AEW co-executive Producer and Senior Production Executive Mike Mansury was on AEW Unrestricted, where he discussed a wide range of topics.
Mansury, who had worked in WWE before joining AEW, addressed the decision for new graphics and stage set in January 2024. He said (per Post Wrestling),
“I believe Winter is Coming 2022 was my first show (for AEW) so in Texas, right? I had learned that on January when we were kicking off the year with Dynamite in Seattle, Washington at the old Climate Pledge, that we were gonna roll out a brand new Dynamite look, a brand new Dynamite set and I was like, alright, cool. That’s great. Something to look forward to. I can’t wait to see it. I didn’t really know what was going on and when we arrived in Seattle that day and I saw the set, it was cool, but it wasn’t my favorite thing. Just speaking honestly here. I’ll be doing that a lot today with our beloved Unrestricted podcast. You have to kind of live up to the title of the show. I saw the new graphics and I am not gonna lie to you, and this has nothing to do with the fact that I spent the bulk of my career there, but I remember walking into Climate Pledge that day and when they were starting to run through elements and stuff, I looked and I was like, ouuu, that looks like Survivor Series sort of look. At this point, I’m maybe three weeks into the job at AEW. I had been out of wrestling for a couple of years at this point, just doing MMA and working with Pat McAfee and his group in Indianapolis. But that was the first thing that hit me, was man, that red and blue and I remember connecting with Tony (Khan) at some point a couple weeks after that show and he’s like, ‘Initially, the direction I’d kind of given the folks’ was he wanted it to look more like the throwback American Gladiators look and I think that was kind of the interpretation of what kind of fell into play. If you noticed as we got later into 2023, we amended it a little bit to kind of get away totally from Raw and SmackDown and the Survivor Series look but, you know, we had known going into that summer that we were going to kind of refresh Dynamite going into 2024. Going into Dynamite #200 I believe it was, we went with a bit of a throwback look, right? With the color, powder burst or whatever and I know that-that was something that resonated very strongly with our fan base. Our fan base, they were very much into that sort of original vibe and it kind of fit into a lot of what we’d been talking about internally when it came to sort of restoring the feeling. So I started to have preliminary conversations with Tony in terms of the new look for next year and also, we’d began talking about the set. That theme was there, that restoring the feeling. But me personally, I didn’t wanna do a full reversion back into what was, right? For me, I was in the mindset of, ‘Let’s pay homage to day one, but let’s also show that AEW is continuing to grow, continuing to evolve.’ So, when I got together with our internal team, both on the in-arena and post-production side and then we also involved the team from W.B.D. as they are phenomenal collaborators to work with.”