10 Times WCW Broke With Reality

WCW was a strange place. Wrestling is weird anyway, but WCW took it even further than WWE when it came to breaching the rules of reality.

Whether it was wrestlers going completely off-script, ill-conceived characters, or desperately bonkers storylines, WCW lost the plot with wonderful frequency. Ted Turner's entertainment behemoth created moments that still have the power to baffle.

The colourful characters of the pre-NWO-era, such as the hysterically uncool Dungeon of Doom, gave way to the knowing, smark-savvy Monday Night wars period of black t-shirts and Eric Bischoff's punchable smirk, but the craziness remained.

Performers gained more clout and Vince Russo transformed the product into a cavalcade of raunchy, quickfire drama. At every juncture, WCW found new and exciting ways to abandoned the laws of logic and taste.

Ultimately, it didn't work. Towards the end WCW became a screaming, rapid-fire sinkhole of madness with titles being treated as disposable props and everything being thrown at the screen to stave off a rampant WWE. Along the way it contributed some prime exhibits to the eternal museum of wrestling-related madness.

WCW tried everything, and not all of it made any sense whatsoever.

After serving in WWE as face-painted weirdo Goldust, Dustin Runnels returned to WCW as face-painted weirdo Seven. In 1999 he appeared in several short vignettes to hype the new character for its debut...

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the vignettes suggested Seven was a child-bothering creep. He lurked outside a child's window, encouraged the tot to 'join him and live forever', and finally to 'sleep'. The character was less 'professional wrestler' and more 'child abductor', and was so off-putting it never even made it to his first match.

Dustin Runnels appeared on Monday Nitro for his live debut. Runnels, in full white facepaint and leather flashing mac, immediately broke character and complained about how stupid his gimmick was, along with how dumb Goldust also was, and re-branded himself as the 'American Nightmare' Dustin Runnels.

Whether Runnels genuinely broke character, or whether they whole thing was a ploy to kill off the creepy character and keep using Runnels while getting a 'worked shoot' angle going, is still unclear.

Whatever Seven's purpose really was, it was extremely weird, as was the bilious promo Runnels gave about how much it sucked.