- Audience-Alienating Era: His WWE run, particularly during the InVasion, is considered the lowest point of his career, with DDP going from a popular babyface in WCW to a creepy stalker who went after Undertaker's wife, made all the more glaring when you consider he was married to Kimberly at the time. While DDP was given a babyface run again after the angle was over and even won the European Championship from Christian, the damage to his career was severe and he was never quite able to get back up there in status despite having wrestled for TNA and various independent wrestling circuits since and his stalker angle to this day is so unpopular that it's one of the extremely few things that The Undertaker can still receive harsh criticism for, since he took part in the burial of DDP under Vince's instruction, despite being mostly beloved in all other aspects of his career.
- Broken Base: While few wrestling fans outright hate DDP, his climb to main event status has created a divide between fans who view him as pro wrestling's ultimate underdog who earned his place as a top star and those who think he's overrated and wouldn't have amounted to much had he not had friends in high places (Dusty Rhodes, Eric Bischoff, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash).
- Harsher in Hindsight: With the benefit of hindsight, most people would agree that Page should have been the one to end Goldberg's legendary Streak and win the WCW Championship during their famous match at Halloween Havoc '98. At the time, the WCW brass had decided it wasn't Page's night and the Streak should be preserved for the perfect opponent... only to squander it on Kevin Nash and the NWO after Scott Hall hit Goldberg with a taser. They would go on to completely ruin Goldberg, and while Page still became champion, he never quite reached the level he could have if he'd won that match against Goldberg.
- Memetic Mutation: When evaluating Van Hammer once upon a car trip, Page once (honestly) said "he's got the look, the rap, the size; I SMELL MONEY!" The problem being that Van Hammer was awful. The other wrestlers knew it, the fans knew it, and reasonably soon, Van Hammer's career was mired in obscuritynote . However, news of this appraisal filtered back to Scott Hall and Kevin Nash who began using the line regularly on WCW's on line after-show called "WCW Live" with Mark Madden. To this day, Madden and Nash still use the line on a regular basis, and some smarks use the line when evaluating some new on-air wrestling talent who they think to be overrated and assume will be out of a job in short order.
- Most Wonderful Sound: "BANG! Yo, it's me! It's me! It's D-D-P!"
- Older Than They Think: A cutter that can come out of nowhere, be used at pretty any time, and will instantly end a fight? Randy Orton might be the one younger wrestling fans think of, but DDP was the first to do so in North America.
- And the RKO/Diamond Cutter was originally called the "Ace Crusher" as it was developed in Japan by the wrestler Johnny Ace, known to current WWE fans all over the world as Mr. John Laurinaitis, Former Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and General Manager of Both Raw And Smackdown.
- Suspiciously Similar Song: Page's theme music was an off-key rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- As noted under Aborted Arc on the main page, we never learned the identity of the "mysterious benefactor" who brought Page back to WCW after his Kayfabe firing in 1996. Since Page returned right before the nWo storyline started, it would seem like they would be the most likely of candidates (Ted DiBiase was the nWo's financial backer after all). It also would have added additional weight to their attempts to get Page to join them, since they would have been responsible for getting him re-hired. But WCW seemed to have forgotten about the benefactor altogether, so it was never resolved.
- Of all the heinous wastage of potential the InVasion inflicted on viewers, the handling of DDP's debut in the WWF probably stung the most, mainly because it could have actually been not just good, but fantastic! While casting him as a creepy stalker of The Undertaker's then wife Sara wasn't a very promising angle for a wrestler of DDP's profile, the pop he got when he unmasked in the center of the ring was thunderous and the promo he proceeded to cut on 'Taker was amazing, and looked like it would be able to redeem the whole feud.In brief Unfortunately, this actually made DDP look like a brilliant mastermind rather than a worthless buffoon, which was the entire point behind the angle (and the entire InVasion, honestly), so everything DDP had said in the promo was promptly disregarded to have him act like he really was insanely in love with Sara (which fans who'd seen his wife Kimberly in WCW found absolutely absurd), building a stalker shrine to her and at one point even breaking into her house while she and her husband were out and stealing one of her bras. And then the feud played out with 'Taker brutally flattening DDP without mercy every time they met in what was quite possibly the most one-sided feud of all time, culminating in DDP being beaten up and pinned in the final match by Sara, just to prove once and for all what a pathetic chump the former WCW champion really was. What could have been a classic feud was reduced to hanging a talented and eager worker from the rafters and shouting "Hey, look at this WCW guy! Isn't he a loser?!"
- X-Pac Heat: He was getting booed relentlessly at the beginning of 1999, which led to his heel turn and it became regular heat again.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/DiamondDallasPage
FollowingYMMV / Diamond Dallas Page
Go To
