10 WWE Plans Doomed From The Start

5. Mr. America

Hulk Hogan's last full-time run with WWE effectively ended at the climax of his incredible WrestleMania XIX contest with Vince McMahon. The company had worked as hard as humanly possible to position The Chairman as Hogan's biggest ever rival going into the 2003 'Show Of Shows', and left absolutely nothing behind with a match that exploited the character-driven positives of both elder statesmen without exposing the negatives brought on by their advancing years. It was - unlike a recent Australian main event - a super showdown.

There was nowhere to go in the aftermath, but the company tried all the same by rebooting a Dusty Rhodes 'Midnight Rider' angle from the mid-1980s and attempting to reheat the angle on the SmackDown midcard. They never even made it to SummerSlam.

The gag wasn't entirely laboured. Hulk Hogan - fired by McMahon post-WrestleMania - was working under the mask but flatly denying it to the one man who, for some reason, required the burden of truth. A lie detector segment was a genuine hit and Hogan was still popular, but the fruit was proven juice-free by a p*sspoor 'Mania buyrate that dribbled in as the weeks progressed.

Predictably, Hogan and McMahon were back at creative and political odds too - to the point where Hulk revealing his identity strictly for the live crowd one week was used as hard evidence for his very real split from the company the next. Would another match really have been a much better conclusion anyway?