10 Iconic Wrestling Finishing Moves You Didn't Know Were Stolen

The world of professional wrestling can be quite incestuous. And we're not just talking about the often uncomfortable storylines involving the McMahon Family.

Gimmicks, catchphrases, entrance music, and even finishing moves are sometimes recycled, repackaged, and reused because coming up with new ideas is hard.

Besides, physiologically speaking, there's also a limited number of movements that a person can put together to create a move that's worthy of "finishing off" an opponent every week. Granted, that's not to say someone couldn't string together 8 or 9 punches to the beanbags, follow it up with a tilt-a-whirl chokeslam, and go to bed every night satisfied that they've created an original finishing maneuver.

But sometimes it's best to go with a proven option.

Now, just to be clear, we're not insinuating that there's something inherently bad about lifting someone else's move to use as your own. In fact, most of the people on this list greatly improved on them and made these finishers famous in the first place.

Still, you've got to give credit where credit's due.

You could spend hours debating whether Eddie Guerrero or Rob Van Dam made the Frog Splash look more impactful and gravity defying. And that would actually be a pretty productive way to spend those hours. Consider doing that sometime.

But before you do, we should talk about the fact that despite being synonymous with that move, neither Guerrero or RVD actually innovated it.

That was actually Art Barr, an incredibly underrated performer who is unfortunately best remembered stateside for his character The Juicer, a blatant - and poorly constructed - ripoff of Beetlejuice.

Barr came up with the move sometime in the late '80s, presumably while lamenting the fact that nearly every high-flying wrestler's top rope move was either an elbow drop or a leg drop. Rather than follow in their footsteps, he decided he would wield his chest cavity as a weapon, but only after quickly condensing and then unfurling his body like an accordion.

It was named when Barr's training partner 2 Cold Scorpio mentioned that Barr looked like a frog whilst in mid-air, probably as a rib. Barr went with it, and the rest is history.

Guerrerro - Barr's tag-team partner in AAA - adopted the move in tribute to his friend Barr, who died just 17 days after wowing the world at When Worlds Collide in 1994.