The Chris Jericho WCW Action Figure Conspiracy, Explained
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WCW was notorious for underappreciating its homegrown talents. There were exceptions like Goldberg, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Diamond Dallas Page who rose through the ranks and emerged as fresh main event talents. However, it’s also telling that future WWE world champions like Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio largely languished, butting their head against a glass ceiling despite their overwhelming talent.
Related: 5 WCW Legends That Always Buried Talent (& 5 That Always Put Over New Talent)Chris Jericho is another noteworthy example who not only felt slighted by WCW booking, but also how the promotion’s merchandise system worked. Jericho has long claimed the company—either via mal intent or incompetence—robbed him of royalties he should have had coming to him during his WCW run, using the concrete example of his first action figure.
Chris Jericho’s First WCW Action Figure Put Money In Other People’s Pockets
While Chris Jericho never broached the rarefied air of the WCW main event scene, he did make a name for himself in the promotion. Once he had the opportunity to turn heel and really show his personality, he distinguished himself from the pack, including positioning himself an under-realized program with Goldberg and perhaps most famously locking horns with Dean Malenko. Jericho’s feud with Malenko famously included the celebrated Man of 1,004 Holds promo and a series of excellent matches.
The feud was well received enough to garner its own action figure set, with Jericho’s first ever doll packaged side-by-side with Malenko's. Jericho recounted the experience in his first book, A Lion’s Tale, published in 2007. As recently as 2020, in a visit to The Major Wrestling Figure podcast (h/t Fightful), he held to the same story—that he was excited to have a toy dedicated to him for the first time, and his girlfriend at the time went out and bought one of the sets. To their surprise, the receipt for the figures didn’t label it as a Malenko-Jericho set, but rather a Hulk Hogan-Sting one. As a result, Jericho theorized every single action figure sale at the time was credited to Hogan.
Related: 10 Weird Moments From Hulk Hogan's WCW Career We Completely Forgot AboutEric Bischoff has contested Jericho’s story on his 83 Weeks podcast, suggesting that while the receipt for that purchase may have been in error, that would have been a mistake on the retailer level, not bespeaking a larger conspiracy or error on the part of the company. Jericho rebutted that point in his 2020 interview, claiming, “I got a royalty check from WCW once for zero dollars and zero cents,” calling into question how he could have been credited for his merchandise sales and also draw absolutely no money from them.
Chris Jericho Got The Last Laugh
Nowadays, Chris Jericho can, of course, laugh about his issues with WCW. After all, the company definitively lost its Monday Night War, ultimately selling to WWE in 2001. By that point, Jericho was years into his own WWE run where he’d become a world champion and one of the biggest stars in the business. All of that paved the road for his current successful run in AEW.
The conventional wisdom is that WWE was always better at merchandising its product than WCW, as even Eric Bischoff has conceded on 83 Weeks that the company simply didn’t have the merchandise infrastructure to take advantage of its peak popularity. Between decades as a featured talent for WWE and his work to follow, there’s little question Jericho has done just fine financially, not least of all including royalties from action figures and other merchandise.
Without access to comprehensive records, it’s difficult to know exactly who was in the right or wrong about how Jericho’s experience went down with his WCW action figures and apparently not reaping any financial rewards from them. Still, right or wrong, the story has become one of the more famous examples of WCW mismanagement and business matters tending to favor Hulk Hogan throughout his tenure there.
