Bruce Prichard Recalls Nixed WWE Evil Clown Idea, How His Character Would Be Involved
The first ever SmackDown was a recent topic on Something To Wrestle With. Bruce Prichard detailed how SmackDown came to be and discussed some ideas for the show. Also discussed was creative ideas for characters, which included the repackaging of Mosh from The Headbangers.
"Headbangers were on the shelf because Thrasher [Glen Ruth] was injured," said Prichard. "He had a knee injury and was on the shelf. Mosh was not. Mosh [Chaz Warrington] was sitting there, a hell of a talent, and we thought that we had gone as far as we could go with The Headbangers, maybe we could do something with them individually. Chaz Warrington [Mosh] had made the mistake of showing me his driver's license one time and made the comment that people always made the comparison of him looking like Beaver Cleaver, which I started calling him The Beav from that point forward. Which everyone started calling him The Beav."
"It was my fault, but I didn't know they would end up calling him 'Beaver Cleavage.' That was a Vince Russo brain-child. Yes, it was my fault for calling him 'Leave it to Beaver' and calling him The Beav. Yes, I might have said, 'Hey, why don't we just call him Beaver Cleaver's son?' The rest of it just went within the mind of Vince Russo. Yes, I will take credit for f***ng that up. That is what happens when you make suggestions sometimes. Suggestions become reality and then you go, 'Oh my God.'"
Prichard then recalls the idea to repackage Thrasher into an evil clown, which was to be a new Doink the Clown.
"The idea behind that was to essentially take Doink the Clown, create a new Doink the Clown," Prichard said. "I felt that Glen Ruth had the ability wrestling-wise to be that evil, sick, worker. Matt Borne [Doink the Clown], and I obviously always loved that Doink the Clown gimmick. The idea behind my new character was going to be something like... did you ever see Saturday Night Live with Dan Aykroyd and he is doing the basimatic? That was going to be my character.
"Part of it was for me to go down and to collect the Basketball and the deer head, and all that other b**lls–t. We were going to do an auction site to boot and I was going to be the host of this auction site. We would sell all that stuff towards an auction and it was just going to be part of the show and another way to drive people to WWF.com. In that, I was going to become a heel character to be in charge of DTK Enterprises, which was Doink the Clown. Get it? You spell Clown with a 'K'. Black hair, black mustache and goatee and everything. I showed up at TV with my hair black and I swear I looked like Bradshaw's older brother."
To hear more about the inception of Smackdown and its first episode, you can listen to the full episode of Something to Wrestle With here.