On a recent episode of “Something To Wrestle”, Bruce Prichard goes into detail on the WWE making the decision to move towards an edgier product at the end of 1997. Here are the highlights:

On Raw Becoming Two Separate Shows With The Second Hour Having Adult Content:

The haters were going to hate and the people that loved it were going to love it. The real reason why we moved the show to two hours was for the ratings. We’d get two shows with two ratings versus one show where if the second hour was worse it’d bring the rating down. It was an attempt at you’ve got two shows now, it’s better than one. We toned it down an awful lot, it was actually going to be censorship in the first hour of RAW.

On The New Age Outlaws Joining DX:

The beautiful thing was this is around the time The New Age Outlaws were really coming along. It was actually Shawn’s idea to put the New Age Outlaws together and eventually have them become a part of DX but not right away. It was going back to the old way of planting seeds and then taking your time.

On The WWE Not Being Able To Get Away With The Same Content Today:

How many things here could you chalk up as “things you wouldn’t see in 2018?” This show is a laundry list of things, and the times have changed. I was watching [the December 22, 1997 RAW] earlier going, “We wouldn’t do that now,” and “God, I wish we didn’t do that then.

On Raw Being Regionally Edited Due To Differing Content Concerns:

We were a little more concerned with how it would air overseas. If they would take it in parts over the world. We heavily edited a lot of the stuff that went into the Middle East and in South America. You’d get to the UK, and we hardly had to edit out shit. In Canada, sometimes they’d get into a moral high ground, and other times they wouldn’t care. You’d be amazed at some of the things they’d let you air and then they’d [disapprove] of others.

On The WWE Financials Changing In 1997:

Business, everything [was up]. It wasn’t just in house shows or ratings, it was in merchandising. This was the time we started to see all of our stuff in malls and everywhere you looked there was an Austin 3:16 shirt. We were plugging everything, the Chyna Syndrome shirts. Every way that we could to slide these references in, we did.

You can watch the full episode of “Something To Wrestle” below:

Credit: Something To Wrestle. H/T Wrestlezone