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Top 10 Worst WWE Gimmicks Of All Time: From Beaver Cleavage to Eugene
By Jose Maldonado,
2 days ago
WWE
Well, they can’t all be winners, can they? WWE has given life to a menagerie of memorable characters. However, some of them are remembered for all the wrong reasons. Today, we pay tribute to the worst of the worst and countdown the 10 Worst Gimmicks in WWE history.
This was a debacle of otherworldly proportions. Billed from “Outer Space”, the character of Max Moon was supposed to be an…alien, robot…thing, who wore ridiculous (and reportedly expensive) ring gear, used a jet pack that couldn’t fly, and shot streamers out of his hands. Originally conceived by none other than Konnan, his time with the company didn’t last long for a variety of reasons. The character was then given to journeyman Paul Diamond who wound up on a space journey to nowhere.
9. T.L. Hopper
For some reason in the mid-nineties, WWE became fascinated with putting out occupation-based characters. As a result, we got such luminaries as janitor Duke “The Dumpster” Droese, hockey player The Goon, and pig farmer Henry O. Godwin. But scraping the absolute bottom of that barrel had to be T.L. Hopper, the wrestling plumber. Equipped with his trusty plunger and filthy tank top, it’s hard to imagine a world where this gimmick could’ve been anything but flushed away.
This was gonna be a tricky one to pull off from the get-go. Starting in 2004, Nick Dinsmore began portraying the character of Eugene: a mentally challenged young man who happened to be a wrestling savant. Given WWE’s track record for insensitivity, fans weren’t exactly expecting a nuanced portrayal here. To his credit, Dinsmore did the best he could out there and the character was popular with the crowd for a while, but they really should’ve never gone down this road in the first place.
7. Beaver Cleavage
There are bad ideas and then there’s Beaver Cleavage. The former Headbanger Mosh was given a shot at a single run with this parody of the sitcom Leave It to Beaver. He was packaged with black and white vignettes and his “mother”, Mrs. Cleavage, and it all made about as much sense as it sounds. The gimmick landed with a thud and was quickly abandoned when he started going by his real name of Chaz and was involved in an angle where he was allegedly beating the former Mrs. Cleavage. Yikes.
When Scott Hall and Kevin Nash departed for WCW in 1996, WWE had the brilliant idea of just placing two different wrestlers in their former personas of Razor Ramon and Diesel, respectively. The results, predictably, were catastrophic as fans rejected these bootleg versions immediately. Thankfully for Glenn Jacobs, the Fake Diesel, he’d move on to a much more successful gimmick as The Undertaker’s brother, Kane. But speaking of Glenn Jacobs…
5. Isaac Yankem, DDS
When Jerry “The King” Lawler was feuding with his rival, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, he enlisted the help of his monstrous wrestling dentist, Dr. Isaac Yankem, DDS. Get it? I. Yankem? Hilarious! * sigh* Yeah, with Glenn Jacobs as a giant dentist with messed up teeth and the most grating entrance music this side of Right to Censor, it wasn’t long before Yankem disappeared. Man, ol’ Glenn really paid some dues to get to where he got.
During his time in the NWA, Terry Taylor was actually a promising talent with legitimate ability in the ring. So what did WWE do when they brought him on board? They made him “The Red Rooster”, complete with crowing and spiked-up red hair. Yeah, given those circumstances, it was hard to think of Taylor as anything other than a laughingstock. This was too tall of a hill for any wrestler to climb and his career never recovered.
3. Mantaur
Half man, half beast, all terrible. There have been all manner of creatures that have entered a WWE ring, but few have managed to look as instantly ridiculous as Mantaur. It wasn’t so much the wrestler himself, but rather the giant, furry bull’s head he wore to the ring that was the key source of ridicule. Looking like a reject from a theme park parade is not the best way to strike fear into your opponents. It wasn’t long before the Mantaur character was put out to pasture.
2. Bastion Booger
If you sat down and purposely tried to come up with the most unappealing wrestling character imaginable, you’d likely still come up short of the atrocity that was Bastion Booger. The name, the look, the gear, I mean my lord! He was a walking eyesore from the moment he debuted. Thankfully, he’s probably best remembered for not coming out during the ’94 Royal Rumble and never being heard from again.
1. The Gobbledy Gooker
When talking about the biggest creative catastrophes in WWE history, you unquestionably have to mention the one, the only, The Gobbledy Gooker. Leading up to the 1990 Survivor Series , the company carted around a giant egg to their events for weeks, building hype around what could be inside. At the pay-per-view, we got our answer…and it was Hector Guerrero in a turkey suit.
Watching The Gooker dance around the ring with Mean Gene as the crowd looked on in stunned disbelief is hands down one of the most hilariously awkward moments wrestling fans have ever had the displeasure of being subjected to. Thanks for the memories, Gooker.
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