10 Shocking WCW Plans That Almost Happened
7. NWO Nitro And WCW Thunder
Upon the New World Order forming and becoming the most white-hot act in the wrestling industry, the bloom eventually came off the nWo rose when the group's ranks began to swell and swell and swell, as body after body was added to one of the various incarnations of the nWo.
There came a point when barely a single segment of a Nitro or Thunder episode would go by without hearing the famed nWo theme or the WolfPac variant, with it feeling as if a legit 80% of the roster was signed up to one of the nWo arms.
For viewers, it became a painful experience, as what was once great became utterly diluted. But there was actually a logical reason and rhyme behind having such a vast amount of talent tied to the nWo colours - with Eric Bischoff having revealed that the reason for such a large number of nWo-associated stars was to give the nWo letters its own weekly show.
On his 83 Weeks podcast in 2019, Easy E explained how the nWo names were to be spotlighted solely on Nitro, while the standard, non-nWo WCW stars were to highlighted on Thunder.
“Towards the end of 1998, I realized that I was gonna have a really difficult time effectively splitting the brands between Thunder and Nitro. We kind of had the handcuffs put on us financially, and we just weren’t able to do the job that I knew we needed to do in order to effectively create two separate brands. And at that point I had already built the nWo up, anticipating a split, and realized it wasn’t really gonna happen the way I wanted it to. But yet, I had all this nWo talent roster built up.”
Skip ahead a few years, and Vince McMahon would follow Bischoff's lead and separate his roster between the Raw and SmackDown brands.