Shawn Michaels Addresses Using His Old Angles In WWE NXT

Long-time WWE viewers will have felt a sense of deja vu watching NXT in 2023. With Jacy Jayne’s betrayal of Gigi Dolin, and Roxanne Perez’s in-ring collapse reminiscent of classic Shawn Michaels angles from the 90s.

This is surely no coincidence, as Michaels heads up NXT, and during a recent NXT press conference, Michaels addressed the use of such famous angles:

"Some of them, clearly, complete rip-off. We’re using them because we thought they were good. Nothing thrills me more than that, this stuff is 30 years old and people go, ‘oh, it’s the same.’ I’m fortunate that we have a fanbase that remembers that far, but we’re also appealing to a whole new fanbase. They’re still moving, they’re still impactful, they’re still memorable storylines. That’s what we want to do. A lot of this, I would go back to the reference of using action movies. They all have the same sort of diagram, but people do them differently with different actors and other tweaks to make them different. That’s what we’re hoping with all of this. I would argue that kind of everything… every once in a blue moon, we find ourselves venturing into new ground or something original. A lot of what we do in this line of work has been done sort of somewhere down the road. It’s just us sort of mixing it up a little bit. Guilty of doing those storylines that are obviously similar, but you’re always going to have turns in wrestling, you’re always going to have injuries. Some of these are a little more spot on than the others, but they’re all sort of basically derived from the same playbook, which has been around in storytelling from even before I was doing it,” said Michaels.

H/T: Fightful