10 Insane Wrestling Gimmicks That Morphed Into Another Level
6. Bray Wyatt
In many ways, Bray Wyatt foreshadowed - and is emblematic of - WWE's great creative decline.
The first NXT act to promise great change, before the main roster regime changed him into a joke, Wyatt led an online cult in parallel with his onscreen 'Family'. They found the new Undertaker, we whispered. And then he became Mordecai.
Wyatt was a new brood of monster, one more coherent to what was a post-supernatural gimmick environment. He lurked in the daylight, in the woods, ostracised from a society he sought to destroy and reimagine. The true horror is that which we repress and then mutates, an inherent, eternal, shape-shifting evil from which there is no escape, because it resides in us all. A lofty premise put into the hands of writers that can't even craft story arcs for its midcard champions, it was bound for failure. Honestly, f*cking Cthulu could rock up in WWE, and Vince would book him to go 50/50 with Apollo Crews.
It all fizzled to sh*t, and rapidly: Wyatt required the assistance of smoke, mirrors, small children, fire safety blankets and exploding television monitors to win - at which point he had apparently acquired actual supernatural powers, rendering him worse than hapless. And then he threatened to dress up in drag, before the Wrestling Gods granted him reprieve from his sacrilege sentence.
Wyatt had tried his best, they reasoned. It wasn't all his fault.