10 Things WCW Ripped Off

WCW was a curious beast, creatively speaking. For every rock-solid midcard worker and cruiserweight clinic, there was a gimmick or match stipulation so peculiar or ill-conceived it's difficult to imagine the creative process that could possibly have resulted in such bizarreness.

Craziness accelerated as the Monday Night Wars created a desperate need for the next big thing. Handfuls of creative potpourri were hurled at the ring to see what stuck. Some of them were hits, like musclebound monster Goldberg racking up an improbable winning streak. Others were, with the best will in the world, less successful, with the Dungeon of Doom acting as poster boys for creative feculence that later encompassed Things On A Pole matches and non-wrestlers becoming world champion.

One thing WCW loved to do was steal. Ripping off pop culture, film and television was a fertile source of new gimmicks for the promotion, but above all WCW loved half-inching what the WWE was doing. A good proportion of everything WCW did was lifted wholesale from somewhere else, with its serial numbers filed off and a new coat of paint.

André the Giant was a bona fide wrestling superstar, a man who bridged the gap between the territorial days and the advent of Hulkamania and remained throughout a feature attraction audiences would pay just to see. In 1995 WCW would have happily signed André in their conflict with WWE, a plan that had little chance of succeeding since the Eighth Wonder Of The World had died in 1993.

So WCW did the next best thing, which was to make their own André. Fortunately they happened to have a seven footer waiting in the wings. Before he was the Big Show, Paul Wight was billed as 'The Giant' and introduced as André's son just in case nobody got the reference. He was duly thrown in against Hulk Hogan at the infamously bonkers Halloween Havoc 1995, where he grope-hugged his way to the world title. By the time he headed WWE-wards in 1999 the whole André thing had been dropped like the embarrassing and faintly offensive gimmick it was.