Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
World Championship Wrestling was once the hottest wrestling promotion in the world…until it wasn’t. Now there were a variety of reasons why WCW lost its grip on being the premiere organization…bad booking, overspending, lack of build on the youth of the company, wrestlers with guaranteed multi-million dollar contracts with creative control over their characters etc. With all of that, it certainly did not stop WCW head Eric Bischoff for throwing things at a wall and seeing if they stuck. One of those things, was an idea to produce a wrestling sitcom.
Yes, you heard that correctly, at one point, WCW seriously flirted with the idea of putting together a television sitcom based on young, good looking wrestlers who were high schoolers by day and pro wrestlers after the final school bell rang. It all was planned in the Summer of 1999, Eric Bischoff had the idea to create a situation comedy that would be a spin on the popular show ‘Saved by the Bell’ with fast paced, high flying wrestling action. How close would this show resemble Saved by the Bell? Bischoff was able to snag Saved by the Bell’s creator Peter Engel to sign off on the project and be a part of its creation.
The untitled comedy would be an hour long. The first half would be these teenagers dealing with every day life as high schoolers and all the adventures they would experience. The second half of the show would be these same teens wrestling for their own indie promotion. Instead of the show using familiar WCW faces for the project, Eric Bischoff wanted fresh, young faces to star in it. To do that, Bischoff went to Chris Kanyon who had a solid reputation within the company of scouting talent. Kanyon discovered Billy Kidman on the independents and brought him to WCW and became a star. Bischoff knew Kanyon had a keen eye for talent and felt that he would be up for the task.
While Kanyon enjoyed being a WCW scout, he did feel that Bischoff was taking advantage of him and referred to himself as Eric’s “errand boy.” Kanyon wasn’t paid anything extra to watch countless video tapes of wrestlers and go to indie shows which irritated him. Regardless, Kanyon immediately went to work and his first signing was Shannon Moore. Moore knew a few other wrestlers that he wrestled and and were friends with including Shane Helms, Christian York and Joey Matthews while competing for the hot indie fed called OMEGA. Others that Kanyon recruited were Jamie Noble, Jimmy Yang and Shark Boy.
A total of 10 wrestlers were recruited by Chris Kanyon to be a part of this Peter Engel/WCW produced show. Kanyon said that Eric Bischoff allotted him $400,000 to divvy up between the wrestlers in any way Kanyon saw fit. Kanyon said he did what was only fair and gave each wrestler $40,000 each. While the newly signed wrestlers were awaiting instructions to move ahead and star in this project…they all needed a place to live. Kanyon owned a six bedroom house complete with an inground pool and hot tub. He lived alone in this spacious house and invited the wrestlers to stay with him and train while they waited for a script to be made.
The place was unofficially called ‘Klub Kanyon’ and according to Kanyon did him more harm than good by housing all these young men. Talk was spreading backstage in WCW, that Kanyon was homosexual. While that was indeed the case, Kanyon hid that fact as much as he possibly could…fearing it might hurt his own career.
Unfortunately, the show never got off the ground, as Eric Bischoff was fired by WCW and with his firing…went all of his projects including this one. It wasn’t a complete loss for the company, as many of the wrestlers were simply added to the roster with some becoming stars themselves. As for the show, who knows if it would have failed or succeeded? Peter Engel might have created a cult favorite if given the chance…instead the show went into laugh traction.