The shirts that were being sold at Hot Topic, which make up the majority of their sales, didn’t include any references to “too sweet” or drawings of the hand gesture that WWE is claiming ownership of based on purchasing the intellectual property of WCW, where the NWO first used it in 1996.
Interestingly the WWE never registered ownership of the drawing of the “Kliq hand gesture” (which they actually took from the NWO and rival WCW, which did it first, but that’s the term used when registering it), until 2015. WWE had never used it for years and it had become a regular part of New Japan Pro Wrestling with the Bullet Club years ago, when Prince Devitt (Finn Balor) started the club with his heel turn before he came to WWE. The Young Bucks started marketing it in 2013. However, getting into a legal fight over it would be costly.
The story behind this was The Young Bucks, Hangman Page, Marty Scurll, Cody and Brandi Rhodes were all in Southern California after working weekend shows in Las Vegas.
They decided to do a public signing at a Hot Topic store in a mall in Ontario which was near the Citizens Bank Arena, where Raw was being filmed. It wasn’t even teased until the night before, and never advertised, but through social media they brought it up that day so there was a fan base that showed up, and ended up coming to the arena with them, with the idea of filming it for their “Being the Elite” YouTube show.
The funny part of this is they had been doing a storyline for weeks, spurred on by two things, the first being that Cody is not allowed to use the name Rhodes since the WWE claims it as their property (in reality he has tried to keep good relations with WWE since his goal is to write a book about his father and WWE owns the marketing rights to the Dusty Rhodes name), but more The Young Bucks had gotten a cease & desist letter recently from the owners of the Rick & Morty show on Comedy Central since they had produced a Rick & Morty parody T-shirt, based on the idea that Rick & Morty were the hottest selling T-shirt at Hot Topic and they were No. 2.
In recent weeks, on their YouTube show, they basically did the Kevin Sullivan/Chris Benoit thing where they came up with a storyline that turned into reality. In their fictitious world, there was a mysterious WWE stooge who would contact Cody and suddenly through magic, reference to terms like “Too Sweet” and “fukk the Revival” which they had used regularly were mysteriously edited off the show and when they tried to say them, mysteriously they couldn’t. That haunted them to the point where this expanded to the idea that Marty Scurll couldn’t use the umbrella gimmick he popularized with the idea that Jack Gallagher had stolen the idea. More recently, the storyline was that while they were all together, suddenly Page was gone with the idea that WWE had kidnapped Page. In the final show that aired before the Death Before Dishonor PPV, Page was shown having been kidnapped with his mouth duct taped shut, his hands duct taped together and his eyes duct taped open while being forced to watch WWE programming.
So the idea is they were going to Raw to demand that Cody got his name back, that Scurll got his umbrella back and the Young Bucks got their catch phrases back, while Page was looking for retribution for being kidnapped.
Nick Jackson used a loud speaker to say they were coming to get their friends, Luke Gallows, Karl Anderson and Finn Balor (the same thing DX did in the skit WWE has played over-and-over for 19 years), saying they had come to rescue them, which was a parody of what Sean Waltman did regarding Kevin Nash and Scott Hall in the original skit. They even did the thing where they asked fans who were there if they were there to see WWE or Bullet Club like Scott Hall would do, and everyone booed WWE and cheered Bullet Club, which made WWE seem uncool. They even had a fan say he was only there because he got free tickets for the show (WWE doesn’t heavily paper shows these days, and instead just tarps off areas to make it appear full no matter what the attendance is; however at every TV taping, they hire people as seat fillers to make sure seats look full if people don’t come who have tickets or leave seats visible on camera). They made fun of WWE for having to paper the house, which was the one thing on the show that I thought WWE wouldn’t be happy about, because it would be a Raw nerve since they drew 6,000 fans for a major market show, but WWE has also run the market a lot in recent weeks with a PPV the night before in Los Angeles and a Raw two weeks ago at the Honda Center.
