Ranking The 5 Best Gimmicks In WWE Today
By Dalton Quix
Even though WWE has now turned towards the direction of more reality based characters, there are still some great gimmicks that stand out above the rest.
Before WWE started to blur the lines of reality and kayfabe, almost every character had a gimmick. There would be cowboys, undertakers, garbagemen, police officers, sexual figures (like Goldust), giants, vampires, and just about any other character you could think of.
In today’s WWE, superstars have veered away from most of these gimmicks and have really just become themselves with certain aspects of their personality turned up. Now, we see John Cena being John Cena the hard worker, Daniel Bryan being Daniel Bryan the underdog who loves wrestling, and Enzo Amore who flaunts what he’s got.
While WWE has a majority of superstars with no true gimmick, there are still some that try a gimmick in an attempt to get over or get TV time. These gimmicks will fall flat a lot of the time, like Darren Young’s “Make Darren Young Great Again” gimmick or Curt Hawkins’ “Face the Facts” gimmick, but sometimes they can catch lightning in a bottle like they did with Tye Dillinger’s “Perfect 10” gimmick down in NXT.
There is no exact formula for how to make a gimmick work. The Undertaker should have been a short lived gimmick, but Mark Calaway made the character one of the most prominent figures in sports entertainment for a quarter of a century.
It really comes down to what the performer will do with the gimmick. Goldust has been around for so long because of his ability to adapt and tweak his gimmick as he saw fit. The “Shining Stars” gimmick died immediately because the superstars were unable to get it over with the audiences.
It takes a lot of talent and hard work to get gimmick character over in today’s WWE, so let’s take a look at the top five gimmicks in WWE today.