During the Strictly Business podcast on AdFreeShows.com, Eric Bischoff, who has been an outspoken critic of AEW in recent months, discussed the company’s production. The following is what Bischoff said:
“One of the things I like much better about AEWs production than WWE’s is that I actually feel like I’m in the arena. It’s not so pretty [compared to WWE] and it’s almost artificial when it’s done so well that I just feel like I’m in the arena. I can almost smell the popcorn. For me, that’s the part that I miss, that I enjoy the most, the experience. I really want to almost smell the popcorn, that stale beer that somebody spilled the night before because that’s what brings me back to what made me fall in love with professional wrestling.”
“The cleaner it gets, the more distance I feel from it and the less my experience becomes. When you create that totally artificial environment and there’s a lot of reasons why that might be a great idea, I will tell you, for me as an individual, they lost me at that point. There’s no way I’m going to spend two minutes of my life [watching] because I’m not getting anything out of it. [It’s] one of the reasons why I love professional wrestling, and we all have different reasons why we love it, why we’re attracted to it in the first place. It’s different for everybody. For me, personally, the minute they do that, I’m out, completely out.”
