In a new video, WWE legend Randy Orton pulled back the curtain on how messy of a situation TV tapings were under Vince McMahon compared to how it is right now.
Randy Orton made his triumphant return to the ring in November after a year away following spinal fusion surgery, and he has looked as good as ever. No member of the roster is as tenured as “The Viper” and he has seen it all after beginning his WWE career in his early 20s.
He just missed out on the Attitude era but was a key member of the Ruthless Aggression and PG eras. He also was around for the period when Vince McMahon went from a professional wrestling genius to an aging icon who lost all the speed on his creative fastball.
For the last few years, there have been various reports about how chaotic WWE TV broadcasts were, as well as how different things are now with McMahon gone and Paul Levesque, Bruce Prichard, and Nick Khan running the company. During an impromptu interview with Adam Glyn at an airport recently, Orton went into more depth about how “stressful” things were in the final years of McMahon’s reign over the company.
Randy Orton says Vince McMahon was putting out a poor product each week with chaotic planning at TV tapings
“With Nick Khan, Triple H, and Bruce Prichard, so many things have changed from a creative standpoint. They’re thinking months and months and months in advance,” Orton said. “Before, we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants. Creative was changed minutes before we went live each week. I don’t mean sometimes. I mean, each week creative was changed. It’d be 05:00 PM, you’d be on the East Coast going live in two or 3 hours, and you wouldn’t know what you were doing.
“That’s a very stressful environment, and you’re not going to have the best product in the world if you’re doing it like that every week,” he added. “So just purely from a creative standpoint, you’re able to let it marinate and think about, okay, how am I gonna do this? Or how can I make this better? Or maybe there are tweaks, but you don’t do it ten minutes before you go live.”
The revelation isn’t necessarily new but it is fascinating that Randy Orton is afraid to take a subtle jab at the long-time boss that made him a millionaire and praising his former Evolution teammate Paul “Triple H” Levesque.
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