Former WWE Creative Members Talk Katie Vick Angle, Vince McMahon's Input

Former WWE creative members Seth Mates and Chris Gough were guests on The LAW's "Review a Wai" podcast this past Wednesday to chat about the October 21st ,2002 "Katie Vick" edition of Raw. The full show and interview is available for download at this link, as well on iTunes and the free Stitcher app.

Here are some highlights, transcribed by Chris Maffei.

The genesis of the Katie Vick storyline: "At this point, (Vince) wanted to start having a lot more backstories to wrestlers. He didn't want it just to be like, 'Oh, I wanna beat you up. You stole my girlfriend, let's have a match.' He wanted it to be more like, 'I wanna know who every character is.' Their backgrounds, and a lot of that. You've seen through the years of wrestling, he's gone up and down with this kinda stuff.

"It was just a matter of, 'We want to know more about Kane. We know about Paul Bearer and the burning angle, and the Undertaker scenario, but we don't really know much more about him. So let's spend the last ten minutes of this conference call discussing Kane's background and coming up with a way to bring Kane back,' because he had torn his bicep, and he was coming back to TV. It started off with us pitching ideas about how to bring Kane back."

Vince McMahon's pitch: "At the end of the call, Vince basically made the call to say, 'Why don't we make Kane...why don't we say he's a murderer, and he's murdered somebody in his past?' It sort of formulated into what you saw. This was Vince's seed."

The funeral home shoot: "The necrophilia thing had only really begun in that vignette. That vignette was done by Stephanie (McMahon), Vince, and Bruce (Pritchard), and I believe it was mostly Stephanie; Stephanie Triple H, and Vince were the ones behind that. This wasn't discussed; Triple H was involved the whole time, so no one had to explain it to him. He was obviously almost part of the family at the point, he knew everything that was going on. Kane, on the other hand, he was getting a little bored with his direction. He had the big start in '97, and it ran its course. He wanted to change it up a little bit, so they decided they were gonna push him to go for a title run eventually, for the World Heavyweight Championship against Triple H in October. It was a situation where he knew it was going to be a big push, he's taking on Triple H.

"The angle was basically, 'There's a backstory here where he's gonna start picking on you for your girlfriend dying, and that he's gonna start acting like you killed her, and he's gonna start playing more emotional mind games with Kane.' That was the pitch, with Triple H and Kane. There was no, like, 'Hey, by the way, he's gonna say that you banged your ex-girlfriend when she was, uh, dead.' That was never even talked about until the vignette aired, and it really wasn't talked about after that again. That wasn't an idea by a writer, that wasn't pitched to anybody. That was the vignette that was of the sick minds of the McMahon family that was taped in the funeral home that night."