10 Times Wrestlers Got Away With Ripping Off WWE
8. Zeus
Zeus was the antagonist of the 1989 motion picture No Holds Barred - the WWF's first foray onto the silver screen. It was a critical and commercial disaster, but apparently not disastrous enough to immediately kill the idea of WWE Studios.
He was a bust in the ring, but it hardly mattered; Randy Savage carried his load in that year's SummerSlam headliner tie-in, and that was the end of that. Then, six years after everybody forgot the film even existed, Zeus was drafted into WCW to take part in the beat-for-beat recycling of the Hulkamania story. Another Hogan antagonist - The Big Boss Man - was corrected by the WWF legal team, who understandably balked at WCW's decision to rename him The Boss and follow that up, on commentary, with "Man, is he big!"
So, WCW tinkered with the frame of referenZe, and rechristened Tom Lister Jr. 'Z-Gangsta' - the suffix a clear case of "Well, he's black, isn't he?" And if that sounds like a glib, baseless and offensive accusation of racism, consider the case of the Ultimate Solution, with whom Z-Gangsta teamed in the phenomenally awful Doomsday Cage headliner at Uncensored 1996.
Robert Swenson was first named the Final Solution before somebody was alerted to that ghastly business.