Bryan Danielson has wrestled at some of the biggest events in professional wrestling and over the weekend he defeated Swerve Strickland to become the new AEW World Champion at All In. Before the match kicked off Danielson made his entrance to the tune of “The Final Countdown” by Europe as the fans at Wembley Stadium sang along. Danielson used the song as his entrance music early on in his career and on special occasions in AEW.
During the All In post-show media scrum Bryan Danielson talked about why he started using “The Final Countdown” as his entrance music and he explained that he originally chose the song as a joke.
“I chose it as a joke. I was going to Japan a lot and would pick up music magazines at the airport. They used to have all these lists of best songs or whatever. Well, they had the hundred worst songs of all time. I think number one was ‘Final Countdown.’
I was going through them and, I hate to say this, illegally downloading them on Napster. Like ‘Oh, I love this song! I haven’t heard this song in years!’ or whatever it is. ‘Final Countdown’ was—if it wasn’t number one, it was top 10. I was like, ‘Oh, this would be awesome entrance music.’
I do a lot of things to entertain myself. But I never once thought it would catch on in Ring of Honor. Let alone that 20 years later I would be doing it in front of 50-plus thousand people. So yeah, and with a whole 50,000 people singing along to ‘The Final Countdown.’ I don’t know if anybody’s shown this to Europe—if you could, maybe they might bring down the price. It might get us a couple more buys.”
H/T WrestleZone.com