WWE almost ran a storyline about The Undertaker having a son - but it was apparently nixed after some comments from Triple H.
Recently, former WWE writer Freddy Prinze Jr. took to his podcast, Wrestling With Freddie, to talk abut his time in the WWE writer\'s room. Prinze talked about a time when the creative team was tasked with setting up an opponent for The Undertaker to run through before starting a program with Edge.
Undertaker\'s initial opponent was sidelined with an injury, so the creative team was scrambling to find a meaningful replacement. Several ideas were kicked around, before someone suggested bringing up an FCW talent for Undertaker to \"smash,\" but threw in adding that the opponent was \"The Deadman\'s\" son in a \"supernatural sense.\"
Prinze said he got a passive approval of \"Yeah, whatever\" from Michael Hayes and went on to explain the plans for introducing Undertaker\'s son, Hadrian.
\"We write this promo and he’s sort of hacking into the network feed. So we started hacking the feed on Thursday night SmackDown back then, and they would be kind of grainy pictures. They look kind of like 80s grainy and he had these messages for The Undertaker that he would come in with, ‘His (Undertaker’s) time is nearing and now it’s going to be my time.
\"I have anger and love for you.’ He was a British guy. His name was Hadrian. What a great name, Hadrian. I think it was Hadrian Howard. He had this accent and he sounded smooth when he spoke. He had a shaved head and a bit of a beard. He looked real cool, but he definitely was a smaller guy, smaller than me.
\"I’m six one right now, like 185. So he’s cutting these promos and he’s doing a good job. So we get the story approved by Freebird, and then we get it approved by Vince. We start shooting these little segments and they’re airing on television.
\"It’s an ongoing thing. He’s not calling out The Undertaker, but he’s speaking about The Undertaker, and you’re just waiting to figure out what the reason for it is. It was this father-son thing. So we’re building up, I think we get two weeks of TV out of it.”
Prinze went on to explain how the angle got killed during a production meeting. Triple H walked in and made a comment about the talent that was going to be used for the storyline, saying \"He looks like he cuts my grass.\" After that, McMahon killed the angle.
\"So we’re in the production meeting and everyone’s putting their segments through. Here comes our segment and nobody said boo the last two weeks or even three weeks of TV that we got out of it. Not one agent. Not Kevin Dunn. Not Vince. Not anybody.
\"All of a sudden out of nowhere, Hunter [Triple H] says ‘Are we seriously going with this guy?’ Remember, this is not a Pay-Per-View match. This is not a guy that would get any sort of offense on The Undertaker.
\"It would be just a build up for The Undertaker to have something to do so he could smash this guy and then get rolling over to Edge. He says, ‘Are we really going to go with this guy?’ Vince goes, ‘What do you mean? What’s the problem?’
\"He says, ‘He looks like he cuts my grass, man’, and Vince laughed. Literally all the air went out of the room. Like you could just feel it.\"
As if having all that hard work thrown out the window all of a sudden wasn\'t enough, Prinze also said one of the daunting parts of it all was having to break it to the young talent that his high-profile storyline introduction to the WWE main roster, with a Superstar the caliber of The Undertaker, was now nixed. Prinze described the ordeal as \"sickening.\"
Quotes via WrestlingNews.co
