10 Bizarre Times WWE Stars Experimented With Their Gimmick
1. Hulk Hogan - Mr America
Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan probably blamed Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle for WrestleMania XIX bombing at the box office.
A favourite 'Show Of Shows' of many in retrospect with a card loaded with almost every major North American name from the 1990s and beyond in one capacity or another, the buyrate (560,000) was 320,000 purchases lower than the year prior, 427,000 lower than the next year's show and even 25,000 down from the 2003 Royal Rumble. Outwardly the general message was a hatchet job on Seattle's promotion and the war in Iraq (!), but as well as WWE blatantly becoming an uncool brand two years on from WrestleMania X-Seven, the McMahon/Hogan-heavy build simply didn't connect.
They couldn't put on The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin, they wouldn't put it on Triple H despite his racist and disgusting storyline with Booker T, so they probably blamed Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle despite the latter wrestling the thing with a broken freakin' neck and the former almost giving himself one taking bad advice to end the show on a high.
Regardless, the daft old weirdos realised that a straight-up rematch wasn't the answer for the post-Mania run and went all rewrite-No-Holds-Barred-in-a-weekend and put Hogan in a mask to do Simpsons comedy and kill Sean O'Haire and Zach Gowen's momentum getting sucked in as heels and babyfaces respectively. Hogan was gone before they could even "pay" it all off properly, but who's to say that would have yielded any thing more than the original anyway.