10 Major Stars Who Escaped WWE Creative Jail
5. Rikishi
Much like Kane, the man who would become Rikishi endured a torrid time of it in the mid 1990s.
He fared well enough as a Headshrinker, at least in comparison to his early singles ventures. Repackaged as 'Make A Difference' Fatu in 1995, the former savage learned English, and used it to teach the kidz a lesson to the tune of maudlin synthesisers. "Just say to no drugs," he would tell us, "and one day you too might get lumbered with a terrible gimmick that lasts for about a month."
This motivational patter was so lame that Vince McMahon literally cut his tongue off and rebranded him as The Sultan in 1996. It was, quite fittingly, unspeakably bad stuff. Still, he wrestled more WrestleMania singles matches than Dolph Ziggler.
To underscore just how poor those gimmicks were, Rikishi Fatu/Phatu (lol) got more over by displaying his massive, crater-sized a*se on television. We can't in good conscience reduce the man to a body part, because he achieved something particularly admirable in the year 2000, given the daunting level of megastar competition; by drawing deafening reactions as an act as fun as he was dangerous in presentation, Rikishi danced his way to stardom - and it helped that his piledriver was truly disgusting-looking in its impact.