3MB was almost very different

Maybe it’s because Endgame has me thinking about altered timelines. Maybe it’s just a slow news day. Maybe it’s because Heath Slater is an entertaining as hell storyteller. But I love this clip from his appearance on last week’s E & C’s Pod of Awesomeness.

Slater’s idea for turning his “One Man Band” gimmick into a full-on rock group was very different from what we ended up getting:

“I pitched this idea, but the guys that I pitched for was [Dean] Ambrose, Fandango and EC3. At the time, Ambrose was in developmental. Dango was on NXT being Johnny Curtis and Hutter [Michael Hutter is EC3’s real name] was on NXT being Mike Hutter. I pitched those ideas and they said, ‘Ambrose no we have something for him, Dango no we have something for him,’ and I was like, ‘What about Hutter?’ and they’re like, ‘No’. I said, ‘Why not?’ and they’re just like, ‘No’.

I’m like ‘Well, ok’. And shortly after that he got released. So, next thing you know, they just give me Drew [McIntyre] and Jinder [Mahal] and it’s like a bad joke! A dang-gone Scotsman, a dang-gone Indian, and a redneck walks into a bar. You know like, what the hell? So Jinder wasn’t really doing nothing, so he just is like, ‘Yeah, whatever’. But Drew was about to kill somebody, cause he was just like, ‘What the hell? You kidding me? I was the Chosen One and now I’m gonna be in a rock band? So Drew was flipping out a little bit, but then he came terms with, ‘Well, we have to do this. The only things in life I wanted to be were a rock star and a wrassler, so I get to do both’. [Laughs] So I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great way to think about it’.

So that’s pretty much how it happened.”

Not that I didn’t love what the 3MB we got was able to do with the limited amount of TV time they got. And I certainly don’t want to live in a world without The Shield, Fashion Files, or Ethan Carter III’s TNA run.

But I bet the 4MB timeline with Slater, Ambrose, Curtis & Hutter running wild on Raw and/or SmackDown is, well, wild.