We all remember the anonymous Raw General Manager angle. For a while Raw was run by a computer and that computer made our lives miserable. After sitting through episode after episode of Raw with an anonymous General Manager at the helm, fans began to wonder who the anonymous Raw General Manager was. Unfortunately the reveal was less than satisfying as Hornswoggle was eventually outed as the Raw GM.
The storyline fizzled out that’s for sure, but former WWE writer Kevin Eck recently revealed that there was a different plan in place. In his most recent blog he talked about the storyline and he revealed some interesting information to the fans.
Before Eck joined the company he was asked to pitch an angle for the anonymous GM storyline. He submitted a story that would have outed Kevin Nash as the anonymous Raw GM but the storyline was dropped before he joined WWE. According to him every few months the writers would pitch an idea to tie up the loose ends with the storyline, but Vince turned the ideas down and told the writing team that the audience had moved on.
Eventually the anonymous GM was brought back into the fold when Raw was being run by guest General Managers every week. When it came time for the anonymous Raw GM to return to Raw the writers jokingly brought up how Hornswoggle was revealed to be Vince’s son a few years back. That’s when they decided to put Hornswoggle in the anonymous GM role in hopes that it would be one of those things that’s so bad it’s good.
Obviously Hornswoggle played his part in the anonymous GM reveal, but he didn’t play the part that the writers intended him to play. According to Kevin Eck, they came up with a whole new character for Hornswoggle but unfortunately he couldn’t pull it off.
“The idea was that after Hornswoggle was outed as the GM, he’d reveal who he truly was. Saying that his name was Lou Manfredini (the last name of one of the writers), he would speak with a W.C. Fields-like accent, chomp on cigars and refer to women as “dames.”
He would say that he hated being the lovable Hornswoggle character, but playing the role was what he had to do to get a job with WWE. Being the anonymous Raw GM gave him the opportunity to mess with all the Superstars that (in his mind) laughed at him because of his size and treated him more like a mascot than a person. We had planned on making Hornswoggle a heel manager going forward.
The idea was pitched to Vince, and sure enough, he OK’d it. There was only one problem: Hornswoggle couldn’t pull it off.”
Kevin Eck talks more about the storyline in the full blog which is available here.
[…] didn’t work out because Hornswoggle couldn’t pull off the character. Last summer former WWE writer Kevin Eck went into full detail while talking about the storyline, and he revealed that original plans called for Hornswoggle to […]