10 Terrible WWE Gimmicks That Were One Tweak Away From Perfection
1. The Ringmaster
Steve Austin was so close to perfection in 1996 that actually found it in 1997, but it took his separation from Ted Dibiase six months into his WWE run to instantly strip away everything that simply didn't quite click about the gimmick.
Being the Million Dollar Man's top charge at that point was to be damned with the faintest praise in the entire company. As noted elsewhere in this list, Dibiase's Corporation were a busted flush within a year of formation, and even less functional than that by the time Austin was just about the last guy still lingering around the fallen star.
Without the gaudy, dated Million Dollar Championship and the inadvertent barrier of Ted doing his talking, the only thing the future 'Rattlesnake' was a master of was his own destiny.
The tweak was so blindingly obvious that he even managed to use a storyline defeat to his advantage in making it happen. Dibiase promised to leave the company if Austin lost to Savio Vega at May 1996's In Your House: Beware Of Dog 2 (in reality, WCW's real millions had won his signature). In an inspired post-mortem on his loss, Stone Cold implied that he threw the contest to ditch the dead weight.