Doing Your Best to Make the Weaksauce Strong

So I was converting the phantom fungus over to 5e for a megadungeon I've got, and I was kind of smirking about what a dumb, silly monster it is, and it struck me- I've put a lot of effort into taking lame monsters and spells and finding cool uses for them. From fungus-covered halluncinating quaggoth shamans to a city-hating geriviar trapped in Sigil to Lord Obliviax, the memory-eating avatar of obliviax/memory moss who worked alongside mind flayers, I've tried hard to integrate a lot of D&D's "lovable losers" into my campaign's ecology and into its narrative.

Does anyone else do this? Anyone have any particularly cool stories about taking some stupid (in your opinion) monster, spell, prestige class or whatever and making it awesome?

I once gave a pathetic tribe of vegepygmies a fearsome protective onion god that sent a nightmarish avatar to protect the tribe from being picked on by the PCs.

" It's the stay-fresh vegepygmy man........"

I had a whole 2E campaign where Charisma was the god stat. Having an awesome Strength or Dexterity couldn't begin to compare with ably hobnobbing with the movers and shakers of the world.