Vince McMahon allegedly wanted to change the WWF’s name to WE (World Entertainment)
During an interview with Wrestling Epicenter, former WWE Creative Director of On-air Promotions David Sahadi commented on the WWF’s name change to WWE due to a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Fund. Here is what Sahadi said…
“It was World Wrestling Federation back then. I missed that term, Federation. That sounds so cool. There’s a Star Trek sense to it, you know.
At one point when we were making the logo change. Vince wanted it just called WE – like World Entertainment, and I’m just like, ‘it doesn’t kind of work – WE.’ That conversation lasted for about a month before we settled on WWE. I kid you not. It just made no sense. I think it was 1999 or 2000, whenever we had ‘Get the F Out.’
There was advanced warning, I believe. I’m not sure about this, but I believe they’d been suing us—the World Wildlife Foundation—for over a decade, and they weren’t winning. But that was the era when they finally won, when we were getting very salacious. We were getting out there. We had Degeneration X. We were crossing lines. We were doing R-rated stuff—things that hadn’t been done before.
So it wasn’t really child-friendly TV at the time, which is what I miss right now, by the way. I really do. I miss the R-rated stuff, when we were doing things nobody had done before—breaking down walls, crossing barriers, entering new frontiers, and just pushing the envelope as far as we could.
And I think that’s when they finally got the verdict in their favor, because some people thought it was lewd and lascivious. That’s when I think they finally got their redemption and got us to take the F out.”
You can check out the full interview below…