Erik & Ivar of The Viking Raiders were recently guests on the ‘After The Bell‘ podcast. During this, they spoke about WWE changing their tag team name.
The duo started in NXT as ‘War Raiders’. When the debuted on the WWE main roster, their names were changed to ‘The Viking Experience’. After a week, WWE changed their name to ‘The Viking Raiders’ and it has stuck.
Here is what Erik had to say about their reactions backstage after the original change (h/t to Wrestling INC for the quotes below):
“Then we’re ringside, Ivar comes out, a graphic comes on the screen and there’s a cartoon Viking guy and it says Viking Experience. At first it said Berzerkers, then we were War Raiders and then Viking Experience, we watched the screen change to this and we looked at Hunter [Triple H] and said ‘are they messing with us?’ He just shook his head and told us to ‘go see Vince’. We went and spoke to Vince, at this point because it’s so late in the day we weren’t even going to approach the subject of Ivar and Erik – we needed to tackle the Viking Experience name.
We knew at this point we weren’t going to be Hanson and Rowe. The primary focus was The Viking Experience. We caught Vince as he was going somewhere else and we pleaded our case about the name. It sounded like a Disney name and there were 10 names we gave him. The last one we gave him was Viking Raiders and he kind of paused on that one. He said they would introduce us as Viking Experience and if they didn’t feel it they would rename us to something else.
But he also put over how much he loves the TV show Vikings and he loves Vikings in general and mentioning our wrestling gear, our armor and Viking details from history. So we felt confident that he liked us and our work – we were happy to hopefully in the weeks to come to get that tag team name changed.
I wonder what would have happened if we landed on time and maybe we could have had more input. Thank god the next week came and we were The Viking Raiders. The Viking Raiders is the original name we pitched when we were coming into NXT, funny enough.”
Let me know what you think in the comment section below.
On a related note, check out my predictions for Wrestlemania 36 here.