Exclusive: James Mitchell On Seeing He & Abyss In Jimmy Jacobs & Kongo Kong, Tomorrow’s Monster’s Ball, Why Managers Never Went Away, More

On if the role of managers in pro wrestling is fading away or finding a resurgence:

JM: I don’t know that there will ever be a resurgence but when they say, “managers went away,” they didn’t. They just called them something else. Vince McMahon Jr. went away from his father’s formula which was three heel wrestling managers that sent their charges after the World Champion. That was a perennial thing forever. Vince just changed the name.

Vince McMahon, for all intents and purposes even though he was the owner of the company, functioned as a heel manager. Eric Bischoff did the same when he was running WCW. Various companies have been doing it, they just change the name. Maybe instead of being in charge of one person or two people, a tag team, they are exerting their heelish influence over the entire roster in one way or another. The thing is, everyone wants to follow the industry leader. Because Vince McMahon doesn’t call them managers and he calls them “General Managers”, or whatever else, that’s what everybody hops on the bandwagon and tries to do.

One of the things that TNA did that separated it from others, back in the day, was presenting people like Scott D’Amore and myself as managers. As the acting manager and mouthpiece for their charges. I think it would be a good thing for TNA to introduce that and keep it as a staple that would differentiate itself from the competition.

On his memories of working with Mortis and Wrath in WCW and the “Mortal Kombat characters” invasion of WCW that also involved Glacier:

JM: They were slated to be the big thing. They were going to be the thing that was completely different and we were supposed to be the top of the food chain. Sometimes unforeseen circumstances happen and when Hulk Hogan joined the NWO wrestling immediately had the focus go away from the over the top characters to a more behind-the-scenes reality based presentation of the talent.

At that point I don’t think in that environment there was anymore they could have done with us. I’ll never complain about it. We had a great top of the mid-card, high production, featured position. It was a great learning experience because I got to make my national television debut in the middle of pro wrestling’s biggest boom period. It was a lot of fun and had the NWO not come along wrestling may have been a different place.

I will say this, Bischoff was ahead of the curve because what he was looking at was the trend of kids going towards video games and tuning out of wrestling. He was kind of putting that together as a way to draw that demographic back in. He was a bit of a visionary in that regard but he changed his vision not long into the game plan.