Evan Husney talks about The Rock's involvement in the new VICE series "Who Killed WCW?" and more.
'Who Killed WCW?' is the latest pro wrestling series coming to the VICE network from the creators of Dark Side of the Ring and Jason Eisener. The series will chronicle the several bumps in the road that WCW hit on the way down from their successful run opposite the WWE in the 1990s.
Evan Husney recently spoke with Fightful's Sean Ross Sapp about how the series came together. Husney revealed that, like many wrestling fans, he grew up a fan of WCW so the topic carries some sentimental weight for him. He also revealed that fans would often suggest the topic be covered on Dark Side and this is their way of exploring the subject in greater detail.
"Man, there's so much that led to this. I'll try to be brief. First off, I grew up as a huge WCW fan. I was more of a WCW fan as a kid than I was WWF at the time," said Husney. "I grew up in Minneapolis, Nitro came through a lot and so I went to all the Nitros that came through. Huge fan, played all the N64 games to death. So it holds a very special place in my heart. That's number one.
"Number two is anytime we were doing a new season of Dark Side of the Ring, we were putting it out on social media, ‘What do you guys wanna see for the next season?’ and 9 times out of 10, we would get responses from people to cover the death of WCW," he continued. "That was an often requested thing and we had looked into it many times in previous seasons and just couldn't wrap our heads around how we would do it in one or two episodes, it just didn't quite fit and we couldn't make it work and we were developing a podcast. We were, we still might do it. We were gonna do a Dark Side of the Ring kind of spin-off podcast that like would cover stories that are almost too big for the show."
Husney and Eisner would have some pretty big help with this series as they're once again teaming up with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Seven Bucks Productions. Husney revealed that Seven Bucks and VICE were completely on board with the project and everything came together quickly as they only began filming in December 2023.
"We thought maybe we could do it like, you know, the final years of WCW as a subject and it started, we just got so excited with this idea that we're like, wait, maybe this could be its own series for television," he recounted. "Then we'd done Tales from the Territories with Seven Bucks, Dwayne Johnson's production company, and VICE wanted to continue that collaboration. So just kind of these two perfect things like, ‘Well, what about this? Would you guys be interested in doing this doc about the sort of the last years of WCW?’ Seven Bucks was all on board, VICE was all on board and then we were off to the races and we only started filming it in December. So it's a very quick turnaround."
Speaking about working with The Rock for the project, Husney revealed that Johnson had not originally planned to sit down for an interview for the series but elected to do so after seeing a cut of the first episode.
"It was nothing we really planned on, per se, in terms of having The Rock sit down for an interview. But it just, as we started sending him cuts of the episodes, he was so enthusiastic about them and he loved that first episode, and he's like, I wanna sit down for this. We're like, ‘Awesome.’ It actually worked out more so in a practical way, because most of the people we interviewed for this had lived through the demise of WCW, and that was the whole point of this, by the way," said Husney. "The whole point was to not go the WWE framework because, you know, victors rewrite history and we didn't want to go down that path. It doesn't really get into—like it touches on it, but it doesn't really get into how—the WWE fought back in the Monday Night Wars and stuff. It touches on that briefly. So it doesn't get into the DX invasion and all that stuff. But anyway, we needed somebody to speak enthusiastically about the good days of WCW, and nobody involved with WCW these days is gonna speak enthusiastically about it. They're all kind of dejected, you know?"
Despite not having worked for WCW in his career, Rock, fueled by his passion for the industry, wound up being the perfect hype man for the glory days of World Championship Wrestling.
"So we needed a hype man. We needed somebody to put all this over and to talk about when it was good, how great it was and there's nobody better than The Rock to really do that," Husney said. "He also did touch on what his perspective was from the other side seeing how when WCW was kicking their ass like, ‘Whoa, we need to be inspired by this and we need to go more in that direction. I think it all worked out."
"Who Killed WCW?" premieres on VICE on June 4 at 10:00 p.m. ET.
Fans can check out the full interview with Evan Husney embedded above.
