WWE: 5 Biggest Transformations In Wrestling History

The New Year is a time to set goals and make transformations. It’s time to shed old habits and become the person you always hoped to be. If you’re wondering where to look to find inspiration, cast your eyes no further than the world of professional wrestling. The WWE has long been a place where midcarders turn into main eventers and dentists turn into demons.

As you jot down your goals for 2017 and look to become a new you, here are the 5 biggest transformations in wrestling history.

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5. Oz becomes Cool

There’s really nowhere to go but up when your gimmick is to walk to the ring in a giant green cape and the halloween mask of an old man. As a young WCW superstar, Kevin Nash had several forgettable gimmicks, but his run as the all and powerful Oz was one for the ages. He was billed as hailing from the Emerald City and was managed by The Great Wizard. Get it? Yeah, it’s awful.

After a month, the entire gimmick was scrapped. Nash would also compete as Vinnie Vegas alongside Diamond Dallas Page before leaving WCW and emerging in the WWE as Shawn Michaels bodyguard, “Big Daddy Cool” Diesel.

The transformation would lead Diesel to a year long WWE championship run and eventually back to the WCW to form the NWO under his real name. Thankfully for us all, this was the last Wizard of Oz gimmick we’d ever have to encounter in wrestling.

4. Husky Follows The Buzzards

When your name is Windham Rotunda, a wrestling gimmick should be simple. Rotunda, a third generation superstar following in the footsteps of his grandfather (the late Blackjack Mulligan), his father (Mike Rotunda), and two of his uncles (Barry Windham and Kendall Windham) made his way to the WWE in 2009 and was saddled with the unfortunate name of Husky Harris. Not only did the Husky Harris moniker completely ignore Rotunda’s wrestling heritage, but it sounded like the name of a 1980s garbage pail kid.

Thankfully for Rotunda, the Nexus faction he debuted with would eventually sputter out and the Bray Wyatt character would be born. After a year of honing his skills, Wyatt would reemerge on the WWE scene with his family and become one of the most memorable characters of this generation.

3. Stunning Goes Stone Cold

During the early 90s, Stunning Steve Austin was a multi-time singles and tag team champion in WCW. He formed the Hollywood Blondes tag team with Flyin Bryan Pillman and had a memorable feud with Ricky the Dragon Steamboat. As the Stunning one, Austin had a decent career by any standards, but flamboyant blonde haired wrestlers were a dime a dozen in the 90s. Thankfully for the wrestling world, Austin’s hairline would betray him and force him to transform into the bald headed, Stone Cold Steve Austin. When Austin debuted in the WWE as Ted Dibiase’s “ringmaster” he was stuck somewhere between Stunning and Stone Cold. It wasn’t until a King of the Ring victory over Jake The Snake Roberts and the infamous Austin 3:16 promo that Stone Cold’s tranformation would be complete.

2. Maiavia Gets Rocked

Unlike Bray Wyatt, the WWE did try to capitalize on Dwayne Johnson’s wrestling lineage. The third generation superstar debuted at the 1996 Survivor Series as Rocky Maivia (a combination of his father and grandfather’s name, Rocky Johnson and “High Chief” Peter Maivia). As the WWE audiences began craving anti-heroes, Rocky’s happy go lucky persona soon made fans turn against him. The chants of Die Rocky Die would eventually lead to Rocky dropping the last name and simply going by The Rock. With a cocky persona full of catch phrases and fine italian silk shirts, The Rock would go onto becoming one of the WWE’s all time greatest superstars.

So for all of those of you cheering for the demise of Roman Reigns, just know that there’s still hope.

1. The Dentist Goes To Hell

No one has undergone a more important transformation than Glen Jacobs. When Jacobs debuted in the WWE in 1995, he wrestled a few dark matches under the name Mike Unabomb (and yes, that was the same year the Unabomber had been captured). For his first televised appearance, he appeared as Jerry Lawler’s personal dentist, Isaac Yankem DDS. If that sounds like an awful name/gimmick, well, that’s because it was. Yankem’s entrance music was simply the sound of a dentists drill. Yankem would wrestle under the moniker for an entire year as essentially a jobber to the stars.

If being a wrestling dentist wasn’t bad enough, Jacobs would reemerge in one of the most ridiculous storlines of all time as a knock off “Diesel” when Kevin Nash and Scott Hall left the WWE for WCW in 1996.

Luckily for Jacobs and the rest of us, he would finally find his footing in one of the most important storylines in wrestling history when he made his re-debut as Kane at Badd Blood: In Your House on October 5, 1997, by using The Undertaker’s signature Tombstone Piledriver to cost him the victory in the first Hell in a Cell match against Shawn Michaels.

The backstory behind Kane, as told by Paul Bearer, was that The Undertaker had accidentally killed his family by starting a fire at their funeral home, with the exception of Kane, who was left physically and mentally scarred by the event; Undertaker claimed that Kane, a pyromaniac, was the one who started the fire and could not possibly have survived.

Yes, I do realize that sounds even more ridiculous than a wrestling dentist, but it worked.

The greatest transformation in wrestling history has led Jacobs from a dentist to demon and an eventual spot in the WWE Hall of Fame.

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