6 months ago
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Ivar of The Viking Raiders was recently interviewed by Chris Van Vliet where he discussed several topics. Among them were the various name changes throughout their career, how Erik is recovering, Valhalla’s antlers on Michael Cole, and more.
Below are some highlights from the interview:
On why their name changed from War Machine to War Raiders to Viking Experience to Viking Raiders:
“We knew coming into NXT that our names would have to change. Mainly because right around the time that Ring of Honor named us War Machine, there was an MMA fighter who got in a lot of trouble for a lot of things…so we had the conversation with Triple H and he said, ‘I can’t have kids Googling that.’ …so we’re like, alright so then we came up with a bunch of names and War Raiders is what we settled on. So we had a little bit of the element from the indies where we were War Machine and a little more Viking going forward with the Raiders. No problem and the fans were fine with it. I think we asked if we could keep our Hanson and Rowe name because we were associated with that with the titles in New Japan and Ring of Honor…Hunter was totally cool with that. That’s how it started but when we got called up, that was a little rough.
The way the story goes is Vince loves Vikings. He found out there was a team in NXT that were Vikings. [He goes], ‘Yes I want them.’ He wanted Viking in our name and they couldn’t pass anything through legal. There’s already a Vikings football team, there’s already a Vikings TV show. So none of the names they were trying, whatever they were, were getting through. Then somebody, I won’t say who because it was asked in the meeting, ‘what are they, how do I describe them?’ Then somebody describes us as like ‘they’re this, they’re that, they’re like the Viking Experience.’ That’s it! They’re the Viking Experience! And not one person was happy or okay with that except for the one man so we were stuck.
Then our debut, we find out last minute we were coming in. We get flight cancellations. It was in Montreal. We don’t land internationally in Montreal — I didn’t even get into the building until almost 5 pm, the day of our debut. So we couldn’t even talk to him. We see on the tron, Viking Experience. We’re like oh man, what is going on? We went to talk to him [and say] we can’t be this amusement park ride name. We talked to him and we went there and we were told about the whole Viking thing. We were told if we were gonna pitch names, just make sure it says Viking in it. We had 6 or 7 Viking names that we had picked. We had already given up on our regular names Erik and Ivar, no problem whatever…we were listing off these names. We got to Viking Raiders and he stopped us and said, ‘look, this is how we’re gonna introduce you to the audience and if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it going forward.’ Literally, 2 days later on the website it changed.”
On Erik’s recovery:
“He’s great. He was just here. We just did a meet and greet and he’s there for the weekend. I mean, it’s neck surgery. It’s a matter of time and everybody’s neck heals differently. It’s just a matter of him getting cleared. He’s doing physically great. It’s just that doctors need to clear him and then he needs to get back in the ring and so, it’ll take some more time.”
On Valhalla’s antlers on Michael Cole:
“Valhalla had planned it for weeks and weeks and weeks and there was never a moment to do it. Michael Cole had no idea. For weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, and then finally we had this opportunity for her to get it in there and she got it in.”
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