BONUS The Friday Show - Shining Light on the Dark Side
Guest:This wrestler picked me up, turned me upside down, and he definitely put a hole.
Guest:He was putting some extra weight into it.
Guest:I didn't know how to take a bump.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:And he slammed the shit out of me.
Guest:And I remember laying there in the ring, staring up at the lights, and every single freaking bump I'd ever seen in my entire life in wrestling was instantaneously recontextualized.
Guest:I'm just thinking about...
Guest:suplexes and hip tosses.
Guest:I'm just thinking about the most mundane shit in wrestling and thinking like, I can't fucking believe these guys do this.
Marc:So, Chris.
Marc:Brendan, it's Friday.
Marc:You ain't got no job and you ain't got shit to do.
Marc:How many Fridays have you been waiting to do that?
Marc:Well, it was the Ice Cube episode.
Marc:I'm like, why haven't we been saying this all the time?
Guest:I get you.
Guest:I get you.
Guest:Have you gone for a walk yet today?
Guest:I know you go for a lot of walks.
Guest:I sure did.
Guest:Did you make the same mistake as our friend Mark to go for a walk by yourself and then go on top of a mountain and to take a bunch of deep squats and hold your breath while you're doing it?
Marc:I just listened to that on my walk, actually.
Marc:First of all, as a Swifty myself, Folklore is great.
Marc:I'm glad he didn't like it for some reason.
Marc:Midnight's also great.
Marc:There's another album that she did during the pandemic that's also a banner.
Guest:What's the name of that?
Guest:Evan?
Guest:Is that the one I'm thinking of?
Marc:No, there was Folklore, and then there was, hang on, let's see.
Guest:I want to say Even Flow, even though I know that's not what it is.
Marc:That would be great if it was Even Flow.
Marc:Evermore.
Marc:Evermore, there we go.
Marc:Yeah, Evermore.
Marc:Great albums.
Marc:Even Flow.
Marc:So Mark's finally listening to Taylor Swift.
Marc:And I got to say, if you were to ask me and no one would ask me because I'm just a guy, but Taylor Swift is who I would want Mark to interview.
Marc:Like that's on my wish list.
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:Because she's so interesting and her music is so, like she's the author of all her music and he's a musician.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I feel like it would just work.
Guest:I watched that documentary about her, which I quite liked.
Guest:I liked the documentary, Miss Americana, I think it was called.
Guest:I came away thinking she probably wouldn't be a great interview.
Marc:I mean, what, just because she wouldn't let herself guard down?
Guest:I bet you she'd be a great interview in 20 years.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Like, I think right now she is just at a point where she's figuring out how to take control of her life and not be someone's puppet.
Guest:And that's happening now and has been probably for the last five, six years or whatever.
Guest:But I'd give her a little more time.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But I'm not going to turn it down if it happens.
Guest:True.
Guest:Hey, would you like to talk to Barack Obama?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Maybe give him a few more years.
Guest:Let it simmer down.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Here, the largest global pop star would like to be on your podcast.
Guest:Hmm.
Guest:I'm not so sure about that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So as as someone who actively hikes, I got a got a just some suggestions for Mark.
Marc:Maybe don't do stretches at the top of a cliff.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Just just what are we doing here?
Guest:I mean, I wasn't the one to say I'm glad other people said it.
Guest:But like the idea of him going up there alone all the time, too.
Guest:It's just like.
Guest:Hey, guy, you know, you don't have to have a buddy, but maybe don't go all the way to the top.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:I mean, they call it men of a certain age.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:We are fast approaching the men of a certain age, you know?
Guest:We're going to get in so much trouble when he listens to this.
Marc:Oh, wait.
Marc:No, never happens.
Guest:Well, speaking of stuff we talked about, Mark and I, we were doing that bonus episode, which I think you also listened to about the 10 episodes from our early days, the comics.
Guest:That was probably stuff that you remembered well, right?
Guest:You were knee deep with us back then.
Marc:I mean, absolutely.
Marc:I don't know if I was knee deep.
Marc:I was a listener and a friend.
Guest:Yeah, we had you on even on one of those early episodes, I think.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah, that was a weird episode.
Marc:I think you guys, we were talking about Mad Men.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Remember Mad Men?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You guys were still figuring it out.
Marc:But yeah, that boat, man.
Marc:I laughed.
Marc:I was laughing in my backyard, in my hammock.
Marc:And my wife just is like, you know, is looking through the window.
Marc:It's like, what are you laughing hysterically at?
Guest:What were you laughing hysterically at?
Marc:It's Andy Murphy, Mark making Andy Murphy laugh.
Guest:So satisfying.
Marc:kills me every time it's so good because it's it's it's you're right it's not his typical laugh it's this deeper laugh yeah you know it's it came from the gullet yeah oh man and and just like mark was saying it's like that was the entryway and that's how i felt listening i was like oh and you know at the time i was like oh i don't know is he gonna be able to
Marc:to get in, you know, to Eddie Murphy, you know, like an X-Wing with the Death Star, and he fucking nailed it, you know, right there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right in the exhaust port, Eddie's exhaust port.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:I loved, my favorite thing about that Eddie interview, and it made me realize something about him, was that his memory is so crisp.
Guest:And he could remember chapter and verse, comedy clubs he played at in Long Island and the comics who were on ahead of him.
Guest:And I realized there are certain people like that that have these...
Guest:photographic memories they remember everything and i find them all to be pretty exceptional people like lebron james is like that like you could ask him hey remember that game five years ago against whatever team do you remember what happened and he'll start it's like a parlor trick he'll start saying yeah we did this we had this formation then this guy went here this guy went he remembers everything and i think that's like part of just like
Guest:These amazingly talented people, they can do that.
Guest:And Eddie was totally that.
Guest:He remembered everything, everything they talked about.
Guest:There wasn't a single thing where he was like, hmm, I'm not so sure.
Guest:Like, if he ever pulls that with you, you know he's lying because he remembers everything.
Marc:Was there any editing you had to do for that?
Marc:Like, were there any tangents that just, you know, didn't really flow?
Guest:I don't think so because we had a limited amount of time with him.
Guest:So we tried to maximize everything we had.
Guest:Of course, when we did interviews on Zoom like that, there was more editing just from a technical standpoint.
Guest:You know, there's things that happen on Zoom conversations that...
Guest:aren't great you know when people overlap and then they have to go like no no you yeah you go ahead no okay no no yeah you you know whatever so it was more cutting little things like that out but no i there was nothing that had to get cut and and left out of the episode gotcha i also loved your uh mark saying yeah yeah one of these days we'll do an episode of all the stuff that we that we were asked to cut out and your response yeah the betrayal of trust episode
Guest:Oh, by the way, speaking of that, I want to clarify something because I did see some people asking after after we mentioned the thing about the Sam Elliott episode and how his publicist won't put her clients on our show now.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Which boggled my mind because Mark was commenting how how who's the one for air?
Guest:The Viola Davis.
Marc:Yeah, Viola Davis, just brilliant in air and obviously everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're really never going to have her on?
Guest:Unless she changes her publicist.
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:Unless this publicist somehow feels like, you know, she wants her client to be on.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:All I know is this.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Maybe we were a little too vague in describing it.
Guest:I'm going to tell you exactly what the deal is with that.
Guest:Please do.
Guest:So Sam Elliott was on WTF.
Guest:He had a very fun conversation with Mark.
Guest:I think that's a fun episode.
Guest:They get to about the last 10 minutes of the episode.
Guest:They're just talking about various things.
Guest:And Mark says to him, did you see Power of the Dog?
Guest:Wanting to just talk about it like a movie with a guy who plays cowboys a lot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Thinking that the guy will say, you know, yeah, it's good or whatever.
Guest:I think Mark had just talked with Benedict Cumberbatch.
Guest:Like, he was into the movie.
Guest:And so he says that.
Guest:And Sam Elliott says, yeah, I saw that piece of shit.
Guest:And then he goes on a rant about how he hated it and he didn't like all these, like, guys prancing around and he didn't...
Guest:It sounded homophobic.
Guest:Do I think he really was?
Guest:No.
Guest:It just wasn't articulated well, what he was trying to say.
Guest:I think what he generally was angry at was that some review, I believe it was a Manola Dargis review of the movie, was blurbed in a print ad that said, this is Jane Campion's deconstruction of the American West or something like that.
Guest:Demystifying of the American West.
Guest:And he took offense to that as a concept.
Guest:Like, you've got to demystify the American West.
Guest:But he was treating it as though that was like the thesis of the movie.
Guest:It was a critic's term that got put onto a blurb, right?
Guest:It's like Dr. Marin says, there's real shoot-em-up in Rwanda or whatever.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Guest:And so he goes on this rant, and go back and listen to it.
Guest:Mark tries a couple of times to be like, well, yeah, I guess that's just, like, the interpretation of the movie, right?
Guest:And he's, like, just trying to, like, skirt away from it.
Guest:And then, no, Sam Elliott, like, he...
Guest:Leans in on it again.
Guest:And whatever.
Guest:They end it.
Guest:Mark says, I guess you didn't like that movie.
Guest:It really wound you up or something.
Guest:End of story.
Guest:Now, we released that episode on Monday.
Guest:I don't think anything happened with it until Tuesday, Wednesday, sometime later that week.
Guest:You want to know why?
Guest:Because we don't do a damn thing with the episode.
Guest:We never, ever, like...
Guest:excerpt clips and put them out there or send things to publicists or send things to the press.
Guest:Hey, you might want to write up something about this.
Guest:That's not what we do.
Guest:But I did say to Mark when that aired, I said, I bet this causes a problem.
Guest:I just knew it.
Guest:I knew it would get it would turn into clickbait.
Guest:And it did.
Guest:And
Guest:All of a sudden, all this heat came down on Sam Elliott.
Guest:They asked everybody about it.
Guest:They were asking Jane Campion, because it was in the heart of awards season.
Guest:So they were asking people on the red carpet.
Guest:I was afraid they were going to make jokes about it at the Oscars.
Guest:I was like, oh, fuck.
Oh, no.
Guest:And anyway, in any event, Sam Elliott eventually winds up apologizing for it.
Guest:And in his comments and his apologies, he essentially blames Mark, right?
Guest:He says, well, I guess next time I go on a podcast with the name WTF, I should know what I'm getting into.
Guest:And it's like...
Guest:Dude, nothing.
Guest:We didn't do anything to you.
Guest:But then, now, we didn't get anything back to us.
Guest:Nobody said anything to us.
Guest:But then all of a sudden, Samuel L. Jackson, who was a guest we had been looking to get for a long time over multiple projects, and the publicist was always trying to work with his schedule to make it happen, all of a sudden was very quickly unplugged.
Guest:Nope, this isn't going to happen.
Guest:And our bookers said, well, that's weird.
Guest:We don't usually get such a quick no for that.
Guest:And they went back and checked and the publicist was like, yeah, it's not going to happen.
Guest:And, you know, it's like one of these unspoken things.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:She's not going to outright say...
Guest:It's because of the Sam thing.
Guest:But the fact that then her other clients that she has not being booked on the show, that's what it is.
Guest:And look, what bullshit.
Guest:I can't I can't do anything about that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And neither can Mark and neither can anybody.
Guest:And it's like if that's if that publicist was embarrassed by what her client said on our show, I.
Guest:I would advise her to take that up with her client.
Guest:But if she thinks the best way to avoid that kind of thing happening in the future is to not have her clients do our show, nothing I can do about that.
Guest:But I just want to address that for people who were questioning, oh, were we told not to air it?
Guest:Did we get in some kind of fight?
Guest:No, nothing.
Guest:Not a thing.
No.
Marc:They didn't ask you like, hey, that stuff, you know, with the power of the dog, maybe don't air that.
Marc:They didn't say anything.
Marc:Do you know why?
Guest:Because that guy left the garage that day and never thought of it for one second.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Like he didn't go tell his publicist, hey, I said some shit that's going to get me in trouble.
Guest:He didn't think he said anything wrong.
Guest:That's disappointing.
Guest:Yeah, well, that's the game.
Guest:That's the world we're in when we're trying to do this show.
Guest:And it's why it's annoying when our show gets, you know, clipped out and turned into some kind of fodder like that.
Guest:It almost...
Guest:I wish people would understand this.
Guest:It only hurts.
Guest:Like, everybody always thinks, oh, that must be good press.
Guest:No, it hurts.
Guest:I don't think it's crazy that the show might grow a reputation and get too much heat on it after a while that makes people less likely to do the show, you know?
Guest:So it's always something I'm conscious of.
Marc:Did Obama's people get back to you and be like, hey, did you guys make Barack Obama say the N-word?
Guest:I will say this.
Guest:Here's a little backstage of this.
Guest:I've never talked about this before.
Guest:So the whole thing with that was, you know, we had final cut on that episode.
Guest:They couldn't tell us you have to take anything out.
Guest:Like that was part of pre-agreement.
Guest:We're just going to record this.
Guest:We can put it out as, you know, as is.
Guest:There's nothing that they could do to influence the questions we asked or to influence the final product.
Guest:However, we did give them quote approval on stuff for the press, right?
Guest:Because obviously, right, this was a rare episode which we had a PR firm working on and make sure that, you know, the press releases went out announcing that it was going to happen.
Guest:And, you know, we had to kind of have a pretty tight ship on it.
Guest:And so because of that, we said to the White House, because we wanted their cooperation, right?
Guest:We wanted them to promote it as much as us.
Guest:And they did.
Guest:They like promoted it from the briefing room in the White House.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:And so we sent them quotes and I, you know, things that we wanted to use.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and i knew they would never approve that one but i sent it anyway like it was like it was like it was like maybe an off chance that like they were like you know a bomb went off somewhere and they didn't look at my thing oh yeah just tell that kid you know mcdonald approved the thing and i had that quote and get out there but no of course not only did they not approve it i got a phone call to explain it
Guest:Like, it wasn't just like a return email.
Guest:Like, yes, no, no, yes.
Guest:It was like, ring.
Guest:Look at my phone.
Guest:Oh, the White House.
Guest:I guess I should answer that one.
Guest:And they're like, yeah, that one, no go on that one.
Guest:That one needs to be in context.
Guest:But why?
Yeah.
Guest:Uh, so yeah, I mean, again, to be fair, I knew it wasn't going to get approved, but I, it was like, I would have been derelict to not, uh, not try.
Marc:I mean, you gotta ask what's the worst they could say.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Uh, what's the worst they could say?
Marc:No more presidents for you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I will say, listen to the bonus contest.
Marc:Your show, have you guys ever done a clip show?
Marc:Like the Simpsons do a clip show?
Guest:I guess the closest thing was when we did our book.
Guest:We did a chapter of the book as clips.
Marc:It was fun listening to you and Mark reminisce and hearing Jason Sudeikis' bit.
Marc:It's just fun to reminisce about stuff.
Marc:It was a good time.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I love her.
Guest:And yeah, she's the daughter of Lorraine Newman from Saturday Night Live, who has been on the show.
Guest:And yes, we have wanted Hannah Einbeiner to be on the show.
Guest:Mark had Hannah open for him at one of his comedy dates recently.
Guest:Oh, cool.
Guest:And Hannah doesn't want to do the show.
Guest:So-
Guest:Why?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, people some people have that.
Guest:And I want I wanted to bring this up because that happens a lot.
Guest:And we're OK with it.
Guest:Like there's been other people.
Guest:Daniel Tosh.
Guest:He was a guy back in the day, like of the time period of stuff that we were playing the other day.
Guest:He was like.
Guest:a very high profile comic right then.
Guest:That was when Tosh.0 was big and it was like he was making a lot of waves and he just said, nope, don't want to do it.
Marc:Does that ever send off red flags to you?
Marc:Like, hmm, why doesn't that, why doesn't someone want to do a show?
Marc:Like, do they not want to get deep into
Guest:Sometimes it's personal.
Guest:It's personal in the sense that they know what the show is and they don't want to have to reveal so much about themselves personally.
Guest:You know, it was a struggle for John C. Reilly to do the show.
Guest:He eventually did it because he believed in the movie that he was in, that he was promoting, which was The Lobster.
Guest:And, you know, it was actually one of those things where...
Guest:A lot of people wound up seeing that movie, which at the time it was like, hey, no one's going to see this.
Guest:It's a weird indie film by a Greek director.
Guest:And it's got a very strange premise.
Guest:And he just thought, well, I want to do what I can to help this movie because I really love it.
Guest:And I love this director, Yorgos Lanthimos.
Guest:And he came into the garage and was like, just so you know, I don't like doing this.
Guest:I don't like talking about myself.
Guest:and oh okay and they had to talk about that's why they had to talk about clowns for 10 minutes which wound up getting right in there was like the Eddie Murphy thing it was like once once Mark had this entry point he could he could do it um Kate McKinnon is someone who has told Mark straight up she does not want to do the show and it's always very polite like people are like I like you I like the show but I just don't want to do it um
Guest:What's his name?
Guest:Roy Kent.
Guest:Brent.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Brett Goldstein.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said he did not want to do the show.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, it's totally fine.
Guest:Totally OK.
Guest:Like, these are not people who have beefs.
Guest:They don't like, you know, feel like Mark is a jerk.
Guest:Like I said, Hannah was on a show with him, but she just did not want to do the podcast.
Guest:Now, is that a never thing?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Brad Pitt used to say, I won't do the podcast.
Guest:And then he did the podcast.
Guest:So, you know, it happens.
Guest:It can change.
Guest:Things can change.
Guest:Larry David used to be a guy who was like, I don't do that.
Guest:I don't do that kind of thing.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't do the.
Guest:He went on Bill Simmons show and said, I don't want to do the Marc Maron thing like to Bill.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like.
Guest:So we knew, like, oh, Larry David doesn't want to do it.
Guest:And then he still hasn't done the show.
Guest:But when Seinfeld was on, Mark said something to Seinfeld about, like, yeah, well, I can't talk to Larry.
Guest:He doesn't want to do the show.
Guest:And Larry was listening and called Mark and was like, oh, no, I'll do the show.
Guest:I want to do it.
Guest:I've got nothing to promote.
Guest:I'll do it.
Guest:I will.
Guest:I will.
Guest:Hasn't done it yet, so I don't know what that call was about.
Marc:Well, so looking forward to the Jon Stewart episode of WTF coming soon.
Guest:That was a rare guy who told Mark directly he didn't want to do it, and it was because he doesn't like Mark.
Guest:That was direct.
Guest:Basically, Jon Stewart and Colin Quinn are the two who have said... Colin Quinn?
Guest:Yeah, I don't want to do it, and it's a personal issue between the two of us.
Marc:Didn't Mark and Colin do comedy together, do the show?
Guest:Yeah, Mark was on Tough Crowd, but Mark thinks he was on that show because he was basically the token liberal on that show.
Guest:I think it was on one of these Ask Mark Anything episodes, Mark addressed this.
Guest:saying that he's not really sure what it is, but he, in fact, called Colin and said, hey, is there an issue?
Guest:And Colin said, you know what?
Guest:There is.
Guest:I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about it, but, you know, I don't want to do your podcast, that's for sure.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's a bummer.
Guest:Yeah, it happens.
Guest:What are you going to do?
Guest:Exactly.
Exactly.
Guest:Well, if you have any other questions like that, of course, send them in.
Guest:We have the comment section that's in the episode description.
Guest:Just click on that link and you can send a question in about past guests or anything you're thinking of based on the history of WTF.
Guest:Happy to answer them here on the Friday show before we...
Guest:...get into our wrestling content.
Guest:And today, our wrestling content is kind of related to something we did a few months ago.
Guest:We were talking about, like, you know, basically the morality of wrestling.
Guest:Is it okay to enjoy as just kind of escapist entertainment?
Guest:And, you know, we address that on the show here.
Guest:But there is a television show, a series...
Guest:that addresses this kind of on the regular, even if it's not directly, just the subject matter of the show.
Guest:And that is the show The Dark Side of the Ring, which has been airing on Vice for four seasons now.
Guest:They're going to start their fourth season on May 30th with an episode about Chris Candido and Tammy Sitch, or Skip and Sonny, if you know them by those names as wrestlers.
Guest:And if you don't know what Dark Side of the Ring is, the name might tell you.
Guest:It's a show about...
Guest:I guess the underbelly of wrestling and tragedies that have occurred, strange and bizarre stories.
Marc:Also untold stories.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:I knew of Sunny, you know, from wrestling or, you know, from watching wrestling.
Marc:I knew nothing.
Marc:I didn't even know she was with Chris at all.
Marc:So this was all brand new and, you know, just...
Marc:Eye-opening for me.
Guest:Yeah, and I think one of the things that I've heard from people about this show, if they're a wrestling fan, is they're like, I don't know that I want to watch it because I'm not watching wrestling to find out about the darkness.
Guest:I just want to have fun while I watch it.
Guest:And I don't know, it seems like it's depressing.
Guest:And I kind of feel like...
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know that you can enjoy the good stuff if you don't also know about the bad stuff.
Guest:Like, you kind of are required to have some awareness around it if you're going to be at all responsible with your consumption.
Guest:And I guess I liken it to the fact that one of the things I was the most into when I was younger, probably second only to wrestling, was Saturday Night Live.
Guest:I was just obsessed with it.
Guest:I had books on it.
Guest:I watched as much Saturday Night Live as I could get my hands on.
Guest:both the current seasons as I was growing up and stuff that was around from before I was born.
Guest:And in a lot of the stuff that I was, you know, reading and uncovering, it was about the bad old days of drugs and drug abuse and, you know, people's lives kind of getting out of control on that show.
Guest:Of course, Belushi and Farley are the real tragic stories, but there have been plenty that, you know, just people who didn't make it in life because they couldn't hack it on that show.
Guest:We became too much and too bad of an environment.
Guest:And
Guest:I always thought it was important to know that stuff as much as knowing the good stuff.
Guest:And so I think that Dark Side of the Ring kind of serves that purpose for wrestling.
Guest:And the guy who makes it, one of the co-creators of the show, Evan Husney...
Guest:is a lifelong wrestling fan, just like us.
Guest:So I thought it'd be a great time for Chris and I to talk to him.
Guest:It's on the eve of the new season premiering.
Guest:And we'll kind of talk about our own experiences with wrestling and the dark side of it.
Guest:Maybe it's something relatable to you with things that you might enjoy that don't necessarily have the rosiest outlook.
Guest:So we'll listen to this and Chris and I'll talk to you on the back end.
Guest:Chris, you look so familiar to me, and I don't know why.
Guest:I have one of those faces.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, you know, have you ever done Wooly Wooly with the magnets?
Guest:You know, the little thing with the magnets where you bring it up?
Marc:I think that's what it is.
Marc:Default?
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:We put a very little sprinkling of the Wooly Wooly on his chin and his face.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:Otherwise, I don't know that you guys have ever met each other, but I think at heart, we all kind of know each other a little bit because we we all have the bug.
Guest:We all are wrestling fans to the point where you've devoted a good portion of your life to it.
Guest:And that'd be you, Evan.
Guest:Well, welcome to the show.
Guest:And you're here ostensibly because the new season of Dark Side of the Ring is coming out.
Guest:And we wanted to talk to you about it.
Guest:But we also want to just talk to you about you.
Guest:Refresh my memory because I know you're from the Midwest, but I forget exactly where.
Guest:I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota, man.
Guest:Big wrestling epicenter there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you were growing up, was AWA like still a thing or was it done?
Guest:I mean, I think it was still a thing.
Guest:It was just not really on my radar as much.
Guest:I was swept into the Hulkamania of the WWF in like, you know, 1990, 91 was my first exposure to wrestling when I was like five.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So, yeah, AWA was on its last legs.
Guest:Did people in Minnesota talk about Hulk Hogan, though?
Guest:Like, oh, yeah, he used to be around, that kind of thing?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Growing up in Minnesota, anytime you talk wrestling with anybody, it was always like, oh, yeah, you know, Vern Gagne and this and that.
Guest:And Hulk Hogan came in.
Guest:Everyone's got a Hulk Hogan story.
Guest:He came in when I was at a bar.
Guest:And I think actually Hulk Hogan might have hit on my aunt at one point.
Guest:um in a bar setting so like everyone's got a hogan in minnesota story because he lived there for many years there's so many of them and you have the robinsdale connection the mr perfect the rick rudes the legion of doom i mean we had so many you know wrestlers coming from you know minneapolis and and and they were so like wrestling was big you know in minnesota growing up uh you know wrestling always came through nitro always came through when i was growing up and
Guest:You know, and Hogan.
Guest:Yeah, Hogan was there.
Guest:I mean, I remember as a kid being four, you know, five, six, maybe going to a autograph signing of Hogan's and, you know, met him when I was a little kid.
Guest:So I definitely remember that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then by the time you got into it, you're you're into like WWF in the like bloom of Hulkamania, Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warriors around all those guys.
Guest:Were you like a devoted fan or was just you were doing it?
Guest:You were doing the same thing all the other kids were doing.
Guest:You were just sampling it or how to go for you.
Guest:It was a little different, actually, because I was a massive G.I.
Guest:Joe fan growing up as a kid.
Guest:I had all the toys and was watching all the cartoons on TV.
Guest:And so it was really the crossover between Sergeant Slaughter that actually drew me into wrestling.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Because I love G.I.
Guest:Joe the movie.
Guest:And so Sergeant Slaughter was really my guy.
Guest:And WWF came through town, came through Minnesota and was a house show of some kind building up to the WrestleMania Hogan versus Slaughter.
Guest:And if you remember that angle, that was when they turned Slaughter into an Iraqi sympathizer.
Guest:They sure did.
Guest:So my parents brought me to this house show and I'm sitting there cheering for this Iraqi sympathizer, the only guy.
Guest:In the entire auditorium, not getting the message.
Guest:And I think my parents thought there was something developmentally maybe wrong with me at the time.
Guest:And I was I actually remember this is true when Hulk Hogan obviously won or, you know, there was some I can barely remember it.
Guest:I have like flashes in my head.
Guest:But there was like, you know, I think when when when Hogan got the upper hand, you know, with Sergeant Slaughter in that moment, I remember actually crying.
Guest:and was bawling my eyes out that Hulk Hogan was beating up my hero.
Guest:So it was kind of this extra weird moment, I think, for my parents.
Guest:But that was really my introduction to wrestling and live wrestling was right in that era.
Guest:It was like Sergeant Slaughter, G.I.
Guest:Joe, and the toys.
Guest:I mean, I had all the Hasbro, WWF toys, Big Boss Man, all that stuff was just huge gateway drugs for me.
Guest:I think that, I mean, it's so common that anyone we talk to, be it an actual wrestler or a fan or someone in other ways involved, Tony Khan was the same, similar way.
Guest:He was an A-Team fan.
Guest:He liked watching the A-Team.
Guest:And he saw this guy on the A-Team.
Guest:He was Mr. T's friend.
Guest:And he's like, who's this guy?
Guest:How do I find out more about him?
Guest:And he watched wrestling because of it.
Guest:So, I mean, it happens, I think, in an
Guest:in similar ways, just depending on what kind of cultural milieu you're dealing in.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And I think there was something also about that 80s, late 80s, early 90s, you know, primary color, you know, aesthetic of everything that just drew you in as a kid.
Guest:You know, you're watching this and the colors pop.
Guest:Like when you watch those old WWF shows, I mean, that's just one thing that sticks out to me.
Guest:It's just the color palette of all of it and how identifiable and iconic all those costumes were, you know.
Guest:um and the big bold colors and i know that as a kid that just drew me and just like toys did of the 80s you know same thing it's like these were toys that were that had come to life it was watching action figures battle each other and it was awesome you know so so did you stick with wrestling throughout as you grew up or did you take a break from it how'd that basically work for you
Guest:No, I kind of got into other interests as a kid.
Guest:And it wasn't really until, I want to say probably middle school, maybe like fifth grade or sixth grade, when just the Monday Night Wars were happening.
Guest:And I just got, just like everybody else in the country, I got reinvigorated with wrestling, checked back in and saw this WCW thing was popping off.
Guest:And then I saw the Stone Cold Steve Austin thing.
Guest:And then it just hooked me bigger than before.
Guest:And I just became a huge, huge, huge fan around that time.
Guest:And then professionally, do you get into media?
Guest:Or were there stops along the way before you started making films?
Guest:At first, I kind of wanted to be like a heavy metal lead guitar player.
Guest:That was like my dream as a kid.
Guest:So I thought that's where my career path was going to go.
Guest:And then it wasn't really until I started getting into film
Guest:It totally rocked my world and just got really into like 70s movies and 80s movies.
Guest:And that set me on a completely different path, you know, horror movies, that whole thing.
Guest:And so I started, I actually went to film school, dropped out and started to, and then basically, I think I was like 20 years old.
Guest:I moved to New York City and got right involved with films.
Guest:I started working and interning at a company called Troma.
Guest:I don't know if you guys are familiar with Toxic Avenger.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you got to start somewhere, get your foot in the door.
Guest:And that was kind of my school of hard knocks.
Guest:You know, it broke my spirit and crushed my soul.
Guest:And that's basically how I got humbled into this crazy industry.
Guest:And from there, I just kind of bounced around from different companies, basically different cult film and like boutique film labels, you know, releasing stuff on home video and kind of did this, you know, many years releasing weird movies, esoteric films.
Guest:And then I started working for the Alamo Drafthouse and
Guest:and started their um their their film distribution arm which was called draft house films and we had did that for a minute and then i was right around the time like 2013 14 when i joined vice and um started kind of making my own short form documentaries and things and it was i had a blast and that just kind of escalated until i eventually got back around to recapturing my childhood nostalgia for wrestling and trying to apply it into some
Guest:Some some form of a documentary or something.
Guest:And that's kind of how Dark Side of the Ring came about.
Marc:Your trauma people, they're like running the world now.
Marc:There's like James Gunn was a trauma guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, man, just taking over.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's it's interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Someday James Gunn and I got to compare some notes, you know, on.
Guest:We definitely run into each other way back in the day in terms of just certain trauma functions.
Guest:But he is a fan of the show, which is awesome, of Darkseid.
Guest:And at some point, I know we got to level on some old trauma stories because there's nothing like working for trauma.
Guest:You can't really describe it to people.
Guest:It's kind of like vets in the military.
Guest:It's like only you two know what it's like, and you can really talk about it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You had to be in the shit.
Guest:Had to be in the shit, man.
Guest:And we were in literally the shit, if you know Trump.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, I bet for a lot of people it functions in a modern environment much the same way the, like, Roger Corman factory of films did.
Guest:And, you know, what you have to do, you know, always shooting these things, making these things on a budget, there's invaluable lessons there of, you know, having to...
Guest:basically make do essentially.
Guest:And I'm guessing just from the basic sense of knowing what I know about trauma, I'm really, I'm just measuring it against their budgets.
Guest:I'm guessing you had to learn a lot of those tools.
Guest:Absolutely, man.
Guest:I mean, there was so much, you know, I mean, obviously you can imagine how low the budgets were and just trying to make stuff happen no matter what.
Guest:And there was always a solution.
Guest:There was always a way through to make this happen regardless.
Guest:And because the consequences of not making something happen,
Guest:were like, you know, somebody viscerally screaming at you for like maybe 45 minutes, you know?
Guest:And so it was like, it was like to do anything to not, you know, have two New York guys from, you know, five generations before me, you know, tear my soul to pieces.
Guest:And so we always, we always found a way to make anything happen.
Guest:And I think that really was like my biggest education was like literally trying to
Guest:that there's always a way to make something happen by any means necessary.
Guest:And I think that's a big tool for being a producer or whatever.
Guest:Well, so it makes perfect sense that you'd find yourself in a place, especially a place like Vice, and they're looking for alternative content and
Guest:It does make sense to me just as a trajectory of why you'd wind up making Dark Side of the Ring.
Guest:But I guess my question, my biggest question is, what made you want to make it in that way?
Guest:Like, what makes you want to do a show that's called The Dark Side of the Ring as opposed to I Love Wrestling?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's, it's not like a, an easy answer because it, it took on, it evolved over the course of, you know, many years in terms of ideating what this was going to be, like how I was going to tap into that passion of mine and how this was all going to come together.
Guest:It, you know, it wasn't overnight, I should say, you know, especially the title of the show, the title dark side of the ring didn't come to us until the day before it was due for all the legal paperwork.
Guest:You know, we didn't have,
Guest:We didn't we didn't have we had shot the whole entire first season and didn't even have a name for the show.
Guest:And it was shout out to my mom who actually came up with the title to the show at the last possible second.
Guest:I mean, because all of the other alternatives that people were coming up with were terrible puns, you know, like against the ropes and, you know, lariat stories.
Guest:I don't know, you know, whatever.
Guest:And like, you know, turnbuckle tails, you know, and it's like, I can't do that.
Guest:I can't do a bad pun as a title.
Guest:So I tried to come up with something that was evoking just the mood that we wanted to create with this show.
Guest:I think that was kind of the big thing.
Guest:And it wasn't necessarily like we set out to do an expose or here's all the tragic shit with wrestling.
Guest:It was more just like we had been such a fan.
Guest:I say we.
Guest:I should mention Jason Eisner, who's the director of the series.
Guest:And we're like big fans.
Guest:We're best friends.
Guest:We have been for a long time.
Guest:We've collaborated on this show for the whole run.
Guest:And we were just huge fans of Errol Morris's Thin Blue Line, that documentary.
Guest:I mean, it's just amazing.
Guest:It's a true crime masterpiece.
Guest:It's a benchmark of the genre.
Guest:And we loved just the feeling that that show had with the music and the way the reenactments looked and just like this film noir kind of mashup with documentary we just thought was so, so cool.
Guest:So we were trying to come up with something that just embodied that sort of feeling because...
Guest:You know, the very first episode we ever did of the show, which was the story about the murder of Bruiser Brody.
Guest:It's a true crime story.
Guest:And that's how this whole thing started.
Guest:You know, I was like I said, I was searching for something to do with my childhood nostalgia with wrestling.
Guest:And I wanted to sink my teeth into doing something.
Guest:I didn't know what it was going to be.
Guest:I sort of was, you know, I was producing stuff with Vice.
Guest:I had this opportunity to get things made.
Guest:So I was trying to figure out what to do with that.
Guest:Jason and I were really getting into the territory era of wrestling, that sort of era before our time, getting into all the greats, getting obsessed with Harley Race and getting obsessed with Bruiser Brody and Abdul the Butcher and all that stuff.
Guest:Just such a cool, amazing time period in wrestling and something we never experienced firsthand.
Guest:And along the way, we were just like, man, this Bruiser Brody guy is fucking awesome.
Guest:And just his whole vibe and how he's coming out to the ring to Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song and hitting people in the head and swinging a chain.
Guest:And everyone's just running away in terror from this guy.
Guest:I've never seen anything like this.
Guest:And then looking into a story, I'm like, oh my god, this guy was killed in a wrestling locker room.
Guest:And then you start to go down this rabbit hole of just who was there?
Guest:What did they see?
Guest:And
Guest:And that's what really fascinated us was this idea of like, you know, the wrestling world is this very, you know, especially at that time, it's like the blurred lines of, you know, reality and fiction, you know, and kayfabe and everyone keeping up the appearances that wrestling is real.
Guest:And we were fascinated about this idea of when something very real happens, like
Guest:someone being killed in the war in the kayfabe world of wrestling and how that basically how that plays out and it was very it was just so eye-opening to us when we saw that like in the murder trial of you know jose gonzalez who was the attacker who attacked bruiser brody in the locker room he basically got off and one of the reasons that he did was because the jury you know they were creating this case that
Guest:Brody was a heel.
Guest:He was a bad guy.
Guest:And that helped to get this guy off.
Guest:And so that was just super fascinating to us.
Guest:So we started to like this true crime pro wrestling mashup of, you know, examining the blurred lines of, you know, reality and fiction and wrestling and true crime and all that stuff.
Guest:And then, of course, the touch point, as I mentioned earlier, with Errol Morris's film, and that just started to get our wheels turning of like, this could be
Guest:At first, we thought just a documentary, a feature-length documentary about the Bruiser Brody story.
Guest:That's what we kind of first... Oh, really?
Guest:That's what we were... Yeah, that's what we were just jamming on at first.
Guest:We never ever would have imagined it would have been a series.
Guest:And then it wasn't until somewhere along the development process of trying to get this made...
Guest:that somebody mentioned, well, could it be a series?
Guest:And then it was started to think, well, yeah, there is all these other great stories.
Marc:There's a ton of them.
Marc:There's a ton of stories out there.
Guest:Yeah, there is.
Guest:And we had known that from being – we just loved watching these shoot interviews on YouTube.
Guest:Of course, these camcorder shot –
Guest:you know, crappy interviews with wrestlers and like Ramadas across the country, you know, and they're just like, you know, you have the honky tonk man telling these insane stories.
Guest:And we just really got into that.
Guest:And it was kind of imagining like, what if we just elevated all this, like these guys are great storytellers, but what if instead of the like camcorder at the Ramada, we could really like make it feel like an Errol Morris film or like we could elevate it to this level of importance and
Guest:And then other people who aren't us would see that this whole world is as fascinating as we think it is.
Guest:And so the whole idea was just like to take... Because wrestling, you guys know, like wrestling, for the most part, has always been historically frowned upon in mass culture as this thing that's, oh, it's fake and whatever, it's often dismissed.
Guest:And we sort of thought that if people knew...
Guest:that there was this real human side to all these people, all these wrestlers, that they would be equally riveted and fascinated by these stories that are just objectively face value insane.
Guest:And so the whole idea was just about trying to create something that non-wrestling fans would be just as riveted by.
Guest:That was the whole idea.
Guest:It wasn't for fans.
Guest:We never wanted to make it for wrestling fans.
Guest:It was literally just for all the civilians out there.
Guest:Well, and I think, tell me if this makes sense to you, because watching the show, it's kind of, it breaks down to me, I would say, in like three buckets.
Guest:And the first one is what you're talking about specifically stemming out of doing the Bruiser Brody episode, and then there's like...
Guest:Randy Savage or Ultimate Warrior.
Guest:You have a two-parter on Chris Benoit.
Guest:And these are like your personal profiles, trying to explain who these individuals are, which most of them, their lives end in tragedy or in something kind of extraordinary.
Guest:In the case of someone like the fabulous Moolah, it's fraught and kind of...
Guest:Sorted.
Guest:Complicated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that is, you know, what you're talking about almost like as a thesis of the show.
Guest:But then I see these other two buckets and I wonder if you see them in the same way that there's also this like these individual episodes about infamous incidents.
Guest:Like, you've got, like, the collision in Korea, which is when New Japan and WCW went into Pyongyang and did a show that's just an insane story.
Guest:And, like, the plane ride from hell, which was this WWE flight that went disastrously wrong with drugs and alcohol mixed in it.
Guest:And to me, like, this was the moment of, like...
Guest:a show taking something that for a wrestling fan, it kind of exists in the, in the ether.
Guest:Like I always knew about these things and you know that they're, Oh yeah, that plane ride from hell.
Guest:I remember that.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:And then when you actually hear the story of it, it's, it's even more insane than you'd ever imagine.
Guest:And then that brings me to like your third category here, which is you,
Guest:These subcultures within the already strange culture of wrestling.
Guest:You have federations like XPW and UWF.
Guest:My favorite episode that you've done is the one that was on Onida and FMW, which is like deathmatch fighting in Japan.
Guest:And the reason is because, look, I like wrestling.
Guest:I talked to Chris about wrestling.
Guest:I've had friends my whole life that I talk about wrestling with.
Guest:There have been three or four times in my life where wrestling has gone in a boom period and everybody's watching it.
Guest:People know who Stone Cold Steve Austin is.
Guest:They know who The Rock is.
Guest:People today know who John Cena is.
Guest:But like...
Guest:Watching Japanese deathmatch videos that I got on VHS on a dubbed copy, I was afraid if anyone would ever find out about that.
Guest:I didn't want anyone to know that I was watching those.
Guest:And to see the episode about it, it was like, oh, wow, this was a lot.
Guest:lot of people were into this.
Guest:And it was this examination of a subculture within an already determined subculture that I think is very fascinating.
Guest:So, you know, I take that as like the totality of what you're doing with the series.
Guest:And I wonder if you deliberately gave it that type of variety.
Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I would say that we did.
Guest:I mean, when we sketched out the series in the very first season, I mean, you see these different types of episodes, right?
Guest:You see like the more true crime ones.
Guest:You have the Bruiser Brody one we talked about.
Guest:The kind of mysterious death of gorgeous Gino is another kind of true crime examination episode.
Guest:And then we had stuff like the Montreal Screwjob.
Guest:And it's like, that's a well-documented incident in wrestling.
Guest:But
Guest:We sort of thought we really wanted to try and make this definitive wrestling series.
Guest:We were setting out to try and make a series that was going to cover each of these major events in this weird world and try to bring them from this underbelly of wrestling out to a broader sort of pop culture world.
Guest:And so we did sort of think that we were going to have these kind of, for lack of a better term, 30 for 30 or like episodes that would be more focused around like the sport of wrestling or like a moment or an incident or something like that.
Guest:And then there was going to be the true crime ones.
Guest:And then there's going to be the profile ones.
Guest:And that was kind of like the way we had sort of always thought like, well, there's three different kinds.
Guest:And we talk about it all the time.
Guest:We sort of try to mix them up and try to keep them in balance to have like some of the profile ones.
Guest:Here's some of the true crime ones.
Guest:And then here's some of the incident ones or the event based ones.
Guest:And I love the event based ones where it's like, here's one moment that happened and then we can just pull it apart and get super granular with this one iconic moment in wrestling.
Guest:I love those episodes.
Guest:But to talk about the fringe sort of wrestling federations, yeah, that just kind of happened.
Guest:It was this thing where... And to talk about Onida and FMW, which you mentioned specifically, it was like during the pandemic, that's what I was watching.
Guest:I remember as a kid... Or not as a kid.
Guest:Well, I guess as a kid.
Guest:I remember early internet, there were these GIFs, these animated GIFs of FMW of the ring exploding and all these crazy visuals.
Guest:Is this real?
Guest:Like what's going on here?
Guest:Like spike pits and, you know, exploding barbed wire and like all this crazy stuff.
Guest:And I had no idea what it was.
Guest:And then it was like later with YouTube and stuff, I started to see all these clips and then eventually get the tapes.
Guest:And I always had the soft spot for like FMW because it was just so wild and crazy and so visually amazing.
Guest:Like you have like a...
Guest:they have like matches where there's a wrestling ring, like in the middle of like a body of water, you know, and like the different wrestlers have to take these little boats out to the ring, you know, like fight each other.
Guest:It's just so imaginative and amazing.
Guest:And, and so during the pandemic, I basically started to, there was a, there's a guy who runs this FMW fan site and he made a top 100 matches of FMW.
Guest:Like he literally painstakingly ranked every single, like the top 100 matches.
Guest:I just went through all of them, man.
Guest:And it was so awesome.
Guest:And so then it was like, okay, we got to do this as an episode.
Guest:And sometimes that happens.
Guest:We just got to do stuff that really appeals to us.
Guest:And this was one of those times where it was like, we just love FMW.
Guest:We'll find the story.
Guest:Screw it.
Guest:Let's do it.
Guest:And we really did.
Guest:you know, find a pretty compelling story that was there, you know, with Onida and the, the organization and everything, you know, where all the, you know, Yakuza ties and everything.
Guest:So yeah, it was awesome.
Guest:And you have guys who participate in the show regularly who, you know, clearly with their participation in that episode, like they were fans as well.
Guest:I just, I remember Jericho talking just lovingly about how great a baby face Onida was.
Guest:It was like, oh yeah, like you, he must model a lot of stuff.
Guest:I'm like,
Guest:This type of mindset.
Guest:It definitely was influential.
Guest:Dude, as a filmmaker, someone who's super visual and when we talk about the mood and the feeling of all of our show and everything, Onita was such a brilliant mind in terms of the creativity with FMW and the emotion behind it.
Guest:I think that's the thing that separates it from all the other federations.
Guest:When you go back and you watch that exploding film
Guest:whatever exploding barbed wire death match between Onida and Terry Funk, the very first one, the one that we cover in the episode.
Guest:And you watch it and it's just incredible, the drama of like, oh my God, this ring is going to explode and Terry Funk is going to be exploded inside of it.
Guest:And then Onida crawls in to save him.
Guest:And then there's this amazing epilogue with incredible Japanese electric guitar solos playing over the two of them, both crying in tears, like arm in arm.
Guest:And it's this incredible shot with the smoke and the fog in the background.
Guest:And it's just so cinematic.
Guest:That's the word I'm looking for.
Guest:It's this incredibly cinematic...
Guest:wrestling on a scale that you've never seen before and and and one of the things that kind of bums me out about modern wrestling is just how uncinematic it is like it the way it's filmed and the way to me the way that it's produced it's it's missing that magic you know that that it kind of had in the 80s and then into the 90s just in terms of like i don't know if it was the broadcast camera the frame rates or whatever that made it more cinematic or the lighting that they would experiment with now everything's just over lit and crazy but
Guest:But if you go back and you look at FMW production from a production point of view, and just from a performance point of view, it's some of the best, most incredible cinematic portrayal of wrestling I've ever seen.
Guest:That's not like a movie or something.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:You're talking about...
Guest:Getting a lot of inspiration from watching these shoot videos, which, you know, if people don't know what those are, it's like, you know, a wrestling video company will pay a former wrestler, you know, to sit down with them for four hours and just talk about their whole career.
Guest:They were basically like proto podcasts, essentially.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because these things were, you know, traded on the tape market for years before you could even watch them on YouTube or anything like that.
Guest:The big thing there that is sand in the Vaseline is watching any of those shoot videos, it's overwhelming the feeling of, am I being worked?
Guest:And I guess that's what I wonder, in this business that's defined by con artistry, the whole point of it is to try to create an illusion.
Guest:How have you found making this show and trusting what is a work versus what is a shoot
Guest:and actually getting it in the show in a way that's trustworthy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, that's interesting.
Guest:And it was something in the beginning that, obviously, we had never really had much interactions with professional wrestlers before this show, you know, in terms of getting to know them as people or how to deal with them, you know.
Guest:You know, big personalities, and especially the older generation they are, they're kind of predisposed to want to, you know, be...
Guest:not as truthful with media, if you will, you know, in terms of, you know, historically that was what they were instructed to do was to, was to obviously, you know, not reveal all this, all the inside secrets and so on and so forth.
Guest:So for us, it was kind of difficult in the beginning.
Guest:And because I think we were such marks, you know, AKA,
Guest:fans of wrestling, hardcore fans, it was like, I think we just had like, yeah, we had a big mark sign on our forehead, you know?
Guest:And so I think it was, it was very easy for them to, you know, kind of swerve us.
Guest:And we were very intimidated, I would say in the very beginning by these personalities in terms of trying to get, you know, the hard truth and to sort of, you know, separate fact from fiction.
Guest:But that very idea of,
Guest:when someone's working you is just a part of the wrestling business.
Guest:I mean, like you said, they're professional con men.
Guest:They are liars by trade.
Guest:And so we always kind of tried to figure out creatively how we can make that part of the show because there is truth in that.
Guest:That is part of...
Guest:this whole experience of wrestling and, and, and the type and the world these guys inhabit.
Guest:So we often, you see in the show when there is like, you know, perspectives that don't align or there's someone's telling one version of a story and it's completely different than in a version that somebody else is telling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We always thought creatively instead of like us being the ones to separate fact from fiction and to sort of editorialize what the wrestlers are saying, because sometimes that can be impossible if you weren't there or you don't know 100%.
Guest:But one of the main reasons that we always tried to do –
Guest:was to leave the answers in the hands of the audience.
Guest:Because that is what professional wrestling also does.
Guest:There is this collaboration between audience and performer with wrestling.
Guest:It has that tension.
Guest:And so we thought in a similar way... I think the Fabulous Moolah episode is a good example...
Guest:In terms of like, okay, we've given you this complicated portrait of somebody.
Guest:It's not a black or white binary.
Guest:This person should be judged as being good or should be judged as being bad.
Guest:Here's all of these different viewpoints.
Guest:Here's like an oral history of this person.
Guest:And now it's kind of in the hands of the audience member to sort of decipher between what they believe and what they don't believe and how they feel about that.
Guest:And that was something that we always tried to do with the show.
Guest:Or like with the plane ride from hell, I think it was similar.
Guest:Like you saw different viewpoints of this very complicated situation and how everybody feels differently about it.
Guest:But I think like with what wrestling does too, is like wrestling is also a microcosm, I think, of American society in a lot of ways, you know, politically.
Guest:And I think it's kind of like we wanted to also show...
Guest:You know, things just things aren't just as black and white.
Guest:You know, these are these are complicated humans.
Guest:And that's we really wanted to bring the human side to wrestling.
Guest:And I would imagine that you wind up finding as you make more episodes of the show, you wind up finding particular sources who you can trust and you can rely on for a more a straighter version of the story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, like I just personally know Mick Foley and, you know, I would know if that guy was lying to me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And mostly because he doesn't seem to do it.
Guest:I'm sure he has his own perspective on things and he might, you know, say something different than someone else viewing the same exact thing.
Guest:But he's not going to try to work me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:You know, 100 percent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like there are people like Mick is a really good example, you know, of just relationships we've formed like over the course of all the seasons that you just know like, yeah, you're right.
Guest:They will have a perspective on something.
Guest:But at the end of the day, there's no ulterior sort of, you know, motive, you know, for them.
Guest:Because in wrestling, too, there's this weird phenomenon, which I'm sure you guys are aware of, which is like...
Guest:it is very black and white where it's like, you're either putting somebody over or you're just outright burying there, you know, it's like, and there's no in between, you know?
Guest:And I, and I think that there's this kind of unspoken thing in, in wrestling where it's like, you're either doing one or the other, you know?
Guest:And like, there is kind of this, like,
Guest:I don't know, boys club vibe where you're kind of supposed to put everybody over or why the hell are you burying them?
Guest:And that's obviously not what either of us, like any of us on our team are setting out to do.
Guest:It's obviously not that simple.
Guest:It's just here's the story.
Guest:This is the story of what happened.
Guest:And it has nothing to do with putting somebody over or burying them.
Guest:That has something to do with the world that you guys are a part of.
Guest:on your television show.
Guest:And so I think there is some confusion in terms of that.
Guest:And that was a phenomenon that was, at least to me, always been puzzling.
Guest:It was like, no, this is not how documentaries work, guys.
Guest:This is the story.
Guest:We're talking about a story here.
Guest:We're not talking about a push.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, I wonder about that when it comes to a lot of these episodes that ultimately devolve into stories of, you know, drug abuse and oftentimes the dissent that involves the drugs.
Guest:It leads to the death of the people you're profiling.
Guest:And I wonder what your feeling is in talking about, especially because you then wind up talking to so many people who have survived or are, you know, the surviving family members or just wrestling peers, like how much of this was drug use because of lifestyle, because of, you know, the way that it's almost like a rock and roll touring, you know, devil may care attitude when you're on the road and, you know,
Guest:these you know this was what they did to party and all that versus a result of the physical toll of the lifestyle because it just seems like so much of it is painkillers and somas and it's just like i i was i that that's my main takeaway from the show is like i always thought oh the drugged up you know reckless wrestling era of the 80s and 90s was because of like
Guest:steroid abuse and these guys are all on coke all the time and amphetamines and you know blew up their hearts and whatnot and it's just so much so many times it's these guys on painkillers and uh i i wonder what your take is that of that is you know being up close to it
Guest:Well, I mean, I think it's, you know, from all the different stories that we've heard and that people have told us, you know, it is multifaceted.
Guest:And, you know, every situation is, you know, unique.
Guest:You know, in the case of like a Jake Roberts, for example, like in our episode about his father, Grizzly Smith, you can obviously tell through that episode that there is a deep-rooted relationship
Guest:you know, formative trauma that was rooted in all of those, you know, Smith kids growing up that, you know, can give a lot of explanation to the different substance abuse problems that they had.
Guest:And that's something obviously very different.
Guest:But also the lifestyle of a professional wrestler, as you mentioned, during that period, that 80s, 90s period where you're working
Guest:literally 300 plus days a year.
Guest:And every time you wrestle a match, it's just insane what your body goes through.
Guest:And even to me, it's like, I remember just a really quick, funny story.
Guest:It's like, I remember one of the very first interviews we did was with Dutch Mantell.
Guest:for the bruiser brody episode and it was uh we shot this little verite section where um he's standing outside of a ring and he's kind of barking orders to um another wrestler we thought it'd just be kind of a cool little establishing shot to show that he's you know he's like the man right and uh right when we set up the wrestling ring that was the first wrestling ring i'd ever been like in front of in my like you know to where i could go inside right yeah
Guest:And of course, every Mark's dream is like, they want to go in that ring and just jump around and fucking bounce off the ropes.
Guest:And so I couldn't wait to do it.
Guest:So of course, I get in there and I look like the biggest Mark in the world.
Guest:And then Dutch Mantel is screaming at me from the, or screaming from the ringside, like, okay, body slam this kid right now.
Guest:You know, like humble this kid.
Guest:And then immediately this wrestler picked me up and he lifted me up, turned me upside down.
Guest:And he definitely put like a hole like he was like putting some extra weight into it.
Guest:I didn't know how to fall.
Guest:His whole self.
Guest:His whole self.
Guest:I didn't know how to take a bump.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:And he slammed the shit out of me.
Guest:And I remember laying there in the ring, staring up at the lights, and every single freaking bump I'd ever seen in my entire life in wrestling was instantaneously recontextualized.
Guest:I'm starting to think about Mick Foley and the Hell in the Cell.
Guest:I'm starting to think about just anybody coming off the top rope.
Guest:I'm just thinking about...
Guest:suplexes and hip tosses i'm just thinking about the most mundane shit in wrestling and thinking like i can't fucking believe these guys do this you know yeah and uh it hurt it like everyone says it hurts and then as fans we don't really think oh does it really hurt isn't it like a trampoline no you are being slammed on boards like you're just being slammed on freaking you know plywood boards right so um
Guest:It's awful.
Guest:And so immediately I'm just thinking about that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then if I'm thinking about that every oh, and also when you get slammed, here's another fun thing that happens to you when you get slammed, your your brain rattles, too.
Guest:So you actually stand up and you start feeling like a little bit like disoriented, like you like your head's been like has been shaken, you know.
Guest:Because the shockwaves are traveling through your field.
Guest:It's horrible.
Guest:And all the wrestlers say like, oh, that shit goes away after a while.
Guest:It's like, well, does it?
Guest:You're right.
Guest:So all that happens.
Guest:I'm taking that.
Guest:I'm feeling my head shaking.
Guest:And I'm thinking all this, recontextualizing all this.
Guest:And then when you just think about how many matches these guys were doing, how often they were traveling and taking these bumps.
Guest:I mean, it's just like your body has got to be broken.
Guest:After years of doing that, you can be in really good shape and you can be in the gym every day, strength training and being ready for that stuff, but it's going to take a toll.
Guest:And then, of course, it's going to be harder to get up and to go to the next town and to do that all over again.
Guest:And of course, it just takes one person to be like, hey, try this.
Guest:This will make you feel better.
Guest:And then, you know, then you're taking a Soma and then you're, then you realize that, you know, the one Soma doesn't work and you need six and then now you need 10 and now you need 15.
Guest:And it's just a, it's just a bad escalation of that.
Guest:And I think, you know, shout out to our season four premiere episode, you know, on, on Chris Candido and Tammy, I think, you know, that's, that is kind of, you kind of see that play out, you know, how that, how that cycle starts.
Guest:In that episode, Mick Foley says, I've seen it happen in one prescribed dose of 30 pills or however many someone's told, here, take this for the pain you have.
Guest:He said, I've seen it happen where that one bottle is the beginning and end of full addiction.
Guest:It happens in that week.
Guest:They go from nothing to completely hooked.
Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, the tragic thing with Chris Candida, which you point out in that episode, was, you know, he had never done a drug.
Guest:He wasn't a drinker, but it was the physical pain from this job, you know, put him in that position.
Guest:And then going back to what you were just saying, the kind of toll that the body is put through, that ultimately the tragic end of his life is,
Guest:was something that most people would think of as innocuous.
Guest:It was like a misstep in the ring that wound up snapping his ankle.
Guest:And it's just, it's a crazy thing.
Guest:But we, you know, Chris and I watch Wrestling Still every week.
Guest:And, you know, we talk about, we even talked about it last week.
Guest:They're like, wow, it just seems like it's a little bit more of a humane thing.
Guest:uh a product and presentation and they're letting these guys take time off and letting them heal and you know they there's uh there are more safeguards in place there's more medic medical staff in place but really it's it's one thing can happen and that's the end yeah and and and yeah it's it's yeah and obviously things today you know that is kind of the bright side to all this right that
Guest:Through the benefit of hindsight and learning from a lot of these stories that we cover on the show, it's like the business has changed mostly for the good in that regard.
Guest:I want to get you to talk about that specifically because I hear that all the time and to the point where I wonder, am I being conned, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they obviously, you have not seen a large number of premature deaths of wrestlers in many years.
Guest:And there was a period of time where it was happening very frequently.
Guest:So just by that metric alone, you go, okay, something did change.
Guest:But I wonder just from your perspective in talking with these guys and women very specifically, do you get a sense that it actually has changed?
Guest:Well, I think...
Guest:Yes, I do.
Guest:I mean, that's predominantly what I do here, you know, for most of the wrestlers that we interview when we're talking about these stories, you know, from the 80s and 90s when things were really rough and there were a lot of deaths and a lot of pills and things like that.
Guest:But for the most part, that seems to be the thing that is the silver lining, is that things have changed for the better.
Guest:Is every case that way?
Guest:No, probably not.
Guest:There's still a lot of dangerous stuff people are doing.
Guest:But you go back and you watch some of that old footage, man, of chair shots and...
Guest:Especially the chair shots, man.
Guest:That is just brutality.
Guest:But you do see stuff from time to time in modern wrestling on the majors where you're like, oh, crap, that was pretty risky, or this is that, and all that stuff.
Guest:But I think mostly, I don't know.
Guest:Maybe I'm wrong.
Guest:I'm not in the business.
Guest:I don't know what it's like today.
Guest:I'm sure maybe somebody has a completely different perspective.
Guest:But it just sounds like really the number of days
Guest:these guys and girls are on the road wrestling.
Guest:You know, the number of... You know, how often they were wrestling back in the 80s and 90s and before versus how much they are now.
Guest:At least it cuts... From what I understand, especially like with AEW, you know, they have two shows a week, you know, or they will be having two shows a week.
Guest:And it's like that's so much significantly less than wrestling every single night, 25 days a month, you know, and just what your body is going through and being able to like actually heal, you know, from...
Guest:What ostensibly is like a car accident every single night in the ring.
Guest:You know, it's crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's got to be something culturally, too, within the business and just the type of people it's attracting and the policing within the business as well.
Guest:Because the thing about that Chris Candido, Tammy Sitch episode is that...
Guest:Tammy, known as Sonny in the WWF, was not a wrestler.
Guest:She rarely, if I can, I'm not sure I can think of one time she took a bump.
Guest:And she was a valet.
Guest:She was someone there to have her personality shine through and was obviously very attractive.
Guest:And that worked for teenage boys who were watching the product at the time.
Guest:But...
Guest:you know, she was a personality capital P on that show and wound up with one of the most terrible stories of drug addiction and alcoholism that, you know, the business has seen ended with her currently in prison.
Guest:And so, you know, I, I do think there has to be something changing overall in the culture of how they produce these things.
Guest:Um,
Guest:And, you know, my brief encounters with the people who are currently in the business would lead me to believe that's the case.
Guest:It's not anything I have a kind of ironclad proof about, but I just I do get that sense.
Guest:Well, also, I think there is and again, I can't.
Guest:fully speak to how what it's like now, you know, to be perfectly honest, like I'm not, we're not really covering, you know, what's going on today.
Guest:And I'm not as much paying attention to it as maybe I should.
Guest:But, you know, focusing more on the past, it's like, I think the attitude culturally is
Guest:in this country or if it was just, you know, in, in, in business in general was like, if you had a drug problem, you're just like fired, you know, like you're just straight up like fired, you're gone.
Guest:You know, it's not like there's this opportunity where we can give support or help to the person that's struggling with, you know, addiction and, and these problems.
Guest:And I think that's like,
Guest:I can't speak to the quality of these modern day programs or how much they're really sort of prioritizing them.
Guest:But I do think that that's the step in the right direction that we're thinking about these things differently, you know, in terms of, you know, addiction and mental health and those types of things when it comes to these performers.
Guest:That's the, I think, perspective shift that's needed, you know, for what things were like back then.
Guest:I mean, you see it in the Chris and...
Guest:And Tammy episode, it's like, you know, being fired, you know, for, for being on this stuff, but it, it literally, you know, is that, that's where's that going to leave them?
Guest:You know?
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's interesting because I noticed that it's one of the few times you really see Jim Cornette, uh, break down and have a hard time getting through a discussion about, uh, one of the wrestlers who's passed.
Guest:And in this case, it was Chris Candido and, uh,
Guest:I could really only read that as guilt, you know, and I mean, I know that it's a friend of his and that, you know, it's sad to lose someone, you know, but he seemed particularly upset over the fact that this was a kid who came to him.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:who was not involved in any kind of drugs, any kind of alcohol, who all he ever wanted.
Guest:And you see his broom when he was a child.
Guest:He had pictures and belts he made and all this stuff, coloring.
Guest:And, you know, this was a person much like Jim Cornette in love with pro wrestling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he just wanted it to be this great thing in his life.
Guest:And that this happened and it happened because the business like that was there's really no way around it.
Guest:Like, it's not like Chris Candido is a guy who came from a troubled situation and he was a, you know, a guy who was going to go down the wrong path somewhere or another.
Guest:It's like, no.
Guest:Like any one of us just loved wrestling.
Guest:He got into it.
Guest:He was in pain.
Guest:He got hooked on painkillers and that ultimately led to an injury and it led to the end of his life.
Guest:Yeah, I think in the Jim Cornette case with this episode too, I think it was extra special emotional for him in particular because I don't think he would admit it, but I think he was really kind of a father figure to both of them.
Guest:I don't think he would go so far as to really say that on camera.
Guest:I think maybe he's more comfortable with mentor.
Guest:But I think he does.
Guest:He especially, I think, you know, I mean, he has a lot of ownership in terms of them being in the business.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, in particular, like I don't know if I mean, maybe Chris, you know, Chris was a prodigy.
Guest:He was incredible in the ring and he was incredible.
Guest:He was so good.
Guest:And of course, he was very ahead of his time in terms of his style.
Guest:His style and his size is more in fashion now than it was then, right?
Guest:So he was ahead of his time.
Guest:And I think that, Jim, you're right.
Guest:I think probably does have some level of guilt or just ownership in terms of their career because he really did bring them in.
Guest:And I think he's very close to them.
Guest:And I don't think in his wildest dreams he ever would have thought...
Guest:how the story would have ended.
Guest:I mean, it's not totally over, obviously, with Tammy, but I don't think he ever would have thought of where it is now.
Guest:I think that kind of is pretty hard to process.
Guest:And I totally get that, for sure.
Guest:Because it does, to me, on the surface, looking at this story, was sort of like, here's these two young teenage kids who are in love.
Guest:And Chris, as you said, when he was a very young kid,
Guest:He was like on a path to be wanting to be a wrestler from probably age like five, you know, like he lived and breathed it.
Guest:And that was his dream.
Guest:And you can tell that in those scenes looking through, you know, the attic and looking at all that stuff that he put up there as a kid, right?
Guest:You just knew this is what he wanted.
Guest:And so you have this kind of teenage romance that gets swallowed up and spat out by this culture, by this industry, for better or worse.
Guest:And I think how you see them on the other side of that...
Guest:is just very shocking.
Guest:It's just, how did we end up here?
Guest:And I think that's the part that is very hard for a lot of people to process.
Guest:But I think the injuries and the dependencies and the recreational choices played a huge part into all that.
Guest:And that was a big part of the culture at the time.
Guest:I think if a Chris Candido and a Tammy came along...
Guest:Now, I can't say if it would be the same.
Guest:I think Chris and Tammy do have a different sort of relationship to those substances and things, at least from what my perspective is.
Guest:But I think just a large part of it was the culture at the time that played into that story.
Guest:It's just a bad timing situation on top of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's the premiere episode that is on May 30th.
Guest:And then how many episodes total this season?
Guest:10 episodes this season for season four.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there'll be 10 eps and Chris and Tammy kicks it all off.
Guest:And then the Marty Jannetty episode will be the finish.
Guest:She'll be the...
Guest:That's the last one.
Guest:OK, I've heard it's a crazy episode.
Guest:Yeah, the Marty Jannetty episode.
Guest:I mean, it's you know, it's there's not a ton of episodes we get to do, sadly, unfortunately, where the person is still with us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and, you know, Marty, his story is just so wild in terms of what he's been through.
Guest:the injuries, his current state of, you know, where he's at in life.
Guest:And, you know, Marty has kind of created, you know, we talk about separating truth from fiction.
Guest:You know, he is definitely, he kind of is living in, you know, his own world.
Guest:You know, like this is, I think the episode title that we've gone with is The World According to Marty Jannetty.
Guest:And I think that's very...
Guest:apt for what the episode is really about you know he has created um you know um this you know i think because not being able to wrestle in terms of you know playing a part of the storyline and being a part of it i think that post wrestling life you know getting used to a crowd not being there getting used to the adulation not being there and being you know and not having that spotlight on you um it's very tricky for a lot of wrestlers to figure out what they do after wrestling i think that's also a big part of when you get into trouble and i think for him
Guest:It's been extremely hard, and I think this is a portrait of that, you know, a very honest portrait of that.
Marc:Nice.
Marc:This first episode, though, Chris and Tammy, which is Sonny from WWF, and Sonny for me was the pinup of my childhood.
Marc:I used to stay over at my friend's house a lot in high school, and his walls were covered in two, well, maybe three things.
Marc:It was Sonny posters and Shawn Michaels posters, ironically.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:And and it's funny watching this episode.
Marc:I didn't know anything about any of this stuff about, you know, any of the stuff that happens.
Marc:But you didn't you didn't interview Shawn Michaels.
Marc:Was there a reason why?
Marc:Like there wasn't even a title card saying that, like, oh, Shawn Michaels refused to be interviewed.
Marc:Did you guys try to interview him?
Guest:Well, historically, he hasn't wanted to participate in the show.
Guest:And it really is kind of more or less an unspoken thing that it's extraordinarily hard, as you can imagine, to get anybody who's kind of on the WWE side of the fence to get the approval to even be on our show in the first place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, you know, I mean, you know, Sean's part of this story is, you know, it's relevant, but it's minimal in terms of how it plays out in our episode.
Guest:I mean, would we have loved to be able to get him?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But for us, it's pretty much a near impossibility.
Guest:We've only really been granted access to one WWE, I guess, person, you know, for Dark Side of the Ring, which was Jerry McDivitt.
Guest:the wwe you know lawyer um when we did our steroid trials episode in season three so we're kind of limited in that respect um for like oh yes we'd like you to talk to him about his greatest achievement getting Vince McMahon to not go to federal prison
Guest:That one's fine.
Guest:That's the only situation where I think that might work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I'm glad you have another season of it on here and we'll continue to watch and hopefully get more.
Guest:And Evan, it was great talking to you.
Guest:Thanks for doing this with us.
Guest:And, you know, as always, if you're ever interested in just talking wrestling, anything having to do with it, we're around here on Fridays.
Guest:Oh, man, I'd love to.
Guest:I'd absolutely love to.
Guest:If you guys are getting into any good vintage stuff, you know, definitely hit me up.
Guest:You want to watch some FMW?
Guest:We can definitely go to town on that whenever you're ready.
Guest:Yeah, I still got my Insane Clown Posse Stranglemania tape sitting on my shelf with Japanese death matches.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I might have to be convinced on that one, but I'm missing.
Guest:I'd love to watch that.
Guest:It's a good time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right, Evan.
Guest:Thanks a lot, man.
Guest:Good talking to you.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Guest:So, yeah, Chris, I mean, I think he puts a lot of thought into that show.
Guest:I don't ever get the sense that there's anything about it that's being sensationalized or that they're just looking for the most salacious things possible.
Guest:Like he really is a storyteller and wants to tell the best possible stories about wrestling.
Guest:And I'm pretty impressed with the scope of things they choose to cover on the show.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:And I'm kind of amazed that he didn't get to this story until season four.
Marc:I would have thought because of the high profile of Sunny, she was the Internet's first pinup girl that this would have been like a season one or season two episode.
Marc:No, but no season four.
Guest:Yeah, well, it just goes to show how many stories there are.
Guest:But yeah, if you want to check that out, it's on Vice.
Guest:This new season premieres May 30th.
Guest:There's I think the first three seasons, you can pretty much watch them on demand if you have access to Vice.
Guest:And so, you know, it's not going to be the most uplifting stuff when it comes to watching wrestling.
Guest:But I guess that's why we at the end of the show usually highlight our best thing we saw in wrestling during the week.
Guest:Do you have a candidate for this week, Chris?
Guest:Oh, man.
Marc:Can I say, I didn't think much going in, like looking at the AEW card.
Marc:I was like, all right, this Falls Count Anywhere match, I'm sure it'll be okay.
Marc:It blew me away.
Marc:It was fantastic.
Guest:That was my favorite thing, too.
Guest:This was AEW Dynamite.
Guest:It was the Chris Jericho, Roderick Strong, Falls Count Anywhere match, which means you can pin the guy anywhere that you want.
Guest:You can go outside of the ring.
Guest:You could go elsewhere in the arena.
Guest:You go outside the arena.
Guest:I want to point out, though, before we talk about it, that the booking of this match...
Guest:I want to just take a little credit for basically sniffing out this booking a week ago.
Guest:Yes, you did.
Guest:To the T, right?
Guest:I think I basically told you exactly what was going to happen, and it did.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Because there were stipulations where Adam Cole was not allowed in the arena.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And so Adam Cole's best friend challenges Chris Jericho to a fight.
Marc:And he says, well, guess what?
Marc:JS also not allowed in the arena.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He bans Chris Jericho's friends from the building as well because Adam Cole has already been banned from the building.
Guest:Adam Cole cannot be in the building when Chris Jericho is in the building.
Guest:And I said to...
Guest:To you, well, you see where this is going, right?
Guest:And I'm like, no.
Guest:Go on.
Guest:It's a false count anywhere.
Guest:You can pin the guy anywhere, all right?
Guest:He's banned the guy from the building.
Guest:Well, they're going to go fight all over the place and wind up outside the building.
Guest:And then Adam Cole's going to show up and kick the shit out of him and he's going to pin him.
Guest:And sure enough, that's what happened.
Guest:And as with most things in wrestling, it was totally satisfying.
Guest:I was not unhappy that I guessed the ending.
Marc:can i just say i'm again amazed that you can see through everything and see the finale and i'll be honest with you i'm okay not having that skill set no because i loved i love being like surprised and it's just it's just really really well executed uh programming by them
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:They also, they fought in some fun places.
Guest:There was a point where they went into a stairwell and there was like a little ledge on a stairwell.
Marc:I was so nervous that they were going to mess that up, but they were pros and they even got to count Aubrey.
Marc:Yeah, our friend Aubrey.
Guest:Yeah, she was counting them against the railing of the stairs.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:There was a pie that was thrown in the face.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It was not a pie.
Guest:It was Mr. Softy.
Guest:It was like a basin of soft serve ice cream that they got from the concession stand.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:They were being like suplexes onto like those condiment stands.
Marc:It was a really fun match.
Guest:He took hand sanitizer and rubbed it into his eyes, which I was like, that's great.
Guest:That does burn.
Guest:Like, you ever do that by accident?
Guest:That sucks.
Marc:Oh, if I have a paper cut, it sucks.
Guest:Yes, and it's eventually wound up going outside this arena in Austin, Texas, and the pin occurred in like a garden bed, essentially.
Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I like to think that they'll erect like a statue around this garden bed.
Marc:Like this is where Chris Jericho was pinned.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And, you know, it also always helps when it's a Chris Jericho match, knowing, having spoken to him on the show, knowing how much he thinks about like the goofy things.
Guest:Like he's, he's the kind of guy thinking ahead, being like, now I want to make sure I get ice cream all over my face here.
Marc:Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
Guest:uh well that was a fun match and we will put a link to it in the uh comment section here and along with in that comment section as always click on the link if you want to send us some suggestions you know we're uh we're long on time today we'll save it for another time someone wrote in wanting to know about our favorite announcers and commentators in wrestling and i think we can basically start with that next week so uh
Guest:We will do that.
Guest:It will be a little tribute to the people behind the mics that we think are the best.
Guest:But until then, I'm Brendan.
Guest:That's Chris.
Peace.