Vince McMahon recently opened up about his reluctance to change WWF to WWE during the Mr. McMahon Netflix docuseries.
The rebranding followed a legal battle with the World Wide Fund for Nature in 2000, which forced the World Wrestling Federation to officially become World Wrestling Entertainment in 2002.
McMahon admitted he wasn’t happy with the change, though it was necessary.
“When this lawsuit was filed, we tried to fight it, as we do most lawsuits. It looked like, ‘Wait. We’re not gonna win this thing.’ They had, in fact, used the initials WWF long before we did. So it changed from WWF to WWE because we were entertainment.
It wasn’t necessarily a good thing that we had to change our name.
I didn’t want to change, but you can’t do anything about it. Once something is closed, you have to move on.
Whenever there is a failure, and there’ve been a lot of failures in my life, if you allow it to fester like, ‘I wish that would have worked.
If I’d have done this, that would’ve worked.’ It’ll drive you nuts. Let it freaking go and think about something positive and work at something positive, not anything that’s negative.”
WWE launched the “Get the F out” campaign to handle the transition, leading to extensive re-editing of old WWF content for years.
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