15 MORE Wrestling Gimmicks That Got Weird Rip-Offs
11. Randy Savage (Black Machismo)
From the ridiculous to the sublime, never was Jay Lethal more over in wrestling than when he was presenting his own take on another wrestler that had once been incredibly over.
Borne out of the cult classic Paparazzi Production sketches featuring Lethal dicking about with the likes of Alex Shelley, Sonjay Dutt, Kevin Nash and others, the future ROH World Champion's dead-on Randy Savage impersonation was revealed during a talent show bit that stopped all the fictional judges in their tracks. Nash convinced Lethal to try the act again in the ring, and even supplied him with some colourful Macho Man attire to boot.
Announced then as "Black Machismo", Lethal was able to go about incorporating Randy's offence into his own to make a perfect clash-of-ages character. He didn't need to drop the stuff he'd refined over years, but the famous and familiar work of an all-time great was a fantastic library to liberally poach, not least when audiences expected it.
The concept peaked with a victory over Kurt Angle for the X-Division Championship at No Surrender 2007, but TNA simply couldn't not be TNA about it, and Lethal's Savage-and-Liz bond with So Cal Val morphed into a lousy programme with former friend Sonjay Dutt over Val's affections. When she joined Dutt for a double heel turn and the whole thing eventually fizzled, so too did any chance of Lethal breaking the glass ceiling.
In a better-than-nothing outcome, the now-normalised bit did at least keep him relevent in TNA until he chose a hard and ultimately success reset for himself in ROH in 2011.