Vince McMahon And Bruce Prichard Pitched The Comedy Gimmick To The Revival In WWE

Back on April 10, Scott Dawson and Dash Wilder of The Revival were released by WWE. Rumours had swirled for months that Vince McMahon planned to repackage The Top Guys as a comedy tag team, and their prospective new attires leaked online soon after their releases.

Now going by Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler of The Revolt, the former SmackDown Tag Team Champions recently appeared on Talk Is Jericho and revealed the comedy gimmick was pitched to them by Vince McMahon and Bruce Prichard during a meeting in the boss's office. Wheeler explained as part of their contract negotiations they wanted to have a face to face meeting with Vince, and he eventually called them to his office to pitch the new gimmick.

Wheeler said: "We had been trying for a while to get a meeting with Vince, but we knew it was going to be pretty unlikely because the whole FOX transition was extremely hectic, and then the XFL thing was happening which was extremely hectic and we knew that he was busy… Part of our negotiation was that we wanted to talk to him and air our grievances face to face with him. He knew a little bit about why we were not happy but we had never gotten to really sit down face to face, man to man to man."

Ahead of an episode of SmackDown in early 2020, they were called to McMahon's office by Mark Carrano, where Vince pitched the new gimmick to them with Bruce Prichard.

"We went straight to Vince’s office and we sat down, and he (Wheeler laughs) he handed us these big fold-outs and the first page is us as we are now, and then you open it up and there were multiple different versions of their vision for what they wanted to do for us," Wheeler said. "The pictures have leaked online now, they're out there and they are 100 percent legit. They were handed to us by Vince McMahon himself." 

He later added: "I laughed out loud in front of everybody. It was me and David, Vince, Bruce Prichard and Carrano and I laughed out loud in front of everybody, and they were all serious. They had the faces on and were telling us about why they thought it would be a good idea and talked about the ucey hot stuff and the back shaving stuff… We looked at them all in the face and we said, 'Here's the deal, these are not good. These are bad. But we will do these until our contracts expire. We will do whatever you want, we'll give it 100 percent, we'll go all in. We'll have fun with it, it'll be fun and we'll do exactly what you have right here, but when our contracts expire we're gone. We're not re-signing. There's no way we're going to be staying here past June."

They never got the chance to use the gimmick on SmackDown, however, as they received a call five days after the meeting with McMahon and Prichard telling them they had been pulled from TV. "So, I don't know because we agreed to do it that it kind of lost some of it's hilarity to them," Wheeler said. 

The man formerly known as Dash Wilder did admit he didn't hate the gimmick because it would have allowed them to channel their backstage grievances into their gimmick. 

Wheeler explained: "Yeah we were actually, and it wasn't terrible. Like, when they first described them they said we were doing it out of spite. We feel like tag teams don't get the respect they deserve, and that all tag teams have to be a comedy act to get TV time, which is kind of true… But out of spite we saw these and thought, 'Okay, you want comedy? You want clowns? We'll give you comedy. We'll give you clowns.' And that's what you see here. Like it's us taking the p**s out of how we perceive wrestling to be disrespected. 

"Like I said, it's not terrible if you see it on paper like that. I don't know how it would have been executed as the weeks rolled on, but us doing this out of spite, to be upset about how tag team wrestling is disrespected, I was okay with it."