Eric Bischoff almost faked his own death on WCW TV nearly a decade before Vince McMahon did the same on WWE TV.
Eric Bischoff was in charge of WCW during its peak popularity in the '90s. The New World Order storyline and the creation of WCW Monday Nitro significantly altered the industry's landscape, a development that has been extensively discussed over the past two decades. During this period, TV ratings were crucial for both WWE and WCW, so many "shock TV" elements were used to boost ratings.
Eric Bischoff revealed on the latest episode of the 83 Weeks podcast that he once wanted to fake his own death for a storyline on WCW but was eventually talked out of it by another executive, Dr. Harvey Schiller.
"I really wanted to fake my own death. I had my own plane at the time. Everybody knew it wasn't unusual for me to go fly to Las Vegas just for a weekend, just to say I did. Fly there, eat a meal, go to bed, get up, fly out the next morning. Get to put that in my logbook. I did that shit all the time," he said. "I thought, 'Man, what if I just made it known I was gonna go fly around the Grand Canyon, maybe southern Arizona, see what the border looks like from the air. Then, somehow, the speculation would be that I must have gotten off course and flown into Mexican airspace. I was no longer being tracked by the FAA, who knows what happened, and then kind of feed the rumor mill enough tidbits that they'll arrive at their own silly shit. Because it's easy to do, it's really, really easy to do. Wow, it's easy. I was going to take advantage of that, and it's like, you know what? If I do the right thing and make sure it travels through the right pipeline, I can plant a story that there's at least a suspicion that Eric Bischoff died in a plane crash while touring the Mexican border. I could have made that believable.
"I ran it by my family, being my wife, we hadn't made up our mind how we were going to tell our kids yet, but I laid it out to my wife. I explained why. I don't know how much she believed it, or thought I would talk myself out of it," he added. "Then I pitched it to Harvey Schiller, and Harvey said no,
and then proceeded to explain why. I got it. I mean, it is what it is. I was an officer with in Turner Broadcasting, a publicly held company if it's revealed that this fake death for wrestling storyline could be interpreted as somehow manipulating public stock, there's exposure there, and the minute you've got any exposure, there's going to be somebody out there willing to sue you at that level when you're playing at that level. So I understood it. I just hated it. If I'd have gotten a green light from Harvey, I would have done it."
In 2007, Vince McMahon staged his own death by having his limo explode at the end of a Monday Night Raw episode. The storyline was cut short because of the double murder-suicide committed by Chris Benoit. However, the angle at least tricked Donald Trump into calling WWE to check on Vince.
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