He presented the idea to Windham Rotunda several weeks before they were on-screen together.
At the age of 36, Windham Rotunda a.k.a. Bray Wyatt passed away. In the days following his passing, his memory was honored by those close to him and by those who watched his career unfold. Multiple wrestling promotions and companies issued statements and sent their condolences.
WWE aired tributes and presented segments on their shows to honor his life and career. Hit Row’s Top Dolla spoke at length about Rotunda on the Jobbing Out podcast. He detailed the interactions he had with him and how big of a fan he was even prior to joining WWE.
Top Dolla told the story of when he presented an idea to Windham that had to do with Hit Row stumbling into the Firefly Fun House. Top Dolla stated that Rotunda was receptive and loved it. He shared that idea with him three weeks before their on-screen segment together in February. He went on to add that Rotunda sat down with him to flesh ideas out. Top Dolla appreciated that Windham took the time to hear him out.
Before I even knew him (Bray Wyatt), before I even met him and he was everything you would expect him to be as a person and more. He’s just so nice and he had an amazing laugh. Everybody talks about his laugh. He was just a really good guy and he knew that I was a mega fan of his, based off of just the conversations that we had and even with that being said, he was just always a lot of fun to be around, and he spent so much time creating so many different characters and he had his own cinematic universe, you know? And he’s one of the greatest minds in the history of the business… I was a fan. I was a fan of his. I wore all his merch to WrestleMania, I wore a sheep mask to WrestleMania. That was my first-ever WrestleMania I went to. I went to the NFL, I got enough money to actually be able to do the things I’ve always wanted to do in my life and one of them was to go support Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania, and then to get here, to get to WWE, to get to SmackDown and have him come back too. Being able to bounce ideas off of him and being able to pick his brain and nobody knows this but we had this idea — I came up with this idea. I asked him a simple question and I asked him, ‘Have you ever seen the movie Leprechaun In the Hood?’ And he and Bo (Dallas), both of them, they both were like, ‘Yeah! We have that movie. We used to watch it all the time. It’s one of the funniest, terrible but awesome movies…’ I had the idea, like in that movie, Ice-T stumbles upon the leprechaun’s golden flute, right? Then it brings him all of this good fortune. But because of that, the leprechaun is trying to hunt his flute down and he’s killing everybody in his path. So my idea was that Hit Row stumble upon the Firefly Fun House. We’re walking in the back and we just see, ‘Enter here, all ye that have no faith,’ and like, what do you mean? I’m not scared… We go into the Firefly Fun House and we look around and see all this stuff and at this time, he wasn’t The Fiend character anymore, you know? He was but he was doing the whole thing with Uncle Howdy. So the idea was that they all would just sit there and all the puppets wouldn’t be alive. There would just be cobwebs everywhere, just like when they find the flute in the movie and we (find) Ramblin’ Rabbit, right? But he’s our lucky rabbit’s foot and we find it and then when we pick him up, everything starts going haywire in the house and we run out scared but then Bray would spin just like in the movie and I sent him so many different scenes from the movie and he was so receptive. It would be like he was chasing us down just like the leprechaun was one by one until we gave back to him what we took. In the meantime, Hit Row, we’re on a losing streak so now, our fortunes change. We got the lucky rabbit’s foot, and that’s why we don’t wanna give it back even though he’s hunting us down… He loved the idea. He loved the idea. We sat and talked about it. I told him about it, probably, I wanna say, three weeks before we did the segment we did with him in the ring in Montreal and so I told him like three weeks before then and he loved the idea. He didn’t know what he was doing at Mania and I didn’t know either. This wasn’t an idea for Mania. This was just a down the road thing and he literally sat down with me and fleshed out ideas of how to do it and he was so excited to do something that he would sink his teeth into, creatively, based off of something that he loved, like Leprechaun In the Hood, I love too. So it was just things like that and he could’ve been like, yeah kid, whatever. He could’ve been like, yeah, talk to creative… He didn’t do that at all. He literally took the time to listen to my full idea and let me flesh it out for him and he was so cool because he wouldn’t just do that with me. He would do that with anybody.
The day after Windham Rotunda’s passing, Erick Redbeard and Braun Strowman were present on Friday Night SmackDown to honor the three-time WWE Champion.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit Jobbing Out with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
