WWE creative pitched Undertaker’s “son” angle

During his Wrestling With Freddie podcast, former WWE writer Freddie Prinze Jr. talked about an idea that was proposed for The Undertaker to have a storyline “son” in WWE…

“We [the creative team] received a note from Vince [McMahon] that said Undertaker needed an opponent to run through before the next Pay-Per-View storyline. Someone had gotten hurt. I don’t remember who and before we could get Taker to Edge, they wanted someone that we could just run through. But they wanted us to have it be someone that could mean something. So they wanted us to find someone from FCW that we could bring up, assign a gimmick to, and basically smash and destroy him for The Undertaker.”

“We’re kind of spitting ideas around and nothing’s really clicking. I don’t remember who said it, but one of us said, ‘What if he claimed The Undertaker was his father?’ Somebody else said, ‘I don’t think anyone will buy that but maybe it could be like in a supernatural sense.’ He’s getting killed anyways, he’s getting smashed up. Yes, that would be a father killing his son, but he’s not really killing him, I just mean like smashing him in the ring. So, we try working with that. We throw it to Michael and Freebird is like, ‘Yeah, whatever’. He doesn’t care. We write this promo and he’s sort of hacking into the network feed. So we started hacking the feed on Thursday night SmackDown back then, and they would be kind of grainy pictures. They look kind of like 80s grainy and he had these messages for The Undertaker that he would come in with, ‘His (Undertaker’s) time is nearing and now it’s going to be my time. I have anger and love for you.’ He was a British guy. His name was Hadrian. What a great name, Hadrian. I think it was Hadrian Howard. He had this accent and he sounded smooth when he spoke. He had a shaved head and a bit of a beard. He looked real cool, but he definitely was a smaller guy, smaller than me. I’m six one right now, like 185. So he’s cutting these promos and he’s doing a good job. So we get the story approved by Freebird, and then we get it approved by Vince. We start shooting these little segments and they’re airing on television. It’s an ongoing thing. He’s not calling out The Undertaker, but he’s speaking about The Undertaker, and you’re just waiting to figure out what the reason for it is. It was this father-son thing. So we’re building up, I think we get two weeks of TV out of it.”