10 Wrestlers Who Turned Their Backs On Former Gimmicks
4. Akeem
"This is deep, this is dark..." mused a confused Gene Okerlund, incongruously suited and booted in the middle of a ghetto he'd been misled into believing was 'deepest, darkest Africa' by WWE's resident Phd in Style, Slick.
That sentence alone tells you how very wrong this whole angle was (and how sketchy Mean Gene's geography must have been: he'd probably rode a cab fifteen minutes from Manhattan to reach the cradle of civilisation). The bemused Okerlund's reason for visiting, um, 'Africa', soon became clear. Tribal dancers surrounded a bonfire, as a ceremony rebirthing a certain 450lb bruiser under a new, inexplicable guise began. From the smoke emerged Akeem, the 'African Dream'.
"Don't you ever refer to him as the One Man Gang!" barked the Slickster, after Mean Gene rightly identified the familiar face now clad in a bright yellow dashiki. Akeem himself renounced his former gimmick in his new jive talk. Hence forth, he'd only be known as, being generous, a lame Dusty Rhodes parody, and being condemning, a backwards African-American stereotype.