Success in the WWE can be easily summed up with the following formula: talent plus opportunity plus gimmick. Sometimes a wrestler has the opportunity and the gimmick, but doesn't have the talent to pull it off (Sean O'Haire comes to mind). Other times the wrestler has the talent and the gimmick, but isn't given the opportunity to do anything with it (Damien Sandow is the most recent example). This list is dealing with the third part of the equation: the gimmick. The WWE's history is littered with ridiculously bad gimmicks that doomed the wrestlers that were saddled with them. In a few cases, however, the creative team came up with a new idea for the wrestler which ended up saving their careers, leading some to WWE World Championships, and others to the Hall of Fame. The criteria for this list is as follows: the character/gimmick change had to be drastic (so subtle character tweaks like Hunter Hearst Helmsley to Triple H, The Ringmaster to Stone Cold, or Rocky Maivia to The Rock don't count), the repackaging had to happen in the WWE (so 1-2-3 Kid being repackaged as Syxx in WCW which led to X-Pac doesn't count...the drastic character changed happened in WCW, not WWF), the wrestler has to be somebody who originally was in WWE before the reboot (so Mean Mark Callous in WCW to The Undertaker in the WWF doesn't count), and the wrestler's career needed to be in dire need of saving (so Shawn Michaels doesn't count...even though he was re-packaged as The Heartbreak Kid, his career wasn't in any jeopardy beforehand; it was just the next step in his career). With those criteria out of the way, let's get to the list!
