Kane, The Godfather and an Exploration of WWE Superstars with Numerous Gimmicks

Before he was Kane, WWE's merciless, masked behemoth, Glenn Jacobs underwent a series of metamorphoses.

In search of stardom, of the ideal persona, the wrestler became a Christmas-themed colossus, a barbarian and a maniacal dentist. His resume is filled with aliases. His past is littered with the ghosts of old gimmicks. 

Wrestling's history boasts a number of men like Jacobs, those who switched from gimmick to gimmick over the years.

Some of them wore those multiple skins comfortably. Some flopped regardless of their character.

Looking back at Charles Wright's path to the Hall of Fame, going from The Soultaker to The Godfather, is a reminder of just how difficult it is to find the right role. 

Wright struggled to find his avenue to success with a number of acts. When Ed Leslie wasn't playing Brutus Beefcake, he flailed around, out of his element, ineffective.

Barry Darsow is a rarity—a true shapeshifter of the squared circle, becoming a new person every few years. He played one role worthy of the Hall of Fame and another that stuck with audiences long after it stopped appearing on TV.

Barry Darsow

The greatest success of Darsow's career fittingly came with his face obscured.

Stripes of red and white facepaint covered his mug when he wrestled as Smash, one-half of the spiked leather-wearing bruisers known as Demolition. This is the role where he won tag team gold with WWE, where he competed at WrestleMania.

The mask of paint he wore as Smash was one of many facades Darsow donned throughout his career.

Darsow played his first gimmick so briefly that it's difficult to find any trace of it. There are no YouTube clips of the Minnesota native as Tsar Mongo. His CageMatch.net page has no record of him as Mongo, either.

The moniker is only mentioned in passing, as it is in Jan Murphy's profile of Demolition on Chinlock.com: "Early in his career, Darsow worked all over the world, including making his debut in Hawaii as Tsar Mongo."

In 1984, he became Crusher Darsow, a heel who battled Junkyard Dog, Terry Taylor and others at Mid-South Wrestling. The act played up his size, with his barrel chest bare and his power as his greatest asset. 

His next incarnation spawned his first big break. Darsow followed many a wrestler's lead and slipped on a jacket with a hammer and sickle and shaved his head to morph into a Soviet villain. The Cold War made it easy for Ruskies, fake or otherwise, to garner heat from the crowd. 

Darsow joined forces with Ivan and Nikita Koloff as Krusher Khruschev.

His size and brawling acumen made the role a good fit. Ivan did the majority of the speaking, allowing the young, inexperienced Darsow to lean on him as he learned the art of the interview.

The Russians were a major part of the National Wrestling Alliance in the mid-'80s. The stable won several tag team titles, feuded with the popular Magnum TA and battled the red-hot Road Warriors.

But where Darsow was a second banana alongside the Koloffs, he soon became a bigger star with a different act.

The leather-clad, face-painted duo of Demolition invaded WWE in 1987. The pairing that most fans remember, where Bill Eadie competed as Ax and Darsow was known as Smash, was not the original squad. 

Randy Colley first teamed with Ax, but fans recognized him as Moondog Rex, his previous gimmick, and chanted that old name. Cue the change to Darsow.

As explained in Greg Oliver and Steven Johnson's The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Tag Teams, "The new Smash was Barry Darsow, hand-picked by Eadie as his partner because he was not widely known at the time." 

This was the perfect spot for Darsow. Smash was ferocious and unruly, a hard-hitting brawler in Mad Max-inspired ring gear that forced fans to pay attention.

Demolition went on to be a major success. In the company's golden age for tag teams, Ax and Smash were among the most memorable, battling The Hart Foundation, The Brain Buster and The Colossal Connection en route to winning the World Tag Team Championship three times.

Ax and Smash held those belts for a record 478 days.

A serious of odder, less sustainable roles followed. Darsow shifted from persona to persona between 1991 to 1999.

Still with WWE, he traded in his facepaint for a cartoon burglar mask and his leather gladiator gear for a length of rope as the uncreatively titled Repo Man. 

Darsow sneaked around the ring with a sly grin, tied up his opponents or stole items in the name of repossession. It was a hammy shtick that fit comfortably in a period brimming with over-the-top gimmicks. 

No one could have turned that act into main event material, but Darsow embraced the character so wholeheartedly that he made it work the best it could. The Repo Man remains a hard-to-forget figure in WWE's New Generation Era.

When Darsow moved on to WCW in 1994, he adopted a more nondescript gimmick—The Blacktop Bully.

Bully was an enraged truck driver in a sleeveless red shirt. His only match of note under that name was a brawl inside a moving truck with Dustin Rhodes at Uncensored 1995.

A few years later, he returned to WCW as a cocky golfer named Mr. Hole-In-One. Unlike Repo Man, who was a clown among clowns, this gimmick was ill-suited for an era that was focusing more on edginess.

He played the part with abandon, though.  The chameleon bruiser always managed to extract the most out of any act, regardless of how goofy it was. 

Darsow told Oliver for Slam Wrestling: "I always did whatever anybody else wanted me to do. I'm not like a lot of other people that just could say whatever they wanted to say and do whatever they wanted to do. I could never do that, so I just kind of went along with the system."

That willingness to take on whatever promoters offered him helped extend his career, opening new doors just as one act was beginning to get stale.

Ed Leslie 

The common thread through much of Leslie's career is Hulk Hogan.

The Tampa, Florida, native switched monikers and costumes several times over, but he often played two roles: Hogan's rival and Hogan's right-hand man.

Leslie's real-life friendship with Hogan first led him to play The Hulkster's brother in 1979.

Hogan, then known as Terry Boulder, often had his kayfabe brother Ed at this side. Ed Boulder sported blond locks, a dark mustache and a body that looked drawn on. He was a generic bodybuilder-type wrestler at the time. 

Not much changed when Terry Boulder morphed into Hulk Hogan and Leslie began wrestling as Dizzy Hogan in the early '80s. He was still buff and towheaded, and still a less charismatic sidekick. 

When Leslie moved to WWE in 1984, he ventured on his own.

Gone was the brother act. Instead, Leslie played a male stripper named Brutus Beefcake. The cocky grappler wore a Chippendale-style bow tie and a glittery vest.

Beefcake began his run on a roll, knocking off jobber after jobber.

His arrogance irked fans. His build attracted female attention. When Leslie found out that WWE wanted to switch up the routine a few years later, he was bewildered.

WWE executive Pat Patterson had the idea that the stripper would become a barber.

In an interview with Kayfabe Commentaries (warning: contains NSFW language), Leslie talked about how ballistic he was at the time. It didn't make sense to him. He said: "Why would you change something that's super white/red-hot?" 

The role Leslie resisted, though, was the one he would become famous for.

Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake was an amped-up, tassel-wearing version of the stripper shtick. He carried a pair of garden shears to the ring and cut off his foes' hair after beating them.

This is how most fans remember Leslie, regardless of the many faces he wore before and after.

The Barber feuded with the intercontinental champ The Honky Tonk Man, clashed with Randy Savage and teamed with Hogan in SummerSlam 1989's main event.

Suddenly, though, Leslie's life and career took a turn. A parasailing accident left him with broken bones in his face and in need of 100 metal plates, as Jaya Roopansingh of Slam Wrestling noted.

Once he recovered, Leslie would transform into many a new character.

In 1991, he attacked a series of villains while wearing a mask and bizarre outfit. The mystery man didn't stick around long enough to get a name.

Once he moved to WCW in 1994, he became known as Brother Bruti, once again playing Hogan's right-hand man. He wore Hogan's trademark yellow and red and stared at the camera through dark sunglasses. 

Bruti turned on Hogan in 1994 as he became The Butcher.

The gimmick change came with only a slight change in appearance. He kept the glasses, ditched the Hogan apparel and cut his hair.

In Paste Magazine, Jim Vorel joked: "The name itself seems to have been chosen just so the WCW announcers could wail that Leslie had 'BUTCHERED A FRIENDSHIP!'"

The Butcher joined forces with Ed Sullivan and Earthquake and formed The Three Faces of Fear, a short-lived dastardly and over-the-top faction. The gig landed The Butcher in the headline match of Starrcade 1994 against Hogan.

New roles soon arrived, all quickly fading away before they had made much impact.

Leslie played an amnesiac known as The Man with No Name. Sporting black and white facepaint, he became The Zodiac, a monosyllabic henchman for Sullivan. This looked to be a mashup of his Beefcake look and a mime.  

He briefly played The Booty Man, a man obsessed with rear ends. Later, he was Hogan's bodyguard and eventual rival as a biker dubbed The Disciple.

This wasn't a case of Leslie displaying Cate Blanchett-type acting range; this was a wrestler making superficial changes in an attempt to mask his lack of "it" factor. Promoters kept trying new things, slapping on a fresh coat of paint when a gimmick grew stagnant.

Leslie's career will be remembered for his run as The Barber, with everything else being insignificant footnotes.

Charles Wright

WWE fans know Wright as two distinct entities: a voodoo priest and a pimp. 

Not a tremendous mat wrestler or out-of-this-world athlete, the tattooed big man somehow managed to portray two noteworthy WWE characters. The Godfather shtick earned him a spot in the Hall of Fame. His run as Papa Shango, as panned as it was, is impossible to forget.

Before either of those roles came his way, Wright was a raw rookie looking to make his name. 

The powerhouse began his career as The Soultaker when he worked for the United States Wrestling Association in 1989. He was the typical wordless monster heel. His job was to be big and scary while his mouthpiece Larry Sharpe talked up his destructive power.

A feud with Memphis legend Jerry Lawler helped him create enough buzz for WWE to gain interest.

In 1992, the company crafted a character inspired heavily by Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die—Papa Shango. Smoke billowed around him. A top hat created a shadow across his skull facepaint.  

Shango was a mishmash of stereotypes about Haitian voodoo, a witch doctor who terrorized the likes of Ultimate Warrior and announcer Gene Okerlund. 

The gimmick is ripe for criticism about cultural sensitivity, but one can't deny how well Wright was able to morph into this dark figure. Despite being around for about two years, Shango is among the most memorable characters to star in WWE's ongoing freak show. 

WWE switched things up with him starting in 1994. Wright was then Kama, the heartless fighting machine.

It was an undeveloped character, and it made little sense to give it to Wright. The former bartender was a brawler and a tough guy, not a trained martial artist.

Kama gave way to Kama Mustafa as part of the Nation of Domination faction. But it wasn't until his next costume change that Wright hit the jackpot.

Strutting to the ring accompanied by a gaggle of attractive women and donning gaudy, colorful attire, he became The Godfather in 1998.

The Attitude Era celebrated the irreverent and showcased the lewd. A dancing pimp was right at home there.

WWE Hall of Famer Ron Simmons, in an interview with Jonathan Snowden of Bleacher Report, said of the character:

It was done at the right time and in the right manner. He had to do it in a way that was entertaining and must-see character without getting underneath people's skins. And it takes a lot of hard work to do that. You must have the charisma, the vocal skills, the physical skills. You couldn't give that character to just anyone.

He would later tweak the act, turning into The Goodfather as part of the self-righteous group Right to Censor. Wright began wearing a shirt and tie and ranting about decency.

This was seen by many as WWE mocking all the critics who lambasted its more raunchy fare.  

The Goodfather was just a blip, though. Wright returned to his pimp routine soon after. That's the character he played when he made a surprise appearance in the 2013 Royal Rumble. And when WWE inducted him into the Hall of Fame in 2016, it was as The Godfather.

There was no mention of his other gimmicks.

Wright spent a huge chunk of his career searching for the ideal role. Playing The Soultaker and Kama, he failed to catch fire. And while he helped imprint the image of Shango in fans' minds, he will always be The Godfather to many.

Glenn Jacobs

The wide-shouldered 300-pounder was hard to take seriously at first. Early in his career, promoters fitted him with an absurd gimmick.

In 1992, Jacobs feuded with Lawler in Memphis' United States Wrestling Association. Considering how red-hot Lawler was in his home city, that sounded like a career-making opportunity, but Jacobs went to battle as The Christmas Creature. 

Tinsel was wrapped around his green costume. Peppermint-striped sleeves covered his arms. Jacobs looked like a character from a low-budget Christmas horror movie.

Thankfully, the act was short-lived. 

Jacobs returned to USWA under a new name soon after. As Doomsday, he was a wordless monster once more, this time wearing a red hockey mask and red-fringed cape. Doomsday looked to be inspired by both Mad Max and Friday the 13th. 

As this amalgam of horrors, Jacobs earned a number of title shots.

Doomsday dominated lesser men, even occasionally taking out two wrestlers at a time. He silently stalked his prey. Overpowering and heavy-handed, this being was in many ways a precursor to Kane.

The foundation of the character—the power, the viciousness—fit Jacobs well, but the outfit was an eyesore.

He ditched the masked look for a run as Unabomb with Smokey Mountain Wrestling. This nondescript gimmick was no improvement.

Unabomb was essentially a big guy in black boots and gloves who liked to beat people up. If you squinted at the TV, it would be hard to tell him apart from Sid Vicious of WCW.

As Unabomb, he teamed with Al Snow for much of 1995. The pair made quite the stark contrast. The smaller Snow made Unabomb look even more immense than he was. The loudmouth braggart did the talking while the giant stood in the background.

Once Jacobs moved to WWE later that year, he moved into cartoon-character territory.

WWE billed him as Isaac Yankem, DDS. The big man now played a sadistic, grinning dentist. 

Rather than feud with Lawler as he did as Unabomb and The Christmas Creature, he was The King's pet. Lawler unleashed him on Bret Hart. 

Jacobs seemed to approach the role with gusto, but it had a low ceiling. 

Evil dentists don't win world titles. Zany characters don't last, as Jacobs himself saw from his early career.

When Kevin Nash and Scott Hall defected to WWE's chief rival WCW in 1996, the company found something worse for Jacobs to do.

He played a fake version of Nash's Diesel character. It's unclear why anyone thought that dressing him in leather and sunglasses and walking out as a mock version of a departed star was going to work.

The act, along with the fake version of Hall's Razor Ramon character, earned a thumbs-down from just about everybody.

Former WWE champ Daniel Bryan trashed the concept. Of faux Diesel and Ramon, he told MTV: "I hated them. I was, like: 'This is the stupidest thing ever.' I didn't know if they thought, like, 'Oh, we can just take anybody and put them into these deals.' Sometimes people make bad decisions. And that was just a really bad decision."

It wasn't until 1997 that WWE found the perfect vehicle for Jacobs—Kane. 

Undertaker's red-clad brother stomped onto the scene at the Bad Blood: In Your House PPV that October and is still a part of WWE today. A stalking silent predator in the beginning, Kane was the intimidating beast promoters surely wanted Doomsday to be.

Kane feuded with Undertaker, battled Steve Austin and remained a steady presence during the Attitude Era.

What might have been a short-term idea extended well into the 2000s and 2010s. Kane remains one of the last remnants of that period.

Jacobs told Scott Zerr in an interview for Slam Wrestling: "My character has definitely taken on a life of its own, and the WWE has done a very good job at keeping people intrigued by the character. People are still intrigued by the myth behind the character."  

The monster act worked well for a long stretch, but ultimately its success came down to its (and Jacobs') versatility. Over the years, Kane has morphed from a mute pyromaniac to an unmasked psycho to the straight man in the comedy duo Team Hell No.

He and Bryan were WWE's hottest act for months as the reluctant partners attended anger management classes together. The skits were consistently funny. Kane seemed as at home making us chuckle there as he was trying to burn Jim Ross alive years before.

Kane's acting acumen was on display throughout. His build made him the ideal fit for a towering figure, but he had ample personality to play all of the tributaries that traveled from the river of Kane.

At the end of 2013, that character took its most drastic turn yet.

Jacobs gave away his mask and instead stepped into a suit and tie as Corporate Kane. The henchman for The Authority buried much of his rage under an executive's smile. The role was more subtle than the original Kane, his monstrous side hidden under the surface.

Only Jacobs could have thrived as a horror-movie behemoth and a slimy supervisor, a cackling dentist and Bryan's therapy partner. 

Most wrestlers are lucky to find one gimmick that clicks. Jacobs made a string of Kane variants work. 

He is likely one of the last of his breed. The infusion of the NXT feeder system has streamlined the character-creating process. Wrestlers step onto the main roster with an act that has been practiced and refined on a smaller scale first.

The chances of Luke Harper suddenly going from backwoods cult disciple to a masked patriot, for example, are infinitesimal. Baron Corbin likely won't be anything other than his current lone-wolf, biker-thug self. The same goes for Tyler Breeze and Finn Balor.

The days of wandering from personage to personage are likely over, in the WWE realm at least. Men like Jacobs, Leslie, Wright and Darsow are relics of a past era.