10 Rip Off Wrestling Gimmicks (That Messed Up What They Copied)

8. RETRIBUTION

Ultimate Warrior Renegade
Carptrash, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons/WWE

Mustafa Ali is a fantastic professional wrestler, one of the most underrated performers in the industry today. Dominik Dijakovic is a freak of a big man, an athletic monster who can do things that nobody his size has any right to do. Shane Thorne is also wildly underrated, one of the best tag team guys of a generation and just about as reliable as it gets. Mia Yim has all the tools to become a major star in women's wrestling, and Dio Madden is very big.

The individuals that make up RETRIBUTION all have plenty to give, but the DOA-faction they are stuck in is going to follow them for a very, very long time. The group known as RETRIBUTION started appearing in WWE over the summer and were ridiculed from the start, although it is difficult to see how anyone believed that a group of hoody-clad chumps cackling and 'destroying the show' were going to get any other sort of reaction. It was like the hyenas in The Lion King minus the danger element.

The whole thing just screamed 'Vince McMahon saw Antifa on the telly and brought his version into his own universe', and the results were about as positive as that suggests. The group's attempts to bring down the system were clearly a caricature of the worldwide anti-fascist movement, the result of a game of Chinese whispers that has been going on for generations. It started as 'f*ck fascism' and has eventually mutated into 'Shane Thorne wrestles with a paper plate on his face'.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.