Chris Jericho, the former WWE star during the Talk IS Jericho podcast, talked about when and why the writers were hired for promo scripts in WWE.
Chris Jericho reveals the reason of scripted promos
Jericho recalled that promos were not scripted when he had made his debut. He also stated how there were no rehearsals at that point of time.
He said:
“It’s funny because when I got to WWE, my famous first promo with The Rock when I interrupted him, there were no writers at that point. That was late 1999 and no rehearsals either.Rock, and I and [Vince] Russo went over in the back, but there was no going through it. As you know, a few years later, that became the norm, which is part of what my opinion of one of the issues there is everything is so overly scripted and overly processed.”
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The former Intercontinental Champion revealed that the idea of scripted promos was pitched when WWE started airing SmackDown back in 1999. Vince McMahon’s main motive was to compete with ‘Friends’ and thus started recruiting writers.
Jericho said:
“The reason why writers became a thing was when we started SmackDown, which was right after I got there, August ’99, Vince made it his motto that SmackDown was going to be bigger than ‘Friends’. We’re going to beat ‘Friends’ on Thursday, and his reasoning and idea and strategy was well ‘Friends’ has writers, then we need writers too.”
Jericho has been great on mic with his promos, be it a scripted or the unscripted promos.
