8 Babyfaces The WWE Universe Turned Heel
With Cena and Reigns polarising fans, here are eight good guys turned bad by the audience.
Times, they are a changing. Back in the 1970s and '80s, the good guys were cheered vociferously by the audience, as the right morals and ethics reigned supreme over the dastardly villains. Men like Hulk Hogan, Tito Santana, and The Ultimate Warrior entered arenas to deafening cheers because of their apparent desire to fight for good.
In the late 1990s, the anti-hero began to take over. The clean-cut babyface was no longer in fashion and WWE was somewhat late to the party, still trying to introduce vanilla heroes to the fans with the rationale of "well, it worked in the past". Luckily the penny eventually dropped, and the Attitude Era gave rise to such babyface stars as Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, and Triple H.
Of course, the one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history, and WWE is no different in this regard. Roman Reigns is the latest babyface to be forced down the throats of the WWE Universe with the audience not being shy about their disapproval. It's been going on for what... four years now? Yup: WWE don't know their history.
Reigns hasn't officially turned heel, but a number of times in WWE history the audience's disapproval of a babyface has actively led to a switch in allegiance. Here are eight such times.
8. The New Day
After a few weeks of vignettes, The New Day finally arrived on our screens way back at the end of November 2014. Some were hoping that Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, and Big E. would return as some sort of Nation of Domination-type faction, despite how silly that would be in the modern age.
Instead, what we got was a whole lot of smiling, clapping, and positive feeling, which combined well with the mass eye-rolling from the audience. From the very beginning, the group as a happy-clappy babyface trio was dead in the water, but it took a long time for the creative team to latch onto this.
The audience rejected them immediately, and by the middle of 2015 the group had little choice but to turn heel. Since then, they've consistently been one of the most entertaining aspects of WWE TV - ironically leading back to a full-blown face realignment, which they've maintained ever since, selling pancakes and setting records along the way.