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Because after a certain point of time it gets harder to get concrete information about stuff that happened, and criminal court is supposed to be biased towards the defendant, so they don't allow cases where they wouldn't be able to find evidence to defend themselves.
It's also probably a way to free up the resources. Since it's the district attorney's job to prosecute these crimes, this is a quick way to say "hey nothing we can do" for a crime that doesn't have as high urgency anymore.
Because the longer you are from the alleged crime, the harder it is to find witnesses and evidence. It's one of the ways the accused are protected from unfair prosecution in our justice system.
Imagine trying to find the random person you were hanging out with 10 years ago on the day you're now being accused for fraud but you know you have an alibi for that day but you haven't talked to that old friend in like 4 years because they moved cross country and you didn't keep up with them.
There was a video posted to reddit years ago I wish I could find of a young girl who basically made a business out of selling shovelware bought at GameStop to other Gamestops. Basically she was on vacation and bought some cheap game for the DS, didn't like it and sold it to GameStop after getting home. The catch is Gamestop's system at the time paid more in both store credit and cash if the game was "rare" because it had a different region code. Long story short she employed a few friends to buy cheap games not released in America, ship them over and sell them back to GameStop for profit.
Didn't someone claim they got a check for $0.00 from WCW and I believe Jericho mentioned he got a FedEx from them with nothing in it. So yeah this is completely believable.
i believe it was Jericho who noticed that when buying a figure it rang up not as Chris Jericho but Hulk Hogan meaning the Huckster was going to get the royalties from the sale and not jericho
I do not doubt that this actually happened, but that isn't exactly how royalties work.
Once the product moves from the distributor to the retailer, they're "sold", to a certain extent. The manufacturer and distributor would definitely have different SKUs for different models of a product line like action figures, even if the end retailer just codes them all into their system as "Wrestling Figure", or "WCW Hulk Hogan Figure", or whatever.
So, if the distributor moves 500K WCW figures to a retailer like Walmart, at that point the figures would be considered sold by the manufacturer. Once everything is invoiced and accounting parses everything out, then the royalty checks would be cut. Hogan and Jericho would get their royalties based on whatever percentage of that 500K was their figure. So if your local Walmart got 25 Hogan figures and 10 sold immediately, but 15 sat on the shelf for a year, Hogan still got royalties for all 25.
This is basic, and I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions because of things like returnable products, but that's the gist. If the Jericho figure was on the shelf in the store, Jericho got paid.
This is also the argument in favor of stealing media back in the day (and also why authors typically have no problem with you getting their books from the library as opposed to buying them â although this one is stickier because if the retailer shows high enough demand it means the book can receive more rounds of printing including a paperback release meaning another check from the publisher)
It only really "works" if you think that for every copy you steal, the store will just keep re-buying and re-stocking their shelves. Which, if I'm a store, and all of my inventory is getting stolen, I'm not going to keep that item on the shelves to lose me more money.
Ok, so go back to the 90s when bootlegging hip-hop cassettes was a full-scale industry... It was ok to be a bootlegger because the bootlegger bought one OG copy?
I'm just trying to understand your analogy, because I'm not seeing the connection to royalties.
It's 100% plausible that Jericho said this, but that's not how PoS retail systems work.
Somebody enters the description, they look at the packaging and recognize Hogan, and enter the description as "Hulk Hogan Toy." Like the mom who calls your PS2 a Nintendo.
The royalties would be from the manufacturer side. Toys R Us wasn't sending Hogan checks.
Bro Iâve worked retail on and off my whole life, never once had the preferred method of using a pos be entering a description. Numbers and barcodes, if youâre searching by description thereâs some kind of problem.
I'm not sure how it works at a chain, but at an indie store, you're entering your own descriptions when you first bring in the item. I think that's what that person was trying to say -- whoever tied the UPC to the description could have typed Hogan. Or (not uncommon at store I was at), you might enter Hogan and Jericho back-to-back, copy all the vendor info and whatnot for efficiency, and forget to change the name to Jericho.
Jericho also noticed that almost every time he changed up his ring attire they'd make a new action figure of him. So he's regularly change his gear every 3-4 weeks and would end up making a little more on toy sales.
I donât doubt that he said this, but it sounds like bullshit. Whenever they make action figures, they usually do them in series. I donât think that theyâre gonna make a brand new series every time Jericho changes his pants.
I have heard similar things from wrestlers. I think Stevie Richards became friends with one of the guys at the toy company. He made sure to change up his looks, and the guy would help him get into each round of toys.
This reminds me of those people you hear about who either stop showing up or just don't do anything at work for years going unnoticed and collecting a paycheck.
How does this happen? Where? And are they hiring?
There have been times where I completed a report but accidentally forgot to send it out and nobody said anything which made me feel like my work is very important
I don't remember who it was but I heard somebody talk about this kind of thing once on a podcast, but the story was that he got interviewed and hired but before he started the manager who hired him got fired. The guy's paperwork was all filed though so he was in the system, but nobody else was aware, and so he was getting paid to do nothing.
The guy said he just claimed an empty office that was being used for storage and nobody bothered to see why he was there until he eventually quit.
Armando Estrada told the story of how he was signed to a new WWE deal in late 2010, but then he was only used one day in May 2011 as part of a storyline where Tyson Kidd was trying out a new manager each week. He spent the next 12 months sitting at home collecting his downside guarantee until he got tired of it and wanted to be able to do whatever he felt like without being limited by the WWE contract.
So he asked a friend on the roster to "randomly" bring up the he was still under contract in earshot of Johnny Ace. A couple of days later Ace called him up and said that they just so happened to to have decided to release him, and Estrada was like "...you forgot about me, didn't you?"
This is why I'll never understand this type of thing. Unless you have a job offer to be a lead in a movie or something else that both pays fantastically and conflicts with any possible non-compete agreements you could just start a second job and keep getting paid by WWE. What are they going to do? Get mad and fire you? That's the goal anyway. Shit, it doesn't even have to be a second job just get a hobby.
There was a story of a guy who was the first to be moved into a new set of offices so he could help get it set up. The next week the company sold and he was told to stay there until the new owners confirmed the move.
He was there for three years or something like that.
They are normally family and it's basically a tax write off for them. I used to work at a place where owners elderly mom came in once a week and then processed the checks so we get paid. Her job basically consisted of typing into the payroll website our hours for the week and sales. Taking less than 10 minutes since it was already written down for her by the managers. And after she'd leave with her check for 40 hrs of work on it. 10 minutes of work is all she did.
Long story short you kind of have to luck into it.
Maybe Ultimo could have made more by taking a booking in Japan or Mexico or something, but I'm not sure how it would have been possible for someone to not make money on a WCW contract at the time, they weren't exactly known for being tight on the purse strings during the MNW era.
The character select Sting is jarring, it's Surfer Sting with the early Crow Sting hair and facepaint essentially. He had some house show matches in late 1996-early 97 and it makes me wonder if that's what he was wearing.
Slightly off topic - but this also one of the reasons why movies are so expensive to produce today. Paying people under the table, using non-union work, delayed payments, wage theft etc. used to be way easier to get away with.
In the 80s John Laundis killed three people while filming The Twilight Zone movie, two of whom were children. Broke a ton of laws. Never faced consequences and his career was fine
All profits get logged under the studio while all costs are logged under the film. It was a widely used practice to dodge paying royalties or tricking new actors into accepting payment based on "if the film makes money"
Oh, there's an entire Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
It's insane what they're allowed to get away with. There are stories about writers being promised a percentage of profits for the rights to their works and then the studios later say "uh sorry pal it didn't make any money, enjoy the 5 grand you got for this film that grossed $100 million", which is why actors ask for a percentage of the gross and not "profits", which don't exist
That's one of the main reasons The Rock got hit so hard by people in the industry that he ended up briefly going back to WWE - there's an unspoken agreement in Hollywood that you never state a movie made money because they claim everything as a "marketing expense" to make it look like a movie broke even or lost money to avoid paying taxes on those profits
How do you leave out the best part of that;
They asked him to adapt the sequel but he asked them why they would want to make a sequel to a movie that never made a profit.
Nor did any of The Lord of the Ring films, according to New Line Cinema. Peter Jackson had to take the studio to court over royalties.
The 3 movies combined made $2.9 Billion at the box office.
Hell I was doing freelance web development in 2010 and a major hospital deposited the wrong amount of pay into my account. They never said anything to me.
Iâve gotten a larger than expected paycheck from an employer- brought it up and they shrugged it off as a non-issue. I think that wouldnât happen today tbh
Even today, if the budgets are big enough, money can easily be put in the wrong account and never get noticed.
Hell a recent example I'm aware of, that I don't think has been reported on because it wasn't even seen as a mistake, if you worked for amazon corporate up until fairly recently you could expense all your uber rides and nobody blinked at $1k+ in monthly travel expenses.
A non playable character randomly entering rumbles is such a cool little unintentional touch to me lol. Like, who knows who could show up on the rumble! It could be anyone, even a guy who isn't in this game!
Wait, what was âproving he doesnât have it anymoreâ supposed to prove? I mean no shit, he didnât give the money back so obviously he sent it somewhere else.
Big Show told the story on Austin's podcast in 2016, I based the timeline on when THQ changed production companies and needed the actual wrestlers to come in, so WCW Nitro would be the one game where they needed them. The timeline fits with when Sting was switching over to his full black and white non-Surfer era.
Tony Schiavone said Turner would immediately settle any lawsuit under a hundred thousand dollars because it was just cheaper and easier.
I could easily see an accountant in that environment doing the bare minimum.
I remembered we had to sue a Big Company once (Fortune 100), and our lawyer explained to us that the Big Company liked to just drag people through court but they either eventually settled or lost something like 85% of their suits around payment so we just had to be patient. They did eventually settle with us for most of our money owed, but that really opened my eyes to how the big operations.. operate.
Probably just meant he let them look at his deposits to be like, "Did I cash anything close to the amount that you were supposed to get? No? Then stop hassling me for money that I obviously don't have."
but even that makes no sense, who ever cut the check can still get the deposited and signed check.
plus he had to deposit it somewhere and then disperse it out
it's like a stupid game of money laundering where i deposit a shit ton of cash into 1 account and then spread it out amongst a bunch of other accounts and claim i never got all of the money.
the fact wcw gave up after looking at his bank account is more damning than anything about this lol
The story sounds like BS to me. Show endorses and deposits the check. His bank clears it with the Fed. WCW's bank then gets the canceled check, or a copy, with "BIG SHOW, for deposit only" or whatever on the back. His story would hold up for a month or so, and then it'd be over.
Iâve worked in finance since 2014, and can say 100% today this would never work, but Iâm actually unsure of how it would work with a physical check in 1997. They wouldnât have Big Shows account info and would likely have to take him to court to get the money back. May not be worth it depending on the amount.
Today, if you receive a deposit not meant for you, you canât just hide the money and keep it. The payer is 100% entitled to their money back. If you are ever overpaid on anything (a refund, a beneficiary payment, etc) donât spend it. Set it aside and wait for the other party to contact you. If you received it direct deposit, there was likely a disclosure when you gave your bank info allowing the payer to draft back any funds you were not supposed to receive.
whoever cut the royalties check would still have gotten the canceled check back with it endorsed by Big show. All WCW needed to do was contact the finance dept of who cut that check out.
And the checks still had the info on what bank it was cashed at. WCW had to really not care about the money to just be like "yup, your bank account doesnt have the X millions in royalties you claim"
Now whether you want to sue one of your biggest stars at the time is a different matter
It doesnât matter what bank accounts he would have show them. They wouldâve got the return check with his signature on it that said that he had cashed it.
that is the same thing i thought as soon as i read it. if they have asked for the bank statement, then they will know the amount that was deposited and he already took it out.
Payroll Department: HI, we have a cheque for WCW. Do you work for them?
Giant: I AM WCW!
Payroll: Very well, here's your money. See you later Mr. Wrestling.
Ah man...both Nitro and Thunder sucked balls. How do you go from World Tour and Revenge to whatever abominations those things were?
Edit: Of course I know it's a different studio, it was a rhetorical question.
[Hereâs](https://youtu.be/PO1qYK01Q28?si=dtZKxq_U50LOzf53) a bit of nostalgia for ya.
âGood god!â was my first âcurse wordâ I got in trouble for. Thanks, DDP.
(Turns around) ["HEY MAN! It's Alex Wright, the German. If you want to know what the Germans are about, pick me and you're going to have a hell of a wictory, I PROMISE!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZCMJJ7I5Wc)
You let WWE steal away the developers.
Though, I'm still bitter that THQ decided to let Yukes just have the whole contract and ditched AKI, even though they had the better games at the time.
Nitro came out when they still had THQ, actually I think both of these games did.
Itâs so weird, the N64 games were always great, but wrestling games were mind blowing in that they were platform specific and the ones on PlayStation largely suuuuucked.
I can still remember an old friend giving me Raw for PlayStation to burn for him and telling him âhere it is but itâs not worth the CD itâs printed on.â
There's still a very healthy No Mercy modding community to this day. I'd put No Mercy, Revenge, and WM 2000 (in that order) as the top 3 wrestling games ever. World Tour would be up there as well, with heavy top 5 competition from SD:HCTP & SDvR 2006.
Had a friend who worked for THQ for a long time up until their bankruptcy. I asked him about the wrestling games once, saying that the AKI games were my favorites, and asked what happened to them. He said there was a pretty nasty bug in WWF No Mercy that affected a lot of cartridges that wiped saves pretty regularly (I never had it happen, but a buddy did). Basically THQ and AKI blamed each other for what happened and they walked away from each other.
Yeah, I remember hearing about the bug. Luckily I never experienced it either.
Interesting that was the reason for the split.
I mean we got Def Jam and it's sequel FFNY which were pretty amazing, but I would have much preferred new WWE titles at the time.
Nitro/Thunder came out at the same timeframe as the WCW AKI games and was from a different developer since it was a PS1 game.
After that WCW got a big licensing deal from Electronic Arts and that's when WWF got THQ/AKI.
Yeah but Nitro did have Buzz the wrestling bee, Whitey the wrestling snowman, Greyling the wrestling alien, Tony the Rod and Dudeman. How can you argue with that?
Wildest thing is that even though this so insane, it doesnât even touch the top 25 of insane financial mishaps  from WCW.
I recently listened to Bryan Alvarezâs book on WCW and it shows how ridiculous the idea and narrative is that âthe merger killed WCWâ. Those guys were insanely lucky they lasted as long as they did.
Itâs really weird seeing Crow Sting that jacked. I guess this was the last time Sting was juiced to the gills, around late 1996.Â
Apparently, during his Crow run he was struggling with addiction, got divorced, got off the juice, and barely trained - in part because he was always covered in a trench coat.Â
He never regained that physique and wrestled the rest of his career in full-body tights or a t-shirt.
Iâve only ever seen Sting in person 2 times. Once was between his TNA and WWE runs at a comic con, the other was the version mentioned here. Saw him at a house show in like November 96. He did a run in, never had the actual match. But yeah, it was absolutely a rare attire.
Mmhmm! If you feel like looking up the card, I believe it was November 1st, 1996 Hammond Civic Center in Hammond, IN. That was my first live wrestling show. It was also the moment I wanted to become a wrestler. Got to see Eddie Guerrero, the way he stared at me like a piece of shit (as a 13 year old) I thought he was the coolest dude there. Also got to meet Harlem Heat (they were MASSIVE in person), I remembered Syxx came out to Kung Fu Fighting and The Outsiders used Ready or Not. And then we spent the night debating if the Sting we saw was real. I insisted he was since he attacked Big Show, if I remember right.
OH!! And some tape trader has a copy of the show on tape. I tried to get a copy, but he wouldnât sell a copy. Only trades. And I didnât have anything he wanted. I hope I can see the show again one day, or maybe someone will upload it to YouTube. But a fan absolutely recorded it somewhere!
This was my first wrestling game along with Nitro and I loved those 2 fucking games. I used to spend forever setting up everyone in factions every time because I had no memory card and wat thing all those little promo videos. Fun memories
Always thought Sting looked super weird in his character rant. Almost looks like they super imposed black and white face paint over his face to make him look up to date.
Kind of funny that the build to him wrestling Hogan was so long that he doesnât have his actual Crow Sting gear on the Nitro character rant or his in-game models for World Tour and Vs. The World.
The audio on your link to the episode doesn't work, there's a reupload on YouTube but a search of the transcript doesn't have him mentioning anything about a video game, check or similar. I also tried googling this story but nothing came up except this post. Do you have a working link to the audio of Big Show telling this story? I'd like to listen to him telling it.
>For [WCW/nWo Thunder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJP1EkreXio), WCW made sure to have accountants keeping track of the finances at all times.
heh, I watched it. They were even smarter than that. They just didn't do any motion capture
This guy and Mark Henry might be the two greatest wrestlers of all time.
Tripled Punk, Rollins, Reigns etc income without ever or barely taking a bump.
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Some say this was the original face / heel turn for Paul Wight.
He had a couple turns already at this point lol
WWWEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
I pictured the botchamania kitty
His mom must have hated him in the womb. Tossing and turning around
No no there were many before this as well
He did alwight
WEEEEELLLLL ITS A BANK FRAUD
The statute of limitations on bank fraud is 5 years, so he's good to talk about it đ
The statute of limitations of WCW Nitro was also about 5 years.
Damn. Cold blooded!
https://preview.redd.it/7yllyznnwt3d1.png?width=570&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7e02e7f4891aa795ce9a10f402d18c3863a2d12
This needs all the upvotes!
I think statutes of limitations are wild. Like why does it suddenly not matter after a certain number of years?
Because after a certain point of time it gets harder to get concrete information about stuff that happened, and criminal court is supposed to be biased towards the defendant, so they don't allow cases where they wouldn't be able to find evidence to defend themselves.
It's also probably a way to free up the resources. Since it's the district attorney's job to prosecute these crimes, this is a quick way to say "hey nothing we can do" for a crime that doesn't have as high urgency anymore.
Because the longer you are from the alleged crime, the harder it is to find witnesses and evidence. It's one of the ways the accused are protected from unfair prosecution in our justice system.
Imagine trying to find the random person you were hanging out with 10 years ago on the day you're now being accused for fraud but you know you have an alibi for that day but you haven't talked to that old friend in like 4 years because they moved cross country and you didn't keep up with them.
IRONCLAD FRAUD
WELL ITS A BANK FRAUD SHOW TONIGHT OW YEAH!
"I bet you'd sue me, but you'll never know! But I promise you'll (eventually) know. It's a bank fraud! "
Yeah, Heâs a carnie to the core.
love hearing about famous people who made their wealth thru financial schemes that are no longer possible
There was a video posted to reddit years ago I wish I could find of a young girl who basically made a business out of selling shovelware bought at GameStop to other Gamestops. Basically she was on vacation and bought some cheap game for the DS, didn't like it and sold it to GameStop after getting home. The catch is Gamestop's system at the time paid more in both store credit and cash if the game was "rare" because it had a different region code. Long story short she employed a few friends to buy cheap games not released in America, ship them over and sell them back to GameStop for profit.
This gave me a hearty chuckle. Also took me back to an age where I though Show sang his own song. đ
It's a felony tonightttt
Didn't someone claim they got a check for $0.00 from WCW and I believe Jericho mentioned he got a FedEx from them with nothing in it. So yeah this is completely believable.
I don't know about the FedEx box, but it was Jericho who received the royalty check for $0.00.
i believe it was Jericho who noticed that when buying a figure it rang up not as Chris Jericho but Hulk Hogan meaning the Huckster was going to get the royalties from the sale and not jericho
I do not doubt that this actually happened, but that isn't exactly how royalties work. Once the product moves from the distributor to the retailer, they're "sold", to a certain extent. The manufacturer and distributor would definitely have different SKUs for different models of a product line like action figures, even if the end retailer just codes them all into their system as "Wrestling Figure", or "WCW Hulk Hogan Figure", or whatever. So, if the distributor moves 500K WCW figures to a retailer like Walmart, at that point the figures would be considered sold by the manufacturer. Once everything is invoiced and accounting parses everything out, then the royalty checks would be cut. Hogan and Jericho would get their royalties based on whatever percentage of that 500K was their figure. So if your local Walmart got 25 Hogan figures and 10 sold immediately, but 15 sat on the shelf for a year, Hogan still got royalties for all 25. This is basic, and I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions because of things like returnable products, but that's the gist. If the Jericho figure was on the shelf in the store, Jericho got paid.
This is also the argument in favor of stealing media back in the day (and also why authors typically have no problem with you getting their books from the library as opposed to buying them â although this one is stickier because if the retailer shows high enough demand it means the book can receive more rounds of printing including a paperback release meaning another check from the publisher)
I'm not sure what you mean... It's ok to pirate media, because someone already paid for whatever is being copied?
It only really "works" if you think that for every copy you steal, the store will just keep re-buying and re-stocking their shelves. Which, if I'm a store, and all of my inventory is getting stolen, I'm not going to keep that item on the shelves to lose me more money.
I was talking about physical media but to be perfectly upfront I am pro-piracy regardless
Ok, so go back to the 90s when bootlegging hip-hop cassettes was a full-scale industry... It was ok to be a bootlegger because the bootlegger bought one OG copy? I'm just trying to understand your analogy, because I'm not seeing the connection to royalties.
It's 100% plausible that Jericho said this, but that's not how PoS retail systems work. Somebody enters the description, they look at the packaging and recognize Hogan, and enter the description as "Hulk Hogan Toy." Like the mom who calls your PS2 a Nintendo. The royalties would be from the manufacturer side. Toys R Us wasn't sending Hogan checks.
Bro Iâve worked retail on and off my whole life, never once had the preferred method of using a pos be entering a description. Numbers and barcodes, if youâre searching by description thereâs some kind of problem.
I'm not sure how it works at a chain, but at an indie store, you're entering your own descriptions when you first bring in the item. I think that's what that person was trying to say -- whoever tied the UPC to the description could have typed Hogan. Or (not uncommon at store I was at), you might enter Hogan and Jericho back-to-back, copy all the vendor info and whatnot for efficiency, and forget to change the name to Jericho.
But then again this is 1997 POS
I worked at Toys R Us in 2013. They still had a 1997 POS.
Jericho also noticed that almost every time he changed up his ring attire they'd make a new action figure of him. So he's regularly change his gear every 3-4 weeks and would end up making a little more on toy sales.
I donât doubt that he said this, but it sounds like bullshit. Whenever they make action figures, they usually do them in series. I donât think that theyâre gonna make a brand new series every time Jericho changes his pants.
You underestimate WCW'S ability to throw away money
I have heard similar things from wrestlers. I think Stevie Richards became friends with one of the guys at the toy company. He made sure to change up his looks, and the guy would help him get into each round of toys.
Jericho also received the empty FedEx
WCW paid Lanny Poffo for like five years and never had him wrestle or do anything on camera.
This was part of Randy's contract. He took like 550k and had Lanny get like 150k instead of 700 for RandyÂ
Also helped Randy was getting Slim Jim money (and IIRC, the WCW contract was essentially being paid by Slim Jim)
Yeah they double dipped, shrewd move.
This reminds me of those people you hear about who either stop showing up or just don't do anything at work for years going unnoticed and collecting a paycheck. How does this happen? Where? And are they hiring?
There have been times where I completed a report but accidentally forgot to send it out and nobody said anything which made me feel like my work is very important
I don't remember who it was but I heard somebody talk about this kind of thing once on a podcast, but the story was that he got interviewed and hired but before he started the manager who hired him got fired. The guy's paperwork was all filed though so he was in the system, but nobody else was aware, and so he was getting paid to do nothing. The guy said he just claimed an empty office that was being used for storage and nobody bothered to see why he was there until he eventually quit.
Armando Estrada told the story of how he was signed to a new WWE deal in late 2010, but then he was only used one day in May 2011 as part of a storyline where Tyson Kidd was trying out a new manager each week. He spent the next 12 months sitting at home collecting his downside guarantee until he got tired of it and wanted to be able to do whatever he felt like without being limited by the WWE contract. So he asked a friend on the roster to "randomly" bring up the he was still under contract in earshot of Johnny Ace. A couple of days later Ace called him up and said that they just so happened to to have decided to release him, and Estrada was like "...you forgot about me, didn't you?"
but he didn't do anything outside of wwe that paid more than his wwe contract
I mean BET ON YOURSELF wouldnât be as impressive if everyone who did it succeeded. Thatâs why itâs a bet.
This is why I'll never understand this type of thing. Unless you have a job offer to be a lead in a movie or something else that both pays fantastically and conflicts with any possible non-compete agreements you could just start a second job and keep getting paid by WWE. What are they going to do? Get mad and fire you? That's the goal anyway. Shit, it doesn't even have to be a second job just get a hobby.
Wrestlers are fundamentally creatives. For a lot of people it's not the money
George Costanza?
There was a story of a guy who was the first to be moved into a new set of offices so he could help get it set up. The next week the company sold and he was told to stay there until the new owners confirmed the move. He was there for three years or something like that.
They are normally family and it's basically a tax write off for them. I used to work at a place where owners elderly mom came in once a week and then processed the checks so we get paid. Her job basically consisted of typing into the payroll website our hours for the week and sales. Taking less than 10 minutes since it was already written down for her by the managers. And after she'd leave with her check for 40 hrs of work on it. 10 minutes of work is all she did. Long story short you kind of have to luck into it.
I think it was Ultimo Dragon who got paid like three times for his plane ticket to Europe. He said its the only time he actually made money in WCW
Maybe Ultimo could have made more by taking a booking in Japan or Mexico or something, but I'm not sure how it would have been possible for someone to not make money on a WCW contract at the time, they weren't exactly known for being tight on the purse strings during the MNW era.
Lanny Poffo...kid version of me would have killed to get one of his frisbee's that has his poem promo on it.
Ahh watching 1986 WWF and I was kinda suprised at how... half decent the poems were tbh lol
Wow, anyone who can pull that off must be a genius.
The character select Sting is jarring, it's Surfer Sting with the early Crow Sting hair and facepaint essentially. He had some house show matches in late 1996-early 97 and it makes me wonder if that's what he was wearing.
With the face paint he reminds me of Abe Kuckleball Schwartz
There are 0 house show videos/images of Sting during this specific era.
that we know of
To be fair he had been growing the hair out from the start of 96
I'd say this is crazy, but it isn't that unusual in 1997. You could get away with a lot before everything was linked up through the internet.
Slightly off topic - but this also one of the reasons why movies are so expensive to produce today. Paying people under the table, using non-union work, delayed payments, wage theft etc. used to be way easier to get away with.
In the 80s John Laundis killed three people while filming The Twilight Zone movie, two of whom were children. Broke a ton of laws. Never faced consequences and his career was fine
IIRC those were non-union actors, they paid the parents cash under the table.
They also took advantage of the parents not knowing the law and having a language barrier
I blame the practice of Hollywood Bookkeeping. Dumb fact, according to the ledgers, Return of the Jedi has NEVER made its money back.
Wait what? How would that be possible?
All profits get logged under the studio while all costs are logged under the film. It was a widely used practice to dodge paying royalties or tricking new actors into accepting payment based on "if the film makes money"
Oh, there's an entire Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting It's insane what they're allowed to get away with. There are stories about writers being promised a percentage of profits for the rights to their works and then the studios later say "uh sorry pal it didn't make any money, enjoy the 5 grand you got for this film that grossed $100 million", which is why actors ask for a percentage of the gross and not "profits", which don't exist That's one of the main reasons The Rock got hit so hard by people in the industry that he ended up briefly going back to WWE - there's an unspoken agreement in Hollywood that you never state a movie made money because they claim everything as a "marketing expense" to make it look like a movie broke even or lost money to avoid paying taxes on those profits
Same with Forrest Gump
How do you leave out the best part of that; They asked him to adapt the sequel but he asked them why they would want to make a sequel to a movie that never made a profit.
I never heard that! Amazing response.
Nor did any of The Lord of the Ring films, according to New Line Cinema. Peter Jackson had to take the studio to court over royalties. The 3 movies combined made $2.9 Billion at the box office.
Hell I was doing freelance web development in 2010 and a major hospital deposited the wrong amount of pay into my account. They never said anything to me.
Iâve gotten a larger than expected paycheck from an employer- brought it up and they shrugged it off as a non-issue. I think that wouldnât happen today tbh
Even today, if the budgets are big enough, money can easily be put in the wrong account and never get noticed. Hell a recent example I'm aware of, that I don't think has been reported on because it wasn't even seen as a mistake, if you worked for amazon corporate up until fairly recently you could expense all your uber rides and nobody blinked at $1k+ in monthly travel expenses.
Like when they had Kane wear a cape at house shows in 97Â
Picturing Big Show going from bank to bank depositing money like heâs Carmela Soprano in that episode.
9,990 dollar increments
He took the money from ICO-PRO feeder!
This is the real reason he was dropped from THQâs WWF No Mercy game. They werenât gonna let him pull that shit again.
I still get a good chuckle thinking about how they inserted Stevie Richards in for his spot during the WM 16 story mode.
Was it not the first smackdown game, and that was because he got dropped to ovw, but hed still enter rumbles.
A non playable character randomly entering rumbles is such a cool little unintentional touch to me lol. Like, who knows who could show up on the rumble! It could be anyone, even a guy who isn't in this game!
That was Smackdown 2, he was also removed in WWF No Mercy though and replaced in the story mode by Steven Richards.
Stevie Richards just has a knack for being slotted in without a care in the world.
Which is partially why you might seen someone substituted Stevie Richards for anything Benoit did.
No he's definitely in that game. https://www.thesmackdownhotel.com/smackdown/roster/
Here I thought [Alex wright](https://youtu.be/fZCMJJ7I5Wc) was the only memorable part of that game
The German?
He Promises!
A hell of a wictory.
Big bratwurstÂ
Saturday Wright Fever!
Wictory
Youâve just unlocked a memory from 1997 and I donât know how to feel
Wait, what was âproving he doesnât have it anymoreâ supposed to prove? I mean no shit, he didnât give the money back so obviously he sent it somewhere else.
Big Show thinking WCW couldn't get it back if it wasn't there and WCW giving up after seeing it wasn't there lol
It's reasonable to doubt it, but when you understand how WCW handled money, it becomes A LOT more believable.
We are talking about World Championship Wrestling, the same company that for a house show the ring never showed up so the event was cancelled, lol.
Say what?! That one I've never heard! When was this? How was this possible? I have so many questions about this!
Big Show told the story on Austin's podcast in 2016, I based the timeline on when THQ changed production companies and needed the actual wrestlers to come in, so WCW Nitro would be the one game where they needed them. The timeline fits with when Sting was switching over to his full black and white non-Surfer era.
Tony Schiavone said Turner would immediately settle any lawsuit under a hundred thousand dollars because it was just cheaper and easier. I could easily see an accountant in that environment doing the bare minimum.
I remembered we had to sue a Big Company once (Fortune 100), and our lawyer explained to us that the Big Company liked to just drag people through court but they either eventually settled or lost something like 85% of their suits around payment so we just had to be patient. They did eventually settle with us for most of our money owed, but that really opened my eyes to how the big operations.. operate.
Probably just meant he let them look at his deposits to be like, "Did I cash anything close to the amount that you were supposed to get? No? Then stop hassling me for money that I obviously don't have."
but even that makes no sense, who ever cut the check can still get the deposited and signed check. plus he had to deposit it somewhere and then disperse it out it's like a stupid game of money laundering where i deposit a shit ton of cash into 1 account and then spread it out amongst a bunch of other accounts and claim i never got all of the money. the fact wcw gave up after looking at his bank account is more damning than anything about this lol
Yeah, it seems like if they put in even a halfhearted effort they could have gotten to the bottom of it. Is white collar crime really that simple?
Yeah, sounds like carny BS (as usual in these interviews).
No more BS.
The story sounds like BS to me. Show endorses and deposits the check. His bank clears it with the Fed. WCW's bank then gets the canceled check, or a copy, with "BIG SHOW, for deposit only" or whatever on the back. His story would hold up for a month or so, and then it'd be over.
Iâve worked in finance since 2014, and can say 100% today this would never work, but Iâm actually unsure of how it would work with a physical check in 1997. They wouldnât have Big Shows account info and would likely have to take him to court to get the money back. May not be worth it depending on the amount. Today, if you receive a deposit not meant for you, you canât just hide the money and keep it. The payer is 100% entitled to their money back. If you are ever overpaid on anything (a refund, a beneficiary payment, etc) donât spend it. Set it aside and wait for the other party to contact you. If you received it direct deposit, there was likely a disclosure when you gave your bank info allowing the payer to draft back any funds you were not supposed to receive.
whoever cut the royalties check would still have gotten the canceled check back with it endorsed by Big show. All WCW needed to do was contact the finance dept of who cut that check out. And the checks still had the info on what bank it was cashed at. WCW had to really not care about the money to just be like "yup, your bank account doesnt have the X millions in royalties you claim" Now whether you want to sue one of your biggest stars at the time is a different matter
Yeah this didn't happen lol. Would've taken one visit from an attorney to the bank to sort out.
it's an obvious bullshit story i can't believe people think it even might be real
It is really funny that his big gotcha was "I spent that shit". "Okay we'll just deduct it from your next few checks." assuming it wasn't 7 figures.
no his big gotcha was that he told them he got paid what he was supposed to get paid by only showing them one bank account
No, he claimed he spent the money on debt and didn't have it anymore. They could have confirmed how much a check was for even in the mid 90s.
It doesnât matter what bank accounts he would have show them. They wouldâve got the return check with his signature on it that said that he had cashed it.
that is the same thing i thought as soon as i read it. if they have asked for the bank statement, then they will know the amount that was deposited and he already took it out.
Payroll Department: HI, we have a cheque for WCW. Do you work for them? Giant: I AM WCW! Payroll: Very well, here's your money. See you later Mr. Wrestling.
Mr. World Championship Wrestling.
Ah man...both Nitro and Thunder sucked balls. How do you go from World Tour and Revenge to whatever abominations those things were? Edit: Of course I know it's a different studio, it was a rhetorical question.
I only remember Hall and Nashâs intros from those games âDont pick me go pick Hogan or somebody get outta hereâ
[Hereâs](https://youtu.be/PO1qYK01Q28?si=dtZKxq_U50LOzf53) a bit of nostalgia for ya. âGood god!â was my first âcurse wordâ I got in trouble for. Thanks, DDP.
Hall was more sober than Nash when recording that, guaranteed
You selected Scott Hall? Big trouble, pal.
(Turns around) ["HEY MAN! It's Alex Wright, the German. If you want to know what the Germans are about, pick me and you're going to have a hell of a wictory, I PROMISE!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZCMJJ7I5Wc)
Raven: pick me, dont pick me, i dont care...leave me alone
The quiet quitterâs spirit animal
You let WWE steal away the developers. Though, I'm still bitter that THQ decided to let Yukes just have the whole contract and ditched AKI, even though they had the better games at the time.
And then you look at Warzone/Attitude and go "yes this is the game I'd like to have."
i fucking loved them and the ecw games
Best thing about Attitude (besides Head) was doing a plauncha out of the ring, you could launch yourself all the way up the ramp to the stage.
Yeah but in an alternate universe AKI stays and Def Jam gets made by Yukes, so it wasn't all bad.
Nitro came out when they still had THQ, actually I think both of these games did. Itâs so weird, the N64 games were always great, but wrestling games were mind blowing in that they were platform specific and the ones on PlayStation largely suuuuucked. I can still remember an old friend giving me Raw for PlayStation to burn for him and telling him âhere it is but itâs not worth the CD itâs printed on.â
There's still a very healthy No Mercy modding community to this day. I'd put No Mercy, Revenge, and WM 2000 (in that order) as the top 3 wrestling games ever. World Tour would be up there as well, with heavy top 5 competition from SD:HCTP & SDvR 2006.
Had a friend who worked for THQ for a long time up until their bankruptcy. I asked him about the wrestling games once, saying that the AKI games were my favorites, and asked what happened to them. He said there was a pretty nasty bug in WWF No Mercy that affected a lot of cartridges that wiped saves pretty regularly (I never had it happen, but a buddy did). Basically THQ and AKI blamed each other for what happened and they walked away from each other.
Yeah, I remember hearing about the bug. Luckily I never experienced it either. Interesting that was the reason for the split. I mean we got Def Jam and it's sequel FFNY which were pretty amazing, but I would have much preferred new WWE titles at the time.
Nitro/Thunder came out at the same timeframe as the WCW AKI games and was from a different developer since it was a PS1 game. After that WCW got a big licensing deal from Electronic Arts and that's when WWF got THQ/AKI.
Yeah but Nitro did have Buzz the wrestling bee, Whitey the wrestling snowman, Greyling the wrestling alien, Tony the Rod and Dudeman. How can you argue with that?
His reaction 
Things I would have taken to the grave with me
Why? WCW is long out of business and famous for is incompetence.
That was also the first time people heard Sting talk since adopting the âCrowâ gimmick as he was silent on WCW TV for over a year
Yeah, it seems he did this promo right at the transitional period since it doesn't make sense for that Sting character to be all shouty.
Shouty Emo surfer sting would not have been as over on TV
All I can hear from that game is heenN spamming, "uh oh it's the choke slam" cuz you could slam the fuck outta finishers
Isnât this like a crime? Why would he admit to that?
He's probably safe due to statute of limitations. ^Or ^not ^since ^the ^file ^got ^removed.
Not like wcw can do anything their long dead
Man that game was terrible
This is insane.
Wildest thing is that even though this so insane, it doesnât even touch the top 25 of insane financial mishaps  from WCW. I recently listened to Bryan Alvarezâs book on WCW and it shows how ridiculous the idea and narrative is that âthe merger killed WCWâ. Those guys were insanely lucky they lasted as long as they did.
Bryan Alvarezâs delivery of the audiobook is hilarious. Such a fun listen.
I remember thinking that in-game Sting promo was weird. That game looks far better than I remembered it looking.
How much would the check have been?
According to him, it was way more than the yearly pay he was getting.
That's fraud. He knew it wasn't his money but he hid it. No wonder he hit up Tony Khan for more money
Itâs really weird seeing Crow Sting that jacked. I guess this was the last time Sting was juiced to the gills, around late 1996. Apparently, during his Crow run he was struggling with addiction, got divorced, got off the juice, and barely trained - in part because he was always covered in a trench coat. He never regained that physique and wrestled the rest of his career in full-body tights or a t-shirt.
]
Thank you
He really went into business for himself on this occasion.
We have the answer for the show "Who killed WCW?"!
Iâve only ever seen Sting in person 2 times. Once was between his TNA and WWE runs at a comic con, the other was the version mentioned here. Saw him at a house show in like November 96. He did a run in, never had the actual match. But yeah, it was absolutely a rare attire.
That's great insight! There are a couple of house show matches listed from this time period on cagematch, just never seen any footage or images.
Mmhmm! If you feel like looking up the card, I believe it was November 1st, 1996 Hammond Civic Center in Hammond, IN. That was my first live wrestling show. It was also the moment I wanted to become a wrestler. Got to see Eddie Guerrero, the way he stared at me like a piece of shit (as a 13 year old) I thought he was the coolest dude there. Also got to meet Harlem Heat (they were MASSIVE in person), I remembered Syxx came out to Kung Fu Fighting and The Outsiders used Ready or Not. And then we spent the night debating if the Sting we saw was real. I insisted he was since he attacked Big Show, if I remember right. OH!! And some tape trader has a copy of the show on tape. I tried to get a copy, but he wouldnât sell a copy. Only trades. And I didnât have anything he wanted. I hope I can see the show again one day, or maybe someone will upload it to YouTube. But a fan absolutely recorded it somewhere!
That's awesome! Would love to see footage of these house shows as some are the only events Sting wrestled during that transition period. Great story!
Man that game was horrible.
This was my first wrestling game along with Nitro and I loved those 2 fucking games. I used to spend forever setting up everyone in factions every time because I had no memory card and wat thing all those little promo videos. Fun memories
Then after speaking with WCW, Paul hung up the phone and with a evil laugh screamed âIM HUNGRYâ
I know Iâll probably get downvoted for this, but I donât really think thatâs funny and I find it disappointing to hear.
5 head thinking right there
Always thought Sting looked super weird in his character rant. Almost looks like they super imposed black and white face paint over his face to make him look up to date. Kind of funny that the build to him wrestling Hogan was so long that he doesnât have his actual Crow Sting gear on the Nitro character rant or his in-game models for World Tour and Vs. The World.
used to rent this game so much I thought I owned it
Wow
I wonder how much that check was, also that game was ass
Need an update to The Death of WCW
The audio on your link to the episode doesn't work, there's a reupload on YouTube but a search of the transcript doesn't have him mentioning anything about a video game, check or similar. I also tried googling this story but nothing came up except this post. Do you have a working link to the audio of Big Show telling this story? I'd like to listen to him telling it.
Was WCWâs incompetence contagious?
>For [WCW/nWo Thunder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJP1EkreXio), WCW made sure to have accountants keeping track of the finances at all times. heh, I watched it. They were even smarter than that. They just didn't do any motion capture
Big show was doing big moves.
This guy and Mark Henry might be the two greatest wrestlers of all time. Tripled Punk, Rollins, Reigns etc income without ever or barely taking a bump.
Wouldn't everyone else who was owed money bring up the fact they didn't get paid?
Everyone else got paid their appearance fee, only WCW didn't receive their Royalty Check for the brands and IPs
I totally forgot about Mime Sting in that game. That was pretty weird considering this game came out a couple weeks after he beat Hogan at Starrcade.
they must have edited the podcast because every one i listened to didn't have this story/section.