10 Forgotten WWE gimmicks from the 90s
For every Hulk Hogan and Steve Austin, there are countless professional wrestlers who never manage to make it to the big leagues like the WWE. Some are lucky enough to get brief runs in the major leagues.
In the early and mid-90s, we saw a number of strange gimmicks in WWE which never got over, leading the men behind the gimmicks to only have short runs in the company. We take a look at some of these forgotten gimmicks from the 90s, including one Superstar who main-evented the first-ever episode of WWE RAW in a match against The Undertaker.
#10 Bastion Booger
We start off our list with Bastion Booger. Booger was portrayed by journeyman wrestler Mike Shaw who had already had a couple of unsuccessful gimmicks before he debuted as Bastion Booger.
Before this, Shaw briefly wrestled as the “mad monk” Friar Ferguson but that gimmick had to be nixed because of the Catholic Church of New York.
WWE repackaged Mike Shaw as Bastion Booger as this gimmick was destined to fail from the moment it debuted. Booger’s whole character was that he was a glutton and he just couldn’t control his appetite.
There have been stories that Shaw was given the Bastion Booger gimmick as a punishment because he couldn’t control his weight. He was a jobber for most of his brief WWE run and his biggest win was over Owen Hart on All American Wrestling.
#9 Duke “The Dumpster” Droese
One of the things I remember from the New Generation Era of WWE is that a lot of the undercard wrestlers were based on jobs. Amongst these was Duke “The Dumpster” Droese, your friendly neighborhood trash collector.
Droese was actually decent in the ring, especially for the the time, but the gimmick just didn’t connect with fans. He wrestled in the Fed between 1994 and 1996, after making his debut on an episode of WWE RAW in May ‘94 against Barry Horowitz.
Speaking about the origins of his gimmick in an interview with WrestleZone, Droese said the following:
Vince McMahon was still holding on to a lot of the same ideals in the 1980s and into the 1990s, trying to do the same things. Whether it worked or not, I knew that’s what he was looking for, and I knew he was always looking for someone to get over with the people, especially the working-class man. A ‘blue-collar’ gimmick was perfect and that’s why I came up with it in Florida when I was working the independent scene. I wrestled as ‘The Garbage Man’ Rocco Gibraltar.