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

4. The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Iaukea

Ultimate Warrior Renegade
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That Prince guy was pretty charismatic, right? The music industry, not unlike professional wrestling, is full of characters that are larger than life, and they didn't come much more bombastic than a purple-clad virtuoso from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prince stood 5'2", but his infectious magnetism was (at least) 10 feet tall.

Prince Iaukea was just about as anonymous as WCW superstars got. He wasn't a Prince, he had nothing to do with Curtis Iaukea. He was just a dude in tights who happened to be trained by Dean Malenko, a forgettable presence who made his debut delivering papers to the future nWo Sting on behalf of Sgt. Craig Pittman. 1995 WCW wasn't all great. Iaukea did a whole lot of nothing for a while before shocking the world and defeating Steven Regal for the WCW Television Championship, a title he held for a couple of months before dropping it Ultimo Dragon. What a strange, strange period for that belt.

Iaukea fell off the face of the earth shortly after, occasionally resurfacing to lose to illustrious opponents like Norman Smiley, Horace and Vincent before everything changed once again. WCW being WCW, Iaukea was repackaged as TAFKA Prince Iaukea, a not-so-subtle take on the decision made by actual charismatic Prince to move forward as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. They both wore purple, they both had 'Prince' in their name, surely that was all the similarities required for this to be a raging success?

Alas, it didn't work. Actually, scratch that; it was a total f*cking failure. The main problem was Iaukea's absolute lack of charisma, and there are few things more depressing in wrestling than watching a wet flannel try to act like ACTUAL PRINCE.

Less than a year later, he was gone.

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.