WWE Senior Vice President Bruce Prichard recently discussed various topics on an episode of his podcast, “Something to Wrestle With.”
One subject he covered was the company’s choice to unmask WWE Hall of Famer Kane in 2003.
Prichard said, “Well, that was Vince’s idea. The reasoning for it was to allow the character to grow. And you create these characters sometimes, man. You fall in love with them, and you want them to be frozen in time in so many ways. However, as I say often about the same guys talk about, ‘By God, let me tell you what’s wrong with the business today.’ There’s nothing wrong with the business; it’s just different. The business will continue to evolve and grow. Some people will like it. Some people will not. People will pick it apart. There’s something for everybody.”
On growing the gimmick:
“With Kane, Vince wanted to grow that character. It’s like, ‘You know, he’s got facials and the mask hides all that. His face is so expressive. We’re taking half of his emotion away from him in the mask.’ So think about it. We had gone from most of his body was mangled in a fire. And his face was so disfigured that he had to wear this mask and this body suit. He couldn’t talk, he had to have the gimmick [with the micrphone on his neck], to speaking in a regular voice, to all of a sudden wearing a singlet that showed no burns, no scars. All I’m saying is that cosmetic surgery did an incredible job just hiding all those scars and things of that nature.”
On Kane being apprehensive about it:
“So when it came time to take the mask off, it was, ‘Alright. We’re gonna take the mask off.’ I think that Glenn was a little apprehensive about taking the mask off. Because he had an anonymity as Glenn Jacobs. In the Kane mask, he could be Kane, put that mask on. Take that mask off, a lot of people didn’t know who the hell he was. They’d think ‘He’s big son of a bitch. Looks like somebody.’ So Kane was little apprehensive, but willing to do anything.”
On changing Kane’s look:
“Now, somebody might have asked question, ‘Okay, we take the mask off of him. What does he look like?’ ‘What do you mean, what does he look like?’ ‘What does he look like under there?’ Because he’s been wearing a mask to hide something. So we told this story before. I wanted to mangle him up some way, so that the mask was still hiding something that when you took that mask off you went, ‘Oh, that’s hideous. Now I understand why he wore the mask all this time.’ And so that’s why he chopped the hair up a little bit and shaved it, and chopped it all up. And shaved his eyebrows and did all that wonderful stuff. So it was again, it was an evolution of the character Kane, to give him another dimension. So you could see his face. You could see that when he’d scrunch his face up, and you’d see him thinking. And it was scary. And the hair lasted for a couple of weeks, and then kind of got overruled on that one.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
