India, July 26 -- Eric Fogel still laughs thinking about how Celebrity Deathmatch got off the ground nearly three decades ago. He pitched the claymation brawl show 28 years ago while working at MTV, but the idea did not land right away.

"As a kid, I always had a love for stop-motion animation. I was just sort of taken by those Ray Harryhausen films and some of the claymation that you would see on TV at the time," Fogel told People Magazine in an interview.

Mixing his love for pro wrestling with pop culture takedowns, he knew he had something different. It took nearly a year of pushing MTV executives before the green light came through. "After about a year of annoying him, he said, 'Yeah, let's do it,'" Fogel recalled.

The first match, ...