Neal Pruitt is the man behind the famous NWO black and white promos in the early days of Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff starting the faction. He was also the voice in the promos saying “The following announcement has been paid for by the New World Order” and the voice who was used in the entrance music.
He joined me on “Wrestling Reality” and talked about those experiences. Here’s an excerpt:
On How He Got Involved with the nWo Promos:
They first asked me to do a promo on the 1-900 number. The idea was to have the phone grow and grow until it exploded because of so much information. They really liked that first production of mine; then they came to me and said that they have this new thing called the nWo starting up, and that they would like for me to do some promos for it. They explained to me what it was all about of course, and I said that it would be great. I said that it would need a unique voice for that. Craig Leathers, who was also a Producer and Director, said to me well, what do you have in mind? I mentioned someone, and then he said to me that I should do it and I said okay. Down in Disney, I was fortunate to work on the microphone that was used by Robin Williams and so many great voices, and that was when the nWo voice was recorded and that was when it originally started. I was really lucky.
On the Idea of the Camera Angles Feeling ‘Chaotic’:
The idea was to make it look like there was a kid on a switcher that kind of just went wild, and cutting back and forth between cameras helped us out in many ways. I had a great Editor working with me named Kemper Rogers. Kemper was just amazing to be able to come up with some really cool looks and all of that stuff. All the films roles, he contributed to that, and was a big help throughout the entire process. What enabled us to equal out all the different egos and what they were able to say was to be able to cut sporadically like that because we could then choose the best part in what each of them said and then just kind of mash them together. They would talk for about 15-20 minutes and then you had to cut it down to 5 minutes for the video, so there was a lot of process behind what exactly should they say and how they would say it. Some of the difficulties were during the transfer so if you were talking about one subject; say for example Scott Hall was talking about one subject and Hulk Hogan was talking about another, sometimes we had to have somebody say something for them to tie the things they said together. Sometimes you had to tell the guys to say this, so I can get from this to this. We had a great time; a great crew.
Neal also talks what it was like working specifically with Hogan, Nash and Hall. Also, the famous NWO Sold Out pay-per-view that was all NWO theme and Neal’s voice did the introductions for WCW wrestlers with no music.
