Professional wrestling Legend featured recently spoke on the creation of Monday Night RAW. The red brand of WWE was created back in 1993. It is considered one of the longest running television show in the history of the United States of America.
In this long history, RAW had a lot of memories that can make any professional wrestling fan emotional. The biggest legends of professional wrestling worked on the red brand of World Wrestling Entertainment. It is currently the prime show of the WWE.
Bruce Prichard Talks The Creation Of RAW
But did Vince McMahon plan it to be such a huge show when he created it? From the first episode of the show, it can never be said if Vince McMahon wanted it to be such a huge phenomenon in the future. In the main event of the show The Undertaker battled against Damien Demento who was never been a huge wrestler in WWE.
With the growing popularity of WWE, they created second brand in 1999 and the that was the blue half of WWE, Smackdown. But the red side of the promotion always remained their Prime show as of now, and it seems like as long as WWE will exist, RAW will always be their No. 1 show.
“Brother Love” Bruce Prichard recently spoke on Something To Wrestle podcast where he spoke on the creation of Monday Night RAW. He said;
“I always laugh about it when I go back to what we were trying to do and what we were trying to do from a budget standpoint. We had Primetime Wrestling on Monday nights where we would bring in a lot of talent as guests and do kind of a panel type television show, and as we looked at it, that was becoming very expensive to pull people off the road in the middle of tours to come in and do this.
“Then you had to put them up in hotels and what have you. Business overall was kind of down. The thought of, do we concentrate on the Northeast and do we maybe build an arena in Stamford and take the warehouse that we had and turn that into an actual studio arena?
“The warehouse was attached to the studio, and that was the thought starter for Monday Night RAW. It evolved into the Manhattan Center and what have you, but it was a way to save money initially to do a live television show.
“Have the tour come through in the Northeast, have talent there, and do a live show. It was more than anything to save money and try to present the product in a different light….this was an opportunity to expose your stars, but we also wanted to give them a little extra and have a little more competitive matches – not to the extent that it would become. However, this was the infancy of trying to do that.”
H/T and transcribed by 411 Mania