Sgt. Slaughter won the WWF Championship while working an angle where he was an Iraqi-sympathizer and admirer of Saddam Hussein. He defeated The Ultimate Warrior for the title at the 1991 Royal Rumble. Bruce Prichard recently discussed the 91 Rumble on an episode of “Something to Wrestle With” and spoke about the decision to put the title on Slaughter at the time.
Slaughter’s Royal Rumble victory took place on January 19th, 2021. Operation Desert Storm began 2 days earlier on January 17th, 1991.
“This was probably just a little too soon, a little too close to home and I don’t think that anyone ever really thought, until (the weekend of the Rumble), that we were actually going to have a full conflict and go to war,” Prichard said.
“This one turned into that major war that people hadn’t been apart of in many, many years and I think that it just affected the psyche of the country,” Prichard continued.
Bruce Prichard On Similar Storytelling In Other Forms Of Entertainment
Prichard also mentioned how other forms of entertainment will use war as a storyline.
“Look at the movies that they did with the Japanese, and the war, and Hiroshima and different things like that, Pearl Harbor. World War I, World War II were glamorized in the movies, and the villains were accentuated, the evil Russians, the evil Germans, the evil Japanese. That had taken the shape of the villain in America’s eyes.”
He also made specific mention of Americans being used as heels in Japanese wrestling.
“You look at Japanese wrestling, where Japanese wrestling really took off is when they started bringing Americans in to be the villains, the heels.”
Bruce Prichard On Similar Characters In Wrestling
Conrad Thompson asked Prichard about similarities between Sgt Slaughter’s 1991 title win and the Muhammad Hassan character in WWE years later.
“I’d say both were victims of bad timing as well as just bad characters,” Prichard said.
“I think if they had been done at any other time, when some of the outside circumstances hadn’t taken place, I think they would have been fine. But when you start seeing people in war, which they had never seen in real-time before. You got to remember, your closest war was Vietnam.”
