Professional wrestling is a competitive business at times and sometimes things done can come off as more petty in the nature of competition.
And sometimes things are read into more than actually are there.
Last night, AEW announced an appearance for Snoop Dogg on an upcoming episode of AEW Dynamite during their New Year’s Smash event. Obviously, this would ruffle some feathers in the WWE thanks to the deep ties Snoop has with the company. Not only is his cousin the current SmackDown Women’s Champion in Sasha Banks, but Snoop was heavily featured as a celebrity fan during The Undertaker’s Final Farewell on the road to Survivor Series. Only a couple short weeks ago, Snoop was all over WWE’s social media for the build, including them dropping a collaborative merchandise line between Snoop and The Undertaker.
Now, as this news has been announced, the WWE has seemingly pulled the merchandise from its shelves. If you go looking for it on the WWE Shop’s website, you’ll find that the merchandise is nowhere to be found. A notice like this gives a lot of fans reason to believe that this was done as retaliation for Snoop making the AEW appearance, but let’s stop right there and take a look at a few things that not only have led up to this event, but things to consider in the wake of it all.
First, Snoop has a partnership with Warner Media, the company that owns TNT and its sister station TBS. Snoop not only hosted a revival of the popular Joker’s Wild game show on TBS, but is one of the judges on the upcoming Go Big Show with Cody Rhodes.
Secondly, and this is something that may or may not have been noticed, is that the WWE had advertised the Undertaker & Snoop merchandise line as being a limited edition line. This was not going to be up forever, and it’s possible the popularity of both stars moved the product fairly quickly. Conversely, the WWE may have only found out about the announcement the same time as the fans did. There’s a lot of reasons to believe the company didn’t have the time to make such a move that quickly, but even if they did it’s not unreasonable to think that WWE was willing to cut their losses on a handful of shirts they were promoting as limited edition anyways.
WWE is no doubt frustrated with Snoop making this appearance in AEW and it’s not out of their character to retaliate after someone appears on their opposition’s show. Kevin Smith revealed earlier this year how WWE canceled his appearance on Raw after his appearance on AEW Dynamite. That said, limited edition merchandise does mean it won’t be around forever and that could be the bigger reason in play.
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