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 Amish Roadkill
Mike Depoli was trained at ECW’s ‘House of Hardcore’ back in 1996 by Taz and Perry Saturn. Early in his wrestling career, Depli worked on ECW’s ring crew and was a member of Taz’s entourage in ‘Team Taz.’ Eventually, Depoli started to develop his own gimmick, which initially was a sort of ‘Deliverance’ backwoods character dubbed ‘Roadkill.’ After a few preliminary matches as that character, things changed in 1997.
ECW owner Paul Heyman was in attendance at the training facility in Long Island, New York to film promos with Taz. While waiting, Heyman was watching Depoli and fellow student Dan Morrison wrestling against each other. While the two young wrestlers looked completely different and had different styles, Heyman came up with an idea. Heyman had gimmicks already developed in his mind for a character based on the movie ‘Boogie Nights’ which was a drama based on the porno industry in the 1970’s. Heyman also had an idea based on a movie called ‘Kingpin’ which was a buddy comedy about an Amish bowler.
Heyman decided to combine the two gimmicks and form an unlikely tag team with the two trainees. Dan Morrison would be Dirk Doring and Depoli would be Amish Roadkill. Eventually, Dirk Doring was changed to Dan Doring after the WWF debuted the gimmick of Val Venis…so Doring’s porn character was toned down. Tommy Dreamer was put in charge of developing the two as a team and made the decision to have Amish roadkill be obsessed with killing chickens and that would be the only word he would say during promos. The odd couple tag team would capture the ECW tag team titles and be noted as the very last tag champs in ECW history before they folded in 2001.
To browse other entries of the Gimmick Table…Please Click Here.