Stars ranging from Sting, to Hulk Hogan, to Buff Bagwell underwent major transformations within a year's time in WCW.
A lot can change in a year in the world of professional wrestling, and that was particularly true in the fast-paced Monday Night War era. Both WWE and WCW embraced crash booking, chock-full of face and heel turns, title changes, and wholesale gimmick changes.
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There were some wrestlers who remained pretty steady during this time, never having too significant changes in how they were portrayed, even as they shifted feuds or slid up or down the card. However, there were also those talents, including main event level stars, who underwent wholesale changes and became borderline unrecognizable compared to who they’d been twelve months earlier.
Sting was a defining star for WCW, but he had multiple periods of radical change. For the first half of 1996, The Franchise was more or less the same guy he’d been for years as a high-energy babyface who wore bright colors. The nWo invasion, and his WCW compatriots not trusting that he hadn’t joined the heel group led Sting to break off, though, clad in black and white, becoming a silent loner who watched the action from the rafters. The transitions from Surfer Sting to Crow Sting helped him reassert himself as the top babyface in WCW, but Sting underwent another huge shift in 1998. He temporarily dropped the black and white for a red and black look after he joined the nWo Wolfpac and started acting a bit more like his old self.
For Hulk Hogan’s first two years in WCW, he was more or less the same superhero babyface he’d been as WWE’s top star of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, the unusual Bash at the Beach1996 PPV saw him join the New World Order in one of the most epic heel turns of all time.
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Hogan changed color schemes from red and yellow to black and white and became precisely the kind of cowardly, scheming heel mastermind the old Hulkster would have feuded with.
Brian Pillman was a breakout white meat babyface as the face of WCW’s Light Heavyweight Division in the early 1990s. However, in 1993 a heel turn saw him make a surprisingly great turn as half of the brash and brilliant Hollywood Blonds tag team with Steve Austin. Pillman had another babyface run after the team split up, returning to his old ways on a number of levels. However, another heel turn would not only see him join a re-imagined Four Horsemen faction, but also merge into his famous Loose Cannon gimmick that constantly pushed the envelope. It was a pivotal turn as he started to lean less on his athleticism, more on impressive character work for the rest of his career and life.
Few wrestlers have ever changed gimmicks as often or as dramatically as Brutus Beefcake in WCW. He quietly debuted as a Hulk Hogan’s ally in 1994, only to have, by the end of the year, turned heel and been rebranded as Hogan rival, The Butcher. The Butcher would give way to The Zodiac, an eccentric Dungeon of Doom personality, only for him to re-debut as the babyface Booty Man with Kimberly Page by his side. Beefcake was clearly among the wrestlers who suffered from too many gimmick changes, and would garner three-time placement on this list were it not for him being gone from WCW for all of 1997. He did radically change again, though, from his last appearance in late 1996 as The Booty Man, to returning as Hogan’s right-hand man in the nWo, The Disciple, in February 1998.
As a matter of aesthetics, Diamond Dallas Page may not have transformed too much over his WCW tenure—maintaining a similar look and baseline gimmick. However, it’s tough to deny his skills, the way he carried himself, and the way he was positioned on the card didn’t completely transform from 1996 to 1997. In 1996, DDP was planted in the mid-card as a heel. In standing up to the nWo, having a terrific feud with Randy Savage, Page became one of WCW’s tip-top homegrown heroes. This run set him up to become the go-to tag team partner for visiting celebrities like Karl Malone, David Arquette, and Jay Leno, not to mention a world champion in the years to follow.
Marcus Alexander Bagwell was a babyface tag team specialist from 1993 to 1995, winning tag gold first with 2 Cold Scorpio, and enjoying reigns with The Patriot as Stars and Stripes, and then Scotty Riggs as American Males in 1994 and 1995. In late 1996, though, he turned on Riggs and joined the nWo. More than a simple heel turn, Bagwell completely reinvented himself as Buff Bagwell—one of the promotion’s smuggest, most loathsome bad guys whom it was hard to remember had once been such a clean-cut face.
After years billed with the nickname Das Wunderkind, emphasizing his youth and good looks, Alex Wright shifted gears dramatically in 1999 when he re-debuted under the name Berlyn—a reference to the city of Berlin in Wright’s native Germany. The character sported a black mohawk, facial hair, and a trench coat for a much edgier presentation than he’d ever had before. Unfortunately, a series of miscues associated with the character, paired with it simply not getting over with the audience left Berlyn to fester in the mid-card until he went back to the Wright name, and reverted closer to his old persona the next year.
Most of Jim Duggan’s WCW tenure was rooted in the name he’d built in WCW as a flag-waving patriot and a brawling babyface. In late WCW, the most unlikely turn of all occurred when Duggan not only turned heel, but did so by joining Team Canada. It was a square-peg-round-hole scenario that didn’t fit Hacksaw at all, and felt like one of the ultimate cases of introducing a turn or a swerve just for shock value without any logic or anyone really benefiting.
When Ray Traylor signed with WCW, he debuted as The Boss, a character a little too derivative of his Big Boss Man persona in WWE, to the point there was legal intervention to make him shift gears. The Guardian Angel gimmick he worked afterward fell a bit flat.
Related: Every Version Of The Big Boss Man, Ranked From Worst To Best From there, he’d switch gears entirely with a heel turn and a return to the Big Bubba Rogers gimmick he had worked before he ever signed with WWE. Traylor had more gimmick changes as he went in and out of the nWo in the years to follow, but it was this period of settling into WCW when his identity varied the most aggressively.
Billy Kidman worked for most of his first two years in WCW as a member of Raven’s Flock, with a grungy look and implications he had a drug issue. All of a sudden, he made a dramatic change in 1998, shifting to a clean-cut look, wearing a white tank top and jean shorts. As a babyface, free of The Flock, he became a fixture in the mid-card and toward the top of the Cruiserweight division, on a totally different track from where he’d been in 1996 and 1997.
Michael Chin is a writer based in Las Vegas, He writes about pro wrestling for The Sportster and has followed WWE and other promotions for over 30 years. He's the author of the wrestling book, The Long Way Home. Follow him on Twitter @miketchin.