If I'm not mistaken, ideas like Brian Pillman's Yellow Dog character and Nash as Oz were Dusty Rhodes' ideas. Dusty was taking over for Cowboy Bill Watts around this time, who did stupid things like ban top rope moves and be racist until people pushed for his firing, so Dusty tried to whip out all of his most insane ideas at once to show everyone how creative he was.

Jim Herd's claim to fame was trying sell everyone on repackaging Ric Flair as "Spartacus," a bald wrestler with an earring that acted like a gladiator. Ric refused and took the NWA Title with him to WWE.

Herd's hunchback wrestlers--"You can't pin them, because one shoulder will always be up!"--just eventually became the Ding Dongs. No worse than Watts' idea for a slave tag team managed by a Colonel Sanders type guy (which never happened).

That sounds about right. The Massa/Slave team was what eventually became Harlem Heat, right? Going from "Actual slaves managed by Simon Legree" to "Scary urban blacks managed by a succession of white people" was really only a slight positive shift.

Not to nerd this video string up too bad, but Harlem Heat was always Booker and Stevie Ray's gimmick more or less as a team back in their indy days in Houston when they called themselves "Ebony eXpress." There were a lot of teams like them back in the days in the south, because everyone was afraid of militant blacks apparently.

Dusty Rhodes gave us Marc Mero as "Johnny B. Badd," the little Richard gimmick (which was very successful), and came up with the Lethal Lottery. He also gave us PN News (obese white rapper) and Big Josh the lumberjack (which, if I can find on the Youtube, I'll upload, because they are terrible).

That is all for now.

The best Johnny B. Badd story I've ever heard concerns Marc Mero doing some sort of goodwill appearance at an old folks home with some other WCW talent, and everyone was REALLY REALLY excited about him, because they legit thought he was Little Richard.