Santino Marella recently spoke with The Ten Count for an interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Marella spoke about the original plans for his Intercontinental Championship reign, the Santina character was only supposed to be for one night, and more. Here are the highlights:
The original plans for his Intercontinental Championship reign:
“Originally, we were gonna go like, I think the idea was to go right up to the record and then lose it like a day before. But you know, plans changed and we dropped the title somewhere on a European tour and that was it.”
The crowd reaction to him almost winning some of the bigger matches on PPV:
“Every time something like that happened where I knew we were gonna come close, I just looked at it like, Okay, this is gonna be cool. In hindsight, you always, especially the Elimination Chamber, you look back and like, damn, that was something special that night. People still talk about that to this day where it was one of the biggest mistakes in terms of writing that the WWE ever made, you know, one thing they should have allowed to happen to satisfy the crowd.”
When I talked to people that were there for the Royal Rumble, and they were like, ‘Man, we thought you’re gonna win and we were cool with it. We were good.’ But like, Okay, thank you. Santino is going to be in the main event of Mania. I’m good with that. That means a lot to me that fans were cool, or just it made sense at the time, that this was the direction they were going to go. People love Santino. There’s something romantic about, you know, always coming so close and never really getting that complete full satisfaction of getting what they want, and so it always leaves the door open for that, whatever miracle return, you know, or something, right? Just can hopefully one day finally satisfy that itch.”
Pitching a sitcom to Vince McMahon:
“I pitched a sitcom. I think it was one episode. So I wrote it and it was Beth Phoenix and I and it was called, ‘Somebody loves Santino.’ It was basically Beth Phoenix, like, our home life. I got some of the guys from the Online to do some editing and I added some canned laughter. I waited around one night after RAW outside Vince’s office and I gave him the CD. I said, ‘Hey, this is an idea I had’, and he watched it. He said, ‘Yea, we’re going to do it.’ He assigned a writer to do a real pilot for three episodes. but there was this, like, what do you call it, like, a tragedy of errors or whatever that, like, the writer got Lyme disease. Then the writer broke his hip. Then the writer’s father died, and you know, this guy’s trying to put together three funny episodes.One episode was funny, A couple episodes were funny. One was horrible. When we put it together, the WWE, kind of, you know, a little bit higher budget pilots, they weren’t funny, and it was like, ‘Yeah, we’re not doing it.'”
“The original one that I did, I thought was better. So we had a little bit of a difference of opinion, Brian Gewirtz and I. He wanted to do a little bit of like a Curb Your Enthusiasm type camerawork. I wanted pure Disney, canned laughter, that standard sitcom backdrop with the stairs on an angle. I wanted it to be for kids. He wanted it to be, I guess, you know, for a little bit of an older audience, but it really never got going.”
The Santina character only meaning to be for one night:
“Santina was supposed to be one night only, and it was just so funny. Like, you know, people that were in gorilla, like Vince was pissing his pants It was so funny and so she stuck around for a few months.”
You can watch the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
