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A WCW logo that was left unused from their 1999 rebrand has been revealed on Twitter.
The company changed their logo and set in April 1999, with complaints that they did a horrible job of it. Most will agree that the classic-looking WCW logo, which just showed the three letters neatly in a row, was a great look that didn’t need changing.
However, they did change it! The logo was completely altered, flattening the W’s and making the C much taller yet much thinner. It didn’t look like the initials “WCW” and confused a lot of people.
Eric Bischoff didn’t like the rebrand, despite being in charge of the company at the time. The new WCW logo was so unclear that in commercials they would simply write out the name of the company rather than subject fans to that eyesore. It was a failure in every metric.
However, you’ll be pleased to know that things could have been worse. Guy Evans, the author of “Collection: NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW”, posted an unused design for the WCW logo from 1999 on Twitter.
This logo was even more of a mess. It featured two jagged and uneven W’s at an angle, looking like they’d been drawn by Waluigi. The C was thankfully more legible in this one. However, it was also crooked, jagged and looked like it’d been drawn by somebody with no experience in logo design.
The design did not resemble the letters “WCW”. It appears that in 1999, everyone involved in the company just had bad idea after bad idea, including in branding and creativity.
David Penzer on Jimmy Hart
David Penzer spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard to promote his new book, Sitting Ringside Volume 2. Several of Penzer’s stories focus on “The Mouth of the South” Jimmy Hart, who has played a large role in his career.
“Jimmy is doing great. But Jimmy, the layers of things that he’s added, the careers that he’s helped — just off the top of my head, look at Three Count. There’s these three guys that sent in tapes separately, for the most part. And Jimmy came up with a gimmick, he wrote a song, made these green circles, that was all Jimmy,” Penzer explained. “There’s so many times he has done that for people, whether it was in the XWF or with Kid Kash and Emory Hale or in Memphis even.
“He did the DJ challenge [events]. When we couldn’t draw a house in WCW, he would call in every morning and morning drive for three weeks and do an angle with the DJ. The DJ would pick a wrestler and he would pick his guy and it ended up with the DJ getting his hand raised. You can’t imagine how many tickets that actually drew. There were people that were coming just to see the DJ try to get his one up on Jimmy Hart and the wrestler. That was just an idea. Over the course of WCW and independent shows, and XWF — he probably did it 100, if not 250 times. And he got up 5 o’clock in the morning, every morning. It’s just incredible.”
Jimmy Hart asked Penzer to be part of the WCW Saturday Night booking team
“The big guys didn’t want to do it anymore. They had their hands full with five hours of Nitro and Thunder. We just did simple booking, but he included me in all that,” Penzer explained. “I was a part of the team as much as — I wasn’t a junior member of the team like I was in other places. I was an equal part of the team and he’s just always been there for me. And I said to him today, ‘Hey, you know I have this book out and I thank you in the acknowledgments. I [wrote] that there was never a project since we met that you never included me on.’
“And he said, ‘I did that because I was smart and I know your value.’ What do you say to something like that? [laughs] So I told him I loved him, he said love you back and we laughed a little bit about the thing last night in LA and it is what it is,” he continued. “But you are right on the money. I can’t tell you how underestimated he is as far as everything he has done.”
