10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Alberto Del Rio

7. His Gimmick Was A Ripoff Of Ted Dibiase And JBL

There are a lot of things in wrestling that are copies of stuff that happened earlier. A guy might have a finishing move that you've seen somebody else use years earlier. Music gets recycled all the time and gimmicks are no different. Del Rio's gimmick wasn't exactly like two other guys, but it was pretty close. Ted DiBiase made a name for himself in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the "Million Dollar Man" that could buy anything he wanted, even the WWE Title (at least he tried to). He was an arrogant heel that had an assistant in Virgil and he would do anything he could to humiliate people, just because he had more money than them. It was a gimmick totally suited to a heel. In 2004, Bradshaw did a complete character overhaul to become John Bradshaw Layfield, better known as JBL. It was a gimmick that was similar to DiBiase as well as JR Ewing from the TV show Dallas. His character was a rich guy from Texas that made it big in the stock market and was happy to brag about it to us. He became a WWE Champion after spending nearly a decade as a midcarder. Credit to him - the gimmick got over. Del Rio's introductory vignettes showed him in a big house bragging about how rich he was. After his in-ring debut, what the announcers pushed more than anything was that he was rich from his Mexican family. Since "rich = bad" in wrestling that made him a heel just like DiBiase and JBL before him. There's nothing wrong with copying gimmicks. It's just that WWE isn't going to go out of their way to tell you that's what they did.