{"id":21701,"date":"2015-11-02T11:54:56","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T16:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/?p=21701"},"modified":"2016-02-27T15:18:58","modified_gmt":"2016-02-27T20:18:58","slug":"podcast-the-tmptow-interview-bill-apter-and-the-blue-meanie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/news\/podcast-the-tmptow-interview-bill-apter-and-the-blue-meanie\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcast: The TMPToW Interview Bill Apter And The Blue Meanie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling has the honor of sitting with both the &#8220;Godfather&#8221; of wrestling journalism Bill Apter and the colorful and always delightful member of the bWo, Brian Heffron aka The Blue Meanie. First up is Bill Apter to discuss his book &#8220;Is Wrestling Fixed?.. I Didn&#8217;t Know It Was Broken&#8221; and to tell stories of a simpler time in professional wrestling and discussing everything from is kayfabe dead to his highly publicized theory on the &#8220;Benoit murders&#8221;. Additionally John and Chad chat with the always comical and very insightful, Brian Heffron who discusses how ECW pulled off some amazing ahead of it&#8217;s time production on a &#8220;shoe-string&#8221; budget and how ECW continues to live on because of the passion of the fans.<\/p>\n<p>Full Episode Download Link:<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"bbc_url\" title=\"External link\" href=\"http:\/\/tmptow.podomatic.com\/entry\/2015-10-12T21_00_00-07_00\" rel=\"nofollow external\">http:\/\/tmptow.podoma&#8230;T21_00_00-07_00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Blue Meanie Talks His Job Squad Role in WWF &amp; Playing Bluedust:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/H4W1sBZMvPA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Approaching the twenty year anniversary of the bWo:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Me, Nova and Stevie were just talking about that at Chikara and were like &#8220;can you believe this&#8221;? It&#8217;s just insane. When I happened to wrestle JBL on Smackdown in 2005 we were sitting in JBL&#8217;s limo about to come out and Nova just quipped and said that it&#8217;s like thirteen years later and the bWo is still around and the nWo is not. It&#8217;s a little bit of a funny thing between the three of us but he had a good point.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>How did the bWo get so over with the ECW fans:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Todd (Gordon) and Paul (Heyman) saw the crowd reactions and I think they just saw dollar signs and realized they could make t-shirts. The crowd just took to it. The ECW crowd is kind of like A Night at the Apollo where you go out there and the crowd could make you or they could kill you. If they don&#8217;t like you, you will know in about five seconds. I was fortunate that that rabid ECW crowd took to us and I think that is because we weren&#8217;t trying to be like everybody else on the card. Stevie is super talented, Nova is super talented and I did the comedy stuff and I think we all brought a different element onto the show, we were a little bit light hearted.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Where does he draw the comedic elements from in the Blue Meanie:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My two loves growing up were wrestling and comedy. I loved Ricky Steamboat and I loved George Carlin. A lot of my facial mannerisms are an inspiration from George Carlin when he would overly sell a face.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Filming the infamous Christmas in Times Square vignette:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s this video going around where this guy made a hip hop video on like a $396 budget or something like that and they are showing how he put it all together and I&#8217;m thinking, I did that in ECW. In the movie business they call it &#8220;run and gun&#8221; where you go and film and leave to get around permits. The Santa Claus wasn&#8217;t a wrestler, he was just a street performer. We walked around all day just filming stuff and saying what should we do and this guy taps us on the shoulder wearing a Santa suit with a Spanish accent and said that he wanted to be on TV and the funny thing is about that Stevie-kick. That was second one he gave him. He did the Nestea-plunge on the concrete and we were selling it like is he getting up?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Being a part of recent WWE Network projects and ECW DVD releases:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I knew WWE was coming to town for Smackdown in October 2014 and I hadn&#8217;t been backstage in about ten years and I&#8217;ve got friends that still work there and I did the right thing and I got permission to stop by and I saw JBL. Even though we had our beef back in the day we are cool now and he included me on his web show. After, I was talking to a producer and said you guys have the network and you have these countdown shows so if you need somebody to talk about ECW, so I gave him my card. They called me the next afternoon and said they were doing an ECW DVD and it created another opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apter talks wrestling memories and his new book, Meanie talks WWE, Job Squad, ECW, the BWO, DVD releases, more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21708,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-tmptow"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21709,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21701\/revisions\/21709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crazymax.org\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}