10 Wrestling Moments You Didn’t Know Were Totally Ripped Off
Rare, actually good wrestling plagiarism!
Wrestling, broadly, is comically unsubtle in the dark arts of plagiarism. Hilariously unsubtle.
Asya is among the prize examples, in how deliciously pathetic it was. You got a country? Well, we got a continent!
This, essentially, was WCW on some "My dad is bigger than your dad" sh*t, reinforcing its own perception as the playground on which the small children played. What's worse is that the company knew of the folly that was petulant lashing out, having developed the cooler older kid status where the WWF introduced the new Diesel and the new Razor Ramon - but, lacking any counterargument to the WWF's ascendency, they simply made a fart noise with their mouth in the form of a copycat bodybuilder figure.
On the subject of WCW, the league, before it perfected plagiarism to win countless battles in the Monday Night War, was very, very bad at it. Most infamously, Renegade sought to replace the Ultimate Warrior in our hearts, but lacked the authenticity, crazed energy, and shredded frame to truly resonate as the real article. Even if he'd effectively cut one of those classic, idiosyncratic Warrior promos - "I hope you get AIDS, Hoak Hogan!" - it still would have flopped.
Wrestling does, however, have rich form in this department...
10. The Rock
Seinfeld was very unlike WWE; it was really funny, it drew massive ratings, and so many wildly divergent narrative threads converged at the big payoff to create one incredible, out-of-nowhere punchline. It was a masterpiece of the writing craft.
And yet, it acted as strange inspiration for one of The Rock's old bits.
In the seminal episode 'The Marine Biologist', your writer's spirit animal George Costanza, the sad-sack fantasist, had his day.
To win the affections of an old college crush through deception, he pretended to be a Marine Biologist - only, at the conclusion of the episode, to be confronted with a beached whale. He braved the ocean, straddled the "great fish", and retrieved from its blowhole the golf ball inserted into it by his buddy Kramer's seaside golf drive (that's one of those threads converging, unlike, for example, Ricochet entering the Money In The Bank Ladder Match in place of the man who cleanly defeated him last week).
Recounting the tale in Monk's Café, Costanza told the distressed whale: "Easy, big fella!"
The Rock and or Brian Gerwitz happened upon this, and thought, "Hey, we can use this whale as a comparison to Rock's gigantic c*ck, and its inability to be contained."
And why not? That thing was 10 stories high if it was a foot!