Lucha Underground creative head Chris DeJoseph recently appeared on the Busted Open satellite radio show hosted by Dave Lagreca, Doug Mortman, and Mike Riker. Busten Open Airs Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays on Sirius 92 and XM 92 from 2-4 ET. The following are some interview highlights:
Was your plan to only have Lucha Underground for an hour?
No, it was always the plan to make it an hour. That’s where we’re starting at, I sometimes have to pinch myself and remind myself that we have only aired I think 21 episodes or 22 episodes at this point. So we’re relatively, very young in terms of wrestling and in terms of other wrestling shows out there. We take baby steps, personally I like the one hour format. I wrote for the WWE where you had to write 2 hours of Raw, 2 hours of SmackDown, a Main Event, Velocity, Heat, I think at one point we were writing 8 hours of television a week. I think creatively it’s tough to keep up with that type of schedule especially the way Connecticut changes things on the fly and makes changes to thing so often. Here, we’re generally more focused, we have an hour we can give you just enough and leave you wanting more and I that’s kind of fun, especially today, with television shows and Netflix, and Hulu they have time to sit down and invest some time for a brief amount of time. So I think if you can come in and tell a good story in an hour, I think people can accept that. Three hours is an awful long time to have a fan or audience member invested. It’s a tough task for them and I’m glad I don’t have to do that every week.
Has it been difficult working with Vampiro?
It is not difficult at all to work with Vampiro. He is one of the guys I think is most invested in wanting to see Lucha Underground succeed. He loves working on the show, and obviously Vampiro when he came on the show we asked him to be a color commentator and he had never done that before. It’s a lot different being a broadcaster than being a performer in the ring. It took him a little while to get his feet wet, but he’s really coming into his own as a character on the show and as a commentator with Matt Striker. He’s kind of learning the ropes and he’s been great. He does the Spanish, he does the English, he’s been an agent for matches. This guy’s been heavily involved. He eats and sleeps Lucha Underground.
What was your favorite angle that you worked while at WWE?
It was probably just because it was the highest rated segment I think was Edge’s Live Sex Celebration. It’s what I always try to claim as a little star. Obviously with Edge I just had so much fun. I think I was on Raw than I switched to Smackdown once Edge and Vickie were on Smackdown and Taker and Jeff Hardy and the Straight-Edge society and all that. That was a real fun time for me. I enjoyed that little run on Smackdown when I felt like Smackdown was better than Raw. I learned so much from Michael Hayes during that process, it really became a fun thing. I loved when we could compete with the Raw brand, they made the teams want to compete against one another. I think it made everyone want to do things differently and try to one-up one another. The talent would say like “I want to stay on the blue team”. I think they liked being on Smackdown, it was a nice friendly rivalry to try and jockey for position on the card, “Whose match is gonna be the Main Event?” Those things really added to the fun and I think it really added to the overall success of the product during that time. I think competition is a good thing.
Whose conception was Big Dick Johnson?
It was not mine. I think it all started as DX was coming back and we knew that and we were gonna have tricks be played on Vince McMahon. He was gonna walk through this hallway and run into a bunch of different things. I think it was a space alien and a guy with a penis pump, and like a Mariachi band and I think they scratched the Mariachi band and someone said “What if he runs into a group of male strippers?” Than someone added “Well, what if one is a chubby male stripper?” Than someone pointed to me and said “What if DJ was it? What if it was DJ”. I think I turned bright red and said ‘Oh my god’, then Vince looked at me and was like “Yeah that sounds good”. At that point you’re in a meeting with a bunch of people you look up to, you’ve got Arn Anderson and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat and everyone is turning their heads looking at you and you’re like “Yeah, well sure, I’ll do it”. Originally it was supposed to be a lot tamer than it was but I think I got reeled in by Triple H and Bruce Prichard into going all the way and squirting baby oil all over Vince’s $3,000 suit. After that I think Hunter told me like “You never know you might get booked” Who knows what will happen? And I think the next week Paul Heyman put me in a match against The Sandman on Easter. I tried to keep it a secret for a while, I didn’t even tell my family and then I think I told my Mom on Christmas, that was my gift for her. (Laughs)
Nick was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and lived there until the age of 18, when he decided to pack his flack jacket and move to New York City.
