WWE Hall of Famer JBL appeared on an episode of “Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard,” where he discussed various topics, including whether he watches WWE: Unreal.
JBL said, “Just clips of it. Haven’t seen whole shows, but I haven’t seen whole shows of it any year. I watch a lot of the clips, and I’m able to keep up with stuff that way. It’s not that I don’t support it. No, I’m not a fan of the program. I don’t like it at all.”
On why he’s not a fan of WWE: Unreal and where he sees things differently from AJ Styles:
“The show apparently is really good from an entertainment perspective. I mean, really good. So as far as that, look, they’ve hit a home run. As far as the content — I like AJ, and I don’t want to disagree with AJ, but I think I disagree with the fans deserving it or not. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think fans should get it, and the reason is because I think it spoils things, and it spoils your stars.”
On why he thinks it hurts the business:
“Conrad, I love baseball. I want to go see Barry Bonds back when he was in his prime, because I can’t hit 70 home runs. I couldn’t hit seven. I couldn’t hit point seven. I want to see guys do stuff that I can’t do. I want to see Aaron Judge hit a ball 500 feet. I want to see Skenes throw a 100-mile-an-hour fastball. I can’t do that. And in wrestling, if you start pulling the curtain back and everybody’s like, oh, they’re just one of us — one of us don’t draw money. Brock Lesnar draws money. AJ Styles draws money. I just think when you’re doing this, it hurts the business. You want guys to be stars. You don’t want guys to realize, hey, the whole thing is manipulated.”
On not wanting to be the old guy shouting at the product:
“Look, we know what’s work, and I don’t want to be one of these old guys who’s against everything, so I’ve reserved judgment for it, because something’s working. I was just in Minneapolis. They talk about ticket sales or whatever — they’re putting what, 40,000 people back-to-back nights? That was unheard of during my day, to do stuff like that. So they’re doing something right. But I disagree with Unreal. I don’t think the content out there is something that should be out there. Just because it’s good content as far as entertainment, I’m not sure that you should put it out there.”
On the magic trick analogy:
“I don’t want to know that the dragon on Game of Thrones is CGI or whatever the hell it is. I know it is. I know it’s not real. I don’t want to know how it works. I don’t want to know how the elephant appears. When Siegfried and Roy were doing their stuff in Vegas, I went to see their show a couple of times. I asked our guy Magic — he used to work behind the scenes in WWE, because he was part of that fraternity with Copperfield and all those guys — I said, how did they do the elephant? He goes, two elephants. I go, ah, shit. It just ruined it for me. Now I don’t want to see it, because I know how it works. To me, that’s human nature. So that’s the problem I have with Unreal.”
You can check out the complete podcast below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
