WWE’s ThunderDome era had a couple of unfortunate moments with its virtual screens, and Mason Madden recently recalled when the KKK appeared on screen during an episode of Raw. The ThunderDome was WWE’s solution to bring in fans virtually during the pandemic lockdown era, and during an August 2020 episode a fan appeared in KKK garb during a match putting Seth Rollins and Murphy against Dominik and Rey Mysterio. The image was quickly removed and WWE issued a statement noting that such fans would be banned from future events.
Madden spoke about the moment during the MxM Collection’s recent interview with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp when asked about his time in RETRIBUTION, noting that they were going to do a run-in during that match.
“My favorite Retribution story is, so in the Thunderdome we used to do a lot of movie magic,” he began. “Retribution hid in all sorts of places. So one of the places we hid was in the crowd amongst the TV screens. In one of the times we were going to do a run-in, someone had hacked one of the TV screens and there was a video of a Ku Klux Klan rally that was on the TV.”
He continued, ““It was right in front of me and I was like spooked ‘cause I was like, ‘Are they coming? Are they here? Is that the run-in? Am I being set up right now?’ Not really a Retribution story, more of a Ku Klux Klan story.”
Sapp, Madden and Mansoor joked that the situation was clearly not an example of Mustafa Ali’s hacking jobs, referencing Ali’s start to RETRIBUTION by hacking into episodes of Raw and Smackdown to give ominous messages before eventually unveiling the whole group.
