Road Dogg Reflects On Wearing South Park Shirts In 1997, Sneaking In Clever Comments On Early Gear
Vince McMahon never said anything about Road Dogg wearing South Park characters on their attire back in ’97.
The New Age Outlaws, in the three years that they were together, were one of the most popular acts in WWE. Formed off of the back of a lower card-level program that saw Billy Gunn become Rockabilly, the protege of The Honky Tonk Man, Road Dogg and Billy Gunn were able to parlay real-life career frustration into a money-making angle that would see them become members of D-Generation X and when multiple WWE Tag Team Championships.
When they first formed in 1997, they began wearing South Park characters on their attire, South Park was a new program at the time and conveyed the “Attitude” that WWE would soon become known for.
On the inaugural episode of the Oh, You Didn’t Know? podcast, Road Dogg explained how he began wearing South Park characters on his attire. He also says that he never heard what Vince McMahon thought about him wearing another brand’s intellectual property on TV every week, nor did he ever hear any pushback from the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
“I never heard what Vince thought about it,” said Road Dogg. “I never asked if I can wear them. I had a guy in Pensacola, Florida at the mall that did airbrushing and South Park was hot at the time. I was a huge fan, everybody was, it felt like. It only felt right to buy their shirts and then to have them modified to fit what we were doing, you know what I mean? Look, I came from — and it was also a little inside baseball, a little smart markery going on. Because I came from WCW where it was the Armstrong curse. So I would put like on the shirt. ‘Look, Mom, no curse.’ Like, ‘Look, Mom, no hands.’ I would put like, ‘Place belt here,’ with an arrow to my waist. I would make the guy’s eyes bloodshot and put 4:20.”
The Armstrong curse refers to the lack of success for some of his siblings in WWE. Brad Armstrong was one of the more reputable and famous enhancement talents and WCW’s history.
Overall, Road Dogg says he was just riding the coattails of an insanely popular IP at the time.
“It was me riding off their coattails or their success. I just wanted to be in on that. I was a huge fan. So I never we never really heard from Vince,” he explained. “Then when we got our own shirts made, of course, it was like ‘No, we’re going to wear these so people buy them.’ But I never we never heard from Parker and Stone. Parker and Stone never reached out to us or never said anything. But then you see they had like Bret Hart and Macho Man and all kinds of stuff on there. So they, you know, they’re down. They’re down with the sickness.”
Road Dogg was a part of the NXT production staff and WWE Creative team, prior to his 2021 WWE departure. Learn more here.
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