Music…
In the Crane Game by Konami Kukeiha Club (Parodius Da! －Shinwa kara Owarai e－)

Del Rio is the poster child for the PG era of WWE booking where only Cena, Orton and very occasionally Bryan and Punk are headliners and everyone is just making up the numbers, even former world champions.

Del Rio made his debut after a series of cool vignettes and made an immediate impression by beating up Rey Mysterio. He was a new, amusing and cool guy at the time and a breath of fresh air…until it became apparent he only had three lines of dialogue and WWE didn’t have any creative ideas for him.

He’s a rich guy and the only thing they do with him to show he’s rich is have him drive a new car every show. He wasn’t bribing any officials or paying people to lose to him or doing anything to do with wrestling with money. So in short, he was a rich guy but it didn’t mean anything. So why bother? The whole gimmick felt like Vince McMahon went ”you know what’ll be funny? A RICH MEXICAN!” in a booking meeting and nobody had the balls to object to it. I fully expect to have RICH INDIAN Khali on The Main Event now ADR’s gone, just so Vince can laugh to himself. ”HE’S AN INDIAN…WHO’S RICH! HAHAHAHAAH!” and then he’ll go and watch The Shaggy D.A. for the fifteenth time.

So ADR lost a lot of steam by the time he won MITB and confused everyone by sticking his oar in and cashing in the shot against CM Punk in the middle of the Summer of Punk angle. He immediately lost the title to Cena at the next PPV and won it again in a triple threat match at HIAC before losing it to Punk at Survivor Series 2011. Everyone was excited for Punk and the Cena/WWE feud…and now WWE decided was the moment to pull the trigger and have ADR win a title or two. People were paid money to write this shit.

ADR became a part of the scenery and feuded with Sheamus for about five years. The worst part about his whole stint was ADR’s in-ring talent, he put so much damn effort in the ring every time and it was all for nothing because the creative people had nothing creative for him so all most people saw was a talented nobody.

In fairness to him, the double turn in 2013 was one of the highlights of the year. There was something beautiful about him kicking the fuck out of Ziggler to turn heel after a disastrous babyface run (and another Title reign!) to turn heel properly. This great angle/match was followed up by…ADR doing nothing and sort of feuding with Christian, RVD and others before losing to Cena.

When ADR had something to work with, he was great. When WWE had nothing, he’d still do his best he could. So I blame WWE for his failings. Where was the feud with Ricardo? Where were the fun rich guy sketches? Remember the team with Brodus? No, lets’ have him wrestle Kofi and Ziggler and Cara every week for all eternity instead, yeah OK.