The Undertaker pitched sacrificing a member of his own stable on WWE television, and says almost nothing else he suggested during the Ministry of Darkness was turned down.
Asked on the latest episode of Six Feet Under whether any of his ideas from the period were rejected, he named one.
“Well, I mean, I really did want to sacrifice Mideon. I thought that would have been really cool to watch on TV, but yeah, they shut me down on that one. Said it was a little bit too extreme. I was like, man, but think of the ratings.”
Beyond that, he said he had a free hand.
“Back then, pretty much everything that I pitched for that, we went with.”
He described the run as the point where the character reached somewhere the original version could not.
“The ministry, that was a lot of fun. We really got to push the envelope with the ministry, with the symbolism and all of the innuendo and everything else. We got more flack too during that ministry period, but it was just the darkness of all of that and putting people up on the symbol.”
“That original version of the Undertaker was like, oh, that’s kind of spooky, that’s different. But the ministry made people feel things, like this dude really is demented, and he’s messed up. It made it work.”
He does not think it could be done now.
“I don’t know that we could do today what we did back then as far as content. People would absolutely lose their freaking minds, I think, in this day and age, but it was fun while it lasted.”
He also revisited the angle in which he attempted to marry Stephanie McMahon.
“I put Stephanie, you know, what a change that would have been if I’d actually married Stephanie. I mean, I’m sure I would have probably kicked her to the curb by now, but she’s good.”
Where it went wrong
The part he has never made peace with is what the group became.
“Obviously the part that I didn’t like, and I’ve complained about many times, was when the ministry went corporate. That’s when I thought it went, it watered it down and made it too wrestling. I think we had something that was really edgy and made people think and made people feel a certain way.”
“And then when it became the corporate ministry, it was just like, yeah, it sucked. It really did. I hated it. But what you gonna do, man? You just got to roll with the flow and come up with something else and get out of that and move on.”
The Ministry of Darkness ran through 1999 before merging with The Corporation to form the Corporate Ministry.
