Years before the Raven character was conceived, Scott Levy had worked for WCW and WWE under a variety of different names. In WCW, he wrestled as Scott The Body, Scotty Flamingo, and Scott Anthony, while he portrayed the character of Johnny Polo in WWE. Levy’s time with both companies didn’t last long as he disagreed with WCW booker Bill Watts so much that he quit the company, and when it came to his exit from WWE in 1994, he left after having backstage heat, multiple run-ins with people in positions of power, and most famously, getting on the wrong side of Vince McMahon after taking a young Shane McMahon out drinking and partying.

Naturally, this meant that when Levy returned to WWE in 2000 as the Raven character, there were some people who weren’t too pleased. The most notable person who was not only angry, but confused about the signing was Vince himself, who according to Raven in an interview with “Title Match Wrestling,” said in a creative meeting “Who the f*** hired Johnny Polo?” From that point on, Raven knew he wasn’t meant to last in WWE. He has stated that the locker room was set up in a way where if wrestlers were brought in from ECW or WCW, they were undermined and not treated fairly, which didn’t help during the invasion storyline in 2001. 

Raven tried to make the best out of a bad situation, even having a near year-long story on “WWE Sunday Night Heat” where he would try and earn his way back on to “WWE Raw,” only to be squashed on his return to Monday nights, and virtually stripped of anything that made Raven the man who everyone knew in the first place. Raven was a character that caught the cultural zeitgeist when he arrived in ECW, but by the time he got to WWE, it simply wasn’t his time anymore.