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

2. Aces & Eights

Ultimate Warrior Renegade
FX/Impact Wrestling

A back-to-back winner of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Worst Gimmick award (2012 and 2013, for the record), Aces & Eights was indicative of everything that TNA got wrong in the post-Monday Night Wars 2.0 era. As a roster full of tremendous talent was left to twiddle its thumbs, Dixie Carter and her charges looked to the past, to ideas that once worked and the stars that once made money. If anything was going to turn the Impact ship around, a bloated heel stable was almost certainly it!

But Aces & Eights wasn't exactly an nWo rip-off. The dastardly villains were a faux-biker gang, an outlaw group of motorcycle enthusiasts loosely based on Sons of Anarchy, although expecting Garrett Bischoff and Wes Brisco to mimic the charisma of Charlie Hunnan was optimistic at best. It didn't work, and it dragged TNA further into the mire as a result.

The list of reasons why Aces & Eights didn't work goes on and on and on. Fans had been watching The Dudleyz for years, how are they to believe that all of a sudden they are leading a biker gang? Was it a mid-life crisis? What about Ken Anderson, D'Lo Brown and Taz? At a push, fans could accept young talent like Bischoff and Brisco getting involved, desperate as they were to get a rub from legendary names, but even that required a mighty pinch of salt.

Throw in a few classic TNA shocks for the sake of shocks, and you've got yourself an all-time shambolic stable.

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.