Brian Damage
A gimmick is something that is intended to hook the attention of fans to a wrestler. They may be outrageous or steeped more in reality, whatever the case may be…some have succeeded and many others have failed. The Gimmick Table takes a look at the origins of some of your favorite and not so favorite gimmicks of professional wrestlers.
Today we browse the gimmick of Festus
After Drew Hankinson’s ‘Fake Kane’ gimmick flopped on the main roster, he was sent back down to developmental to get repackaged. Without a new gimmick, Hankinson worried about getting released from the company. During this time, Henry Godwinn was brought back to WWE to form a new version of the Godwinns tag team with Ray Gordy. Godwinn eventually left the company and Hankinson begged producer Michael Hayes to be Gordy’s new tag partner.
The original concept was to keep Gordy and Hankinson a ‘hillbilly’ type of tag team named Jesse and Justice Dalton aka The Dalton Boys. Right before the team were scheduled to debut, Vince McMahon called Hankinson into his office. McMahon informed him that there would be a change to his Justice Dalton character. Vince then went into a story from his school days remembering a quiet, slow, slack jawed student who would go insane if something set him off.
Vince McMahon spent hours with Hankinson coming up with facial expressions he wanted his gimmick to have. His name was then changed from Justice to Festus and his gimmick would a slack jawed individual who stayed calm until the bell rang to start a match. Vince instructed Hankinson to no longer wrestle, but become a brawler as McMahon envisioned Festus as someone who didn’t know how to grapple.
The Festus gimmick lasted from 2007 until 2009 when he was once again pulled from TV and repackaged as Luke Gallows with CM Punk’s Straight Edge Society. It was explained that the reason Gallows acted the way he did as Festus was because he was under the influence of drugs.
You can read other Gimmick Table entries here
Kyle Prescott
Love the story, true or not, that years later Vince brought in the Good Brothers and had no idea the guy he was interviewing was Festus.
177613735
That I believe. lol