Lucha Underground’s co-executive producer Chris DeJoseph was on a recent episode on Busted Open Radio, where he talked about working with Lucha Underground, and WWE. You can read the highlights below:
Lucha Underground’s format:
“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 21 episodes or 22 episodes. So we’re very young in terms of wrestling, and in terms of other wrestling shows out there. We take baby steps. I like the one hour format. I wrote for WWE where you had to write 2 hours of Raw, 2 hours of SmackDown, Main Event, Velocity, Heat. I think at one point we were writing 8 hours of television a week. Creatively it’s tough to keep up with that type of schedule, especially the way Connecticut changes things on the fly. Here, we’re generally more focused, we have an hour we can give you just enough and leave you wanting more and that’s kind of fun. Today, with television shows and Netflix, and Hulu, they have time to sit down and invest for a brief amount of time. I think if you can come in and tell a good story in an hour, 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.”
Rumors of Vampiro being hard to work with:
“It’s not difficult at all to work with Vampiro. He’s one of the guys who is most invested in wanting to see Lucha Underground succeed. He loves working on the show, and 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. He does the Spanish, he does the English, he’s been an agent for matches. He eats and sleeps Lucha Underground.”
Who had the idea of Big Dick Johnson in WWE?:
“Not mine. It all started as DX was coming back and we knew that, and we were going have tricks be played on Vince McMahon. He was going to walk through this hallway and run into a bunch of different things. I think it was a space alien, a guy with a p—s pump, and a Mariachi band. I think they scratched the Mariachi band and someone said “What if he runs into a group of male strippers?” Then someone added “Well, what if one is a chubby male stripper?” Then 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 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.”
DeJoseph goes on to talk at length about his work with Lucha Underground, as well as his favorite angles while working for WWE. You can listen to the full podcast at this link.
