Posted on by bdamage1
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 Duke ‘The Dumpster’ Droese
Mike Droese had been wrestling on the Florida independent circuit for a couple of years under the gimmick name of Rocco Gibraltar. In 1993, Droese felt he was ready to join the World Wrestling Federation and decided to create a catchy gimmick to get noticed by the company. Droese saw how many wrestlers in the WWF had occupational gimmicks and decided to create a gimmick based on that. Droese came up with ‘The Garbage Man’ and began wrestling on the independents with that character.
Droese started recording all of his promos and matches developing a video package to send to the WWF. When Droese was included in Pro Wrestling Illustrated Top 500 Wrestlers edition of the magazine, Droese garnered national attention and helped him get noticed by the WWF. Droese was invited to wrestle a dark match try out with the company in 1994 and was ultimately signed to a deal. Vince McMahon loved the garbage man gimmick that Droese developed for himself and assigned his son Shane McMahon to work with Droese on developing it further.
It was Shane who came up with the name of ‘Duke ‘The Dumpster’ Droese and filmed several vignettes to introduce the character to WWF television. Droese feuded with the likes of Jerry ‘the King’ Lawler and Hunter Hearst Helmsley. According to Duke the Dumpster Droese, he fell out of favor with Vince McMahon after allowing himself to get brutalized with his own garbage can by Lawler. McMahon felt it was too violent for TV. Vince was also not happy that Droese had ownership of the garbage man gimmick and these things led to Droese being used less and less. A heel turn was planned for Droese, but was scrapped at the last minute. Droese admitted that during this time, he was complaining a lot to management about his character’s direction and was ultimately released from the company because of it in 1996. Mike Droese would reprise the Dumpster gimmick in 2001 for the Wrestlemania 17 gimmick battle royal.