Natalya looks back on her experience on MatRats.
Love Wrestling‘s Zak Ralph recently spoke with Natalya about her role in MatRats, the Calgary-based wrestling series that attempted to launch in 2001. The series was produced by Eric Bischoff and Jason Hervey, and the roster featured then-unknowns like Harry Smith, Nattie Neidhart, TJ Wilson, Jack Evans, Rene Dupree and Teddy Hart. The format of the show highlighted the fact that the roster only had wrestlers between the ages of 14 and 21, so many of them were still very early in their wrestling training.
As it turns out, Natalya says she ended up learning a dragonrana, an advanced move, before she even knew how to do a basic headlock.
“Mat Rats was so crazy because it was something that was just thrown at us. It was like ‘Eric Bischoff’s producing the show with Jason Hervey and they want to make this for MTV. It’s gonna be like wrestling and rock concert joined together.’ That’s actually where my cousin – I worked with TJ [Wilson], Harry [Smith], and my cousin Ted [Hart] and Jack Evans. Rene Dupree was in it. Mauro Ranallo was in it. I’m just trying to think who else was in it. We had a whole bunch of different people in it. They were like ‘Natty should do a move.’ The very first wrestling move that I ever learned was a dragonrana, which is like a front flip onto somebody’s shoulders into a hurricanrana. I never even knew how to do a headlock! That was the first move I learned.
“It was so much fun doing Mat Rats. Of course, it never really got off the ground. But, it was just a really cool chance for us as kids. My husband and I were on that together. It was a good chance for us as kids to see what it was like to work for like a, like a big set. It wasn’t just like a small independent show. There was cameras and there was TV angles, and there was monitors, and people backstage, and producers, and directors, and it was just like it was cool. I felt like I was on a movie.”
Check out the trailer for MatRats below:
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