10 WWE Name Changes That IMMEDIATELY Backfired
2. Practically Every Member Of Retribution
Retribution will always be pointed to and laughed at for being a colossal waste of everyone's time in 2020-2021. WWE fans needed some fresh acts to sink their teeth into whilst stuck at home mid-pandemic, and it looked like the promotion would provide when a brand new faction of destructive hooligans burst onto the scene in August 2020. Their initial mission? Destroy WWE from within.
The fun was only just getting started.
Eventually, Retribution members started to get cheesy names: T-BAR, Mace, Slapjack, Reckoning and Retaliation arrived. The first trio sounded especially corny, and they signified WWE's intent to gleefully turn a renegade stable of vandals into extras from Streets Of Rage. Being fair, the group’s evolving story didn’t help, but man those names were crap.
Nobody could take Retribution seriously once they saw the new masks and heard those names. Slapjack? Seriously?! The creative team would've been as well calling him Slapnuts in honour of Jeff Jarrett. Aha! Ain't he great? Exactly nobody was saying that about T-BAR, Mace or Slapjack. All anyone wanted to do was kick and punch their health bars down so they'd fall to the ground, blink then disappear.
Back to that story. T-BAR alleged that these invading ex-NXT'ers wanted WWE contracts. One problem: They already had WWE contracts, but apparently that was a logic loophole the writers planned to ignore for good. Things threatened to get fun again once Mustafa Ali came onboard, but he was powerless to stop the flow of bad creative.
It was curtains for Retribution once the masks and names showed up. One hell of a first chapter though.