10 Times WWE Destroyed Something Brilliant

Progress is slow, but recent omens are hopeful.

WWE, after years of stupidly trying to build and trademark sports entertainers from scratch in venues far sh*ttier than the high school gyms they buried Daniel Bryan for apparently wrestling in, is finally recognising that it might be best to simply allow performers to do what made them popular in the first place.

AJ Styles debuted in 2016 under the maverick guise of AJ Styles. Kevin Owens changed his surname and little else. Samoa Joe didn't even become Samoa Jim; he debuted in 2015 with almost the same theme music to which he entered the Impact Zone. The famed WWE bubble is bursting - but the company's trademark heavy-handed approach is still evident elsewhere.

It seems obvious at this point that the main roster creative regime - i.e., Vince McMahon - doesn't really "get" Shinsuke Nakamura, opting to poke fun at and embellish his tangential association with Michael Jackson (and apparently, by extension, all 1980s popular music, him being 'The Artist'). Nakamura isn't the only character painted with broad strokes, and the phenomenon is as old as McMahon's pop culture reference points.

He has even injected his own creations with a lethal dose of poison.

John Cena's awesome 2015 run with the United States Championship achieved something many thought impossible: he restored the value of a midcard title in WWE.

Truth be told, that might be an understatement. The United States Championship has never meant much of anything in WWE. Some decent programmes have been centred around it - not least of which the retread of Chris Benoit and Booker T's best of seven series in WCW - but the belt has largely existed on the periphery, awarded arbitrarily to performers as a weak launchpad for a halfhearted push. See: Antonio Cesaro.

Cena was probably the lone exception to that rule. His 2004 run with the belt elevated him in the eyes of the audience; eleven years later, he elevated the belt in the eyes of the audience, stringing together an assembly of minor classics in an awesome guessing game of a weekly open challenge. The segment was handily the most anticipated and well-executed on RAW, but it ended with a curious whimper.

Alberto Del Rio made his less than triumphant return to WWE at that year's Hell In A Cell, defeating Cena far too easily for anybody to actually buy. He then adopted the worst gimmick of the decade and traded the title pointlessly with Kalisto in a feud that went at least two months too long.