. Whatever it is, there needs to be enough variety in the way you present the product that you’re appealing to the broadest possible audience you can, and one of the elements we were missing was mystery. Now, where did I come up with the idea of creating a mystery? Because who’s the third man worked so fucking well. Who is the third man was one of many reasons why the nWo worked as well as it did because unlike previous producers, promoters, bookers – where you advertise everything and you promote everything in advance and you foreshadow and let the audience know because you don’t want to take the chance of somebody not tuning in or just because it’s the way it’s always been done – the nWo third man mystery was one of the reasons that the nWo concept took off as hard and fast as it did. It didn’t grow into what it became, it exploded into what it became in large part because of the who’s the third man mystery. So, the Sting character was another way of creating that mystery and that doubt and that intrigue. Who’s side is he going to be on? That was the premise for a long time.”

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