Former WWE writer: Court Bauer was recently interviewed by the Wrestling Inc. Podcast. During the interview, he shared the original idea for the Punjabi Prison match. It turns out that the final product that we ended up seeing was much different than the original concept.
According to Bauer, the match was supposed to be similar to the ‘exploding deathmatch’ that has happened in various promotions around the world. Here is what he said about his original pitch:
“The original idea actually was rooted in my pitch in the Spring of 2006 to bring the exploding deathmatch made famous in IWA Japan and FMW to the States because it’s one of the rare things WWE had never touched. And SmackDown needed a shot in the arm, we needed a specialty match, we needed something a little different. We had some good brawlers and I thought well we could build to something with this. We were just talking out loud and [Vince McMahon] turned down War Games, he always does and always will. And I said what about this and I had a whole presentation, it wasn’t off the cuff, I showed him footage, I had a whole package — a real pitch put together for this. And Vince thought about it and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ There we started on our path to the exploding deathmatch coming to WWE for what was tracking to be the summer of 2006.”
Bauer says Kevin Dunn was put in charge. The finished product ended up looking much different than what was originally pitched, leaving many people backstage perplexed:
“Ultimately, Kevin sent us the final product. Not mock-ups, the final product, it’s built. And it looks like a set piece from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I don’t know what to make of it, a play set some poor child would get killed on. Unanimously across the writer’s room, jaws dropped. And we’re looking at this thing doing double takes. I remember Dusty Rhodes taking his granny glasses and pulling them from the edge of his nose, close up top to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. And he was like, ‘Man it looks like Lincoln Logs.’ And I thought to myself, unless the bamboo explodes, which would be a safety hazard, this has mutated into something perverse and it’s not what we had pitched Vince. And usually when you pitch Vince onto something and he gives you the green light, that’s locked, sealed and delivered going to happen. For whatever reason, I never got a real answer, whether Kevin just wanted to do something different or something got lost in translation, we ended up doing this bizarre concept.”
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