Notes on Chris Jericho and Trish Stratus

– During his recent Talk Is Jericho podcast, AEW star Chris Jericho reflected on his 2008 feud with WWE Hall Of Famer Shawn Michaels, and why one match they had at the Judgment Day pay-per-view was the starting point of WWE cutting down on “showing color” on their programming. Check out what he had to say below (per Fightful):

“It’s very much the reason why we got away from blood. Shawn got so much blood in that first match of the series, just a normal match where he got color. I think it was in Omaha or something like that. Or somewhere in Kansas, Wichita, maybe. So much blood that Vince was like, ‘We’re done. No more blood.’ Shawn will tell you, that was the one… I know that Shawn bled so bad that Vince was like, ‘We’re done with blood.” Because after that is when Dave Bautista got some blood in the cage and got that huge fine. I got fined when Flair got color, which is a whole other story. But he was fining people at that point in time. ‘No more blood!’ I’m not kidding, it’s a well-known story, he fined Dave Bautista a hundred grand for getting color in the cage match we had for the World Title in Tampa. He was very, very vigilant about it and it was because Shawn got so much color. Someone must have said something.”

– Wrestling Inc reports that during the For The Love of Wrestling convention, Trish Stratus spoke about getting pitched an angle by Vince McMahon in which she stripped down to lingerie and barked like a dog. It was one of the more controversial segments of the Attitude Era.

She said: “Vince pitched the angle to me like this — ‘so we’re going to have this angle where you are barking like a dog and get really humiliated, and basically hit rock bottom.’ And I was like, ‘amazing!’ Because I knew a couple of weeks later, I would be getting my comeuppance on him and I would be slapping him on the grandest stage of them all, which is Wrestlemania, and turning on him. I was going on to stand up for myself, not needing a man to lean on and fighting for what I needed to fight for. I get questioned about that a lot, and most people go, ‘oh, remember you had to bark like a dog and you had to do that thing that was so degrading, right? For the character, it was, yeah, because that was what the character had to go through. We don’t talk to Halle Barry when she had to get abused by so and so, you know, it’s a character. That, for me, was integral for the character to be at that rock bottom, to have the foresight to say, ‘I can break free from this. I won’t let this happen to me again and let’s move on.’ And you know what? 22 years, we’re still talking about it!.“