Select Answers: Spooky gimmicks! Cena's run, costumes

Welcome to Select Answers, a short feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

***

in the interest of Halloween, what was/is your favorite spooky gimmick in all of wrestling? Additionally, who do you think has/had the worst spooky gimmick?

The worst spooky gimmick was the Dungeon of Doom as a whole. Just absolute garbage. The Yeti specifically was so dumb and so bad, I can't believe they did it. It was just an all over stupid idea. Then they turned him into the SUPER GIANT NINJA. Including having him wrestle under that name, then inexplicably calling him The Yeti again....even though he was in the SUPER GIANT NINJA costume. How stupid?!?! I love the idea of a Boiler Room Brawl, which was a Mankind match. I think today that would be done really well. Or during the pandemic it would have been. As far as actual gimmick, the ORIGINAL Wyatt Family was my favorite. I live in Kentucky, and they all seemed like guys you COULD run into in the woods.

Any truth to the WON report of Cena winning the IC title off Dom to face Gunther for it in his final match which he will most likely lose then?

It's definitely been brought up. I heard that there were some other very major conversations about John Cena and championships in the last few weeks with the world title uncertainty, but I'm not how far those actually ever got. I also don't know how much thought was actually ever put into Cena's retirement program because it has all seemed very fly by the seat of their pants.

I noticed very few wrestlers (on aew and wwe/nxt) dressed up for wrestling shows this week leading up to halloween, even for a halloween themed show like Halloween havoc, is it just timing or is there an issue with licensing/IP for costumes?

Well, many just didn't fall on Halloween proper, so Smackdown had a lot more people dressed up backstage. Certainly, IP situations are something that all these companies have to be sensitive to. I haven't heard of any specific instances of them running into trouble, but I've certainly heard of a few where the talent was just advised not to because of IP issues or partnership conflicts.