Raven In WWE - What Went Wrong?

After two years of creative and relative commercial acclaim, WCW came calling for Levy and the Raven character. In that time, Raven achieved two long runs with the company's Heavyweight Championship, two stints with the Tag Team Championships, and - most notable of all - never lost to Tommy Dreamer until his very last night.

This was the f*cking really good f*cking sh*t, regardless of how marginalised or reduced ECW's output often was. His WCW offer proved as much, not least when he debuted with virtually the exact same gimmick and a 'Flock' of new followers sat ringside on Nitro.

The Atlanta outfit always had a different philosophical approach to Vince McMahon when it came to using characters that weren't created in-house, but they were certainly guilty of their own tinkering eventually. A year or so of Raven's abuse of power being a little more on the nose than the ECW iteration resulted in the Flock disbanding and the character disappearing for several months. When he returned, the company took a creative gamble that didn't pay off.

Presenting him as a spoilt rich upper class kid with a very white suburban family looking to get him help from inside their palatial mansion, "Scotty" spoke of avoiding treatment, not going into institutions and other cod-mental health bullsh*t as presented through the prism of grim wealth. There was a lot to not like about it, but not in the good way.

Within months of the vignettes airing, Eric Bischoff held a backstage meeting offering releases to anybody that wanted them. Reasoning that his carefully constructed persona was still just about in one piece, Scott Levy bet on himself and took the deal.

CONT'D...