The art of the repackage is a tricky one to be sure. It’s particularly difficult in this day and age where it’s very hard to convince people that they’re looking at a different person. Folks are just too aware that they’ve seen these performers before, which has altered the philosophy WWE has on this somewhat. Now they’re more likely to present them as the character going through a metamorphosis (ie. Bayley’s slow descent from chipper young girl into angsty bitter teen) rather than just act like they’re a completely different character altogether. (ie. Husky Harris disappearing for a while, then showing up later as Bray Wyatt.)
Suffice to say, when your character is wholesale altered, your career in WWE is likely to be impacted heavily, for better or worse. For the poor unfortunates on this list, it was definitely the latter.
I should note before we get started that while simply being given a terrible new gimmick can get you on this list, there’s bonus points for if the performer in question actually had a successful one earlier. So you get particular consideration if you were over in a previous guise only to completely falter in a new one. This factor is part of why situations like Avatar going to Shinobi and then to Lief Cassidy aren’t covered. Going from one terrible gimmick to another is a lateral move.
With that addressed, let’s get going…
#5 – Akeem The African Dream
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the One Man Gang was a staggering success. He was a midcard act for sure, largely thought of as just one of the many, many big men in the WWF at the time. He wasn’t near as athletic and unique as Bam Bam Bigelow, nor could he touch the size and presence of Andre the Giant. He was a mid-level menace, destroying jobbers and lower carders, merely being built to be fed to the top babyfaces. But that was honestly a perfectly fine role back in the day. And as the grizzled big biker man, One Man Gang was believable if nothing else. It was effective.
But ultimately they wanted something more unique for him, and decided to roll on the dice on a truly absurd idea. One day, OMG’s manager Slick announced that he’d discovered his African roots and decided to embrace them. Thus was born Akeem The African Dream. The very Caucasian big man would speak in a faux African accent, come out in a ridiculous new garb and just dance. That was about the extent of it.
If you’re looking for an encapsulation of every part of Vince McMahon’s sense of humor, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of this. You have an extraordinarily on-the-nose one-note racial joke. You have a big fat guy doing a dancing gimmick, one of the earliest in a long line for the company. And it’s another thinly veiled knock on the American Dream Dusty Rhodes to boot.
For whatever reason, this persona actually outlasted his One Man Gang gimmick atleast as far as the WWF goes. He spent a year and a half doing this, most notably teaming with the Big Bossman to form the Twin Towers. Once he left WWF in 1990, he promptly went back to his biker days and never looked back, as would pretty much anyone else.
#4 – Emmalina
Okay, honestly, what even was any of this? It’s hard to even find a category for something like Emmalina. You could actually argue this repackaging didn’t even really happen. But then, that’s the whole problem with it in the first place.
To summarize, Emma was a capable worker who WWE saw nothing in, a common story. So they decided to transform her into something a bit more outlandish and see if it stuck. On October 3rd, 2016, we saw the first vignette promoting the makeover of Emma to Emmalina. It was a pretty silly name change all things considered, but it appeared her gimmick was a simple one: being hot. And she was! They flashed many flattering photoshoots of her on the screen, and… that was really all these vignettes were.
And then that was all the character was.
For five months.
Yes, you heard that correctly. There’s nothing wrong with vignettes leading up to the debut of a new character. In some ways it’s another past art that’s been lost. They used to be very effective in building someone up ahead of their first match, to the point where if it was enough of a hit, they’d already be stars by the time they stepped into the ring.
Ideally these would only go for a month or a little more. To me anything beyond six weeks is overkill. And that’s assuming the vignettes are all that good in the first place. But Emmalina wasn’t exactly Razor Ramon. You didn’t even hear from her or get a good sense of how she’d be acting any different. Just, still images of her posing, every single week. For. Five. Months.
Then, on February 13th, 2017 – that’s 133 days from the start of the vignettes – Emmalina finally made her appearance on Raw… to announce that the gimmick had been cancelled. Yeah. She just said that was undergoing a makeover from Emmalina to Emma. And then she disappeared for a couple of months before returning to the ring after WrestleMania, with basically zero explanation of what any of this was about. The gimmick, in essence, was that she was wasting nearly half a year of everyone’s life.
#3 – Repo Man
Woof. This is one of the all-timers for sure, and not in a good way. Repo Man honestly doesn’t have much reason for being remembered. He doesn’t exactly have any big feuds or memorable matches to speak of. He lasted for a while, but only as a lower-tier heel. It’s the kind of act that wouldn’t be recalled at all, if not for being so very, very silly.
In theory, Repo Man was part of the early 90s trend that saw WWF put forth a ton of gimmicks that were just people who had regular jobs and were super obsessed with them. You had clowns, a garbage man, a dentist, as well as people from other sports like hockey or Nascar. So on the surface having a repo man around was just par for the course. But really, it’d be more accurate to say that Repo Man’s character was that of a thief, who merely went by the Repo Man name as a way of justifying his taking other people’s things.
He did so with cackling high pitched promos that could only be described as cartooney. And indeed he was a cartoon villain, perhaps more than anyone in WWF’s history. I’m sure he’d have had a lengthy mustache to twirl if only Barry Darsow could grow one.
And yes, that’s Barry Darsow wearing the eye mask. That is to say, the same man who in previous years had donned face paint and leather and went by the name Smash. Yeah, he went from being part of Demolition, one of the scariest and biggest name tag teams of the late 80s, who for decades held the record for longest combined days with the tag team titles AND the longest single reign ever to… this. That is a fall if ever I saw one, which is really the exact opposite of what a repackaging is supposed to do.
#2 – El Matador
Honestly this one just makes me sad.
Tito Santana was among the more unsung heroes of the 1980s for the WWF. He was a talented worker of the clean cut babyface mold. One of the more skilled wrestlers on the roster for most of his stay, he was a 2-time Intercontinental Champion, only the fifth man to have ever held it, and was among the crop that established it’s identity as the workhorse title. He was also a veteran of the tag ranks, most notably in his title-winning tandem with Rick Martel, a team known as Strike Force.
In addition he was something of a loyalist. During a time where most of the roster came and went, Santana stuck with the WWF – with basically no significant breaks – from 1982 to 1993. He was never quite a top star, but certainly popular enough, and a constant contributor. He was a cornerstone of the promotion for nearly a decade.
And then… for his last three years, they decided to make him a matador.
Yep. After establishing his name and credibility to the WWF audience for the entirety of the 80s, in 1991 Tito Santana suddenly donned a silly green outfit and carried around a silly pink cape and called himself El Matador. He promptly became a Jobber-To-The-Stars and would never have a meaningful role in the WWF ever again.
One could compare this to Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat turning into just… The Dragon, suddenly eschewing his ringname for a nickname and coming out in a silly costume all his own. But that was atleast honoring his history in it’s own way. Plus, if I put Dragon here, I wouldn’t have near as good a segue to…
#1 – Los Matadores
Oh yes… turns out the only thing worse than a buried matador is an inexplicably pushed duo of matadores. I’m betting most people wouldn’t put this act so high, but this is my list and I can’t imagine ever finding anything more egregious than this personally speaking.
The vignettes leading to them were funny in their own way, with a narration that somehow made them sound like serious warriors even as you saw them wearing the same goofy half masks that nobody liked when Aldo Montoya donned them. And I can’t pretend that El Torito didn’t get over with some folks, and it is nice to see a mini get to show off their skills on a big stage like he often got the chance.
But the simple truth is that this gimmick was utter death for everything that it touched. You have to understand; I’m as big a fan of tag wrestling as you’ll ever see, and I probably like Primo and Epico a ton more than most. And I appreciate getting to see them showcase their abilities, anything that can get them pushed is great in my book. Anything but this, really.
Unlike most silly cartooney gimmicks, WWE seemed very, very hesitant to allow Los Matadores to become enhancement talents. It does make a certain kind of sense in that gimmicks like theirs suffer more from losses than anyone else, because it’s very easy for them to look like jokes if they aren’t regularly beating people. The issue is that everyone saw them as a punchline from the first time they appeared on-screen anyway and no amount of pushing was likely to change that.
So they really never got over, how matter how much they won. All they really accomplished was making whomever they beat look bad for losing to such a dumb gimmick team. And they did this very, very regularly.
The kicker was that they seemed to have a knack for beating solid teams right when they were just getting some momentum.
And then, they did nothing with that win. They won their first 17 televised matches in a row and didn’t even hint at wanting to go for the tag titles. In fact, they would frequently just disappear for a few weeks after beating some up-and-coming tandem; until the next time they were needed to derail another push.
Most notably they really, really decimated the Real Americans, just by beating them on two different occasions in late 2014. I really can’t stress enough how much they hurt the credibility of the entire division, and did absolutely nothing else. It was seemingly their entire purpose in life. And to me that makes them uniquely terrible. Most bad gimmicks only hurt the people that have them, but Los Matadores were damaging to tag wrestling as a whole for most of their existence.
Here’s a full list of teams that at some point were defeated by a couple of bullfighters in pink half-masks on WWE TV:
3MB, Los Locales, Hunico & Camacho, Real Americans, RybAxel, Slater Gator, Prime Time Players, The Ascension, Tyson Kidd & Cesaro, Miz & Mizdow, Gold & Stardust, The New Day, The Usos
