10 Short-Lived Wrestling Stables You Totally Don’t Remember
4. The Cosmic Wasteland
Attention, Cody Rhodes: we're terribly sorry for bringing Stardust up again.
Nobody can claim Cody showed a lack of effort with anything WWE handed him under the face paint. The gimmick had simply run its course, and that was true long before The Ascension joined him in 2015. As 'The Cosmic Wasteland', the group were supposed to be Raw's new outlandish menace.
Konnor and Viktor tried their best to look imposing, but all three were swimming up stream against a tide of apathy from an audience who had already written them off. The premise (centred around Stardust as some sort of cosmic leader who used The Ascension as his cosmic henchmen) was hard to stomach.
The Wasteland might have worked as a token act on Superstars in the mid-90s. In 2015-2016 though, it was ridiculous, continued The Ascension's fall from NXT grace and hid Rhodes' natural zest for wrestling and oodles of talent behind a silly gimmick.
Forgetting this happened is a blessing.