10 WWE Gimmicks That Started Elsewhere
Haven't I seen this one before?
Parks & Recreation was an NBC sitcom that aired for six years, seven seasons and 125 episodes. An impressive television legacy by any standard, the gentle satire of local government as viewed through the then-beloved mockumentary format was broad enough to appeal to the masses and just the right side of sharp to win over critical audiences.
What's most impressive about all that is how the show itself started life as a tweaked tribute act.
Greg Daniels and Michael Schur were at the wheel of the hugely successful American adaptation of The Office, and their follow-up had more than just an echo of the events taking place every week in Scranton. Luckily, 'Parks & Rec' also shared the same charming style, a similarly endearing ensemble cast and enough narrative through-lines to justify its place in the overcrowded schedules.
The lesson? You can do things twice if you do them well. Wrestling's history with repurposing is far from perfect, but there are plenty of cases of WWE - still, remarkably, the market leader - borrowing from concepts that started life nowhere near the mind of anybody called McMahon...
10. Lex Luger
Another gimmick that basically borrowed from the man already portraying it, 'The Narcissist' Lex Luger wasn't a huge leap froward from WCW's 'Total Package' beyond a few WWE (and Bobby Heenan) bells and whistles.
But how could it be? Not to completely steal from 'The Brain's gushing praise for his new associate at the 1993 Royal Rumble, but look at him.
So when the stories from the time, Luger had plenty of narcissism flowing through him (along with other things...) and the use of the mirror was as much a heel prop in real life as it was Luger's favourite spot when he wasn't wrestling.
The character was just five months old when Lex was infamously repackaged as a Hulk Hogan surrogate with a bus, but there's a timeline somewhere in which McMahon goes all the way with the heel version that probably makes for a more prosperous outcome. He'd proven in WCW just how well he could work as a muscle-bound heel against fiery babyfaces, and WWE could have lined up loads of them.
Ultimately, we got what we got, Luger got jack sh*t, and it was only when he returned to the birthplace of the gimmick in 1995 that he got to realise much of that lost potential.