I didn't mind Dusty in the WWF and don't really have much of an issue with his run there in retrospect. I just found everything about it embarrassing at the time, from the intro vignettes to the polka dots to the valet named after an Amos 'n' Andy character. Dusty was the American Dream! He'd been through hard times! He was a three-time NWA world champion and deserved better than polka dots, dammit! Fortunately, the Dweem was able to make chicken salad out of chicken shit live and in public, if you weeeeel. Those intro videos have aged well too; I watch them all in succession every few years and laugh. Dusty was at least talented enough to make a bad idea work.
Hogan/Dusty would have been a fantastic tag team for a house show run and a SNME match against whatever heel team from the time you wanted, be it Bravo/Quake or DiBiase/Virgil or whoever.
As for Kerry Von Erich...well, we know what we know about him now, but I certainly had no clue that he was a drug addict with a prosthetic foot by the time he showed up in the WWF. I just wanted the Von Erichs to get out of World Class and see how they'd stack up against better competition. Never liked that the WWF stripped him of his identity by dubbing him the Texas Tornado and not hyping his second-generation status. Without the name, the story, and the moves, Kerry Von Erich is just another guy on the roster and nothing special. Whether or not he could go in the ring was a whole other thing altogether.
My thing was that out of my friends who were fans circa 1990-91, I was the only one who watched non-WWF wrestling and read the Apter mags and such. I was always stoked when ex-territory guys would come aboard the WWF; I'd tell my friends that so-and-so was a great wrestler and just wait until you see what he can do now that he's big time...and within a few months, they'd usually ask me when so-and-so was going to prove that they were as great as I'd said they were.
