Today I listened to a new and interesting segment on the Killing The Town podcast where they gave a few examples of stealing in pro-wrestling. Gimmick infringement, move pilfering, storyline theft. It was an interesting discussion, showing how much one can get away with in "the business", and how it has become even accepted. The purpose of this thread is to discuss plagiarism and for the knowledgeable wrestling historians to present their obscure examples. I'll start with a couple.

The Goon
Don Callis told the story of how Scott D'Amore in the mid 90s had some success on the independents with a hockey playing hooligan gimmick. He pitched it to WWE by sending a videotape. They turned him down or ignored him. Shortly after, WWE debuted "The Goon" (not the name D'Amore used), a hockey-playing hooligan gimmick. It was blatant gimmick infringement. The attire was almost identical, and The Goon used all the moves present in D'Amore's video. This is all from D'Amore's point of view (as told by Callis), so it's not clear how much is really true. If it is true, this is a pretty egregious example of wrestling theft.

nWo/Invasion storyline
It's well-known that Eric Bischoff took the concept of the nWo from UWFi's invasion of NJPW in the mid 90s, and it became one of wrestling's most successful storylines. The invasion concept has been rehashed numerous times. WWE recreated the storyline after buying out WCW. They did it over a decade later with the Nexus invasion. NJPW have played around with the concept, with invasions from other companies and stables. In fact, the first big invasion storyline I can think of predates the UWFi/NJPW storyline. NJPW invaded AJPW in the mid 80s, a hot storyline that dominated the decade.

Go 2/To Sleep
The fireman's carry into knee strike finisher was invented by KENTA in the mid-2000s. Years later, CM Punk would adopt it as his own finisher in the WWE, replacing the Anaconda Vice.

Besides listing examples, let's get some discussion going. Where should the line be drawn with respect to using someone else's ideas in pro-wrestling? The latter two examples above don't strike me as foul play. Artists borrow ideas from each other all the time, and you can't trademark storylines and wrestling moves. Trademarking a hand signal, as WWE has done in the past, is going a bit too far in my opinion.

This is the first I ever heard of the Goon/D'Amore story. Fun Fact: A young Chris Jericho being offered the Goon spot and turning it down was a big rumor back in the day. Has Jericho ever confirmed this?

Along the same lines, Matt Hardy once sent in a tryout tape to WCW calling himself "High Voltage." Weeks later Matt is tuning into WCW programming and sees a debuting tag team called High Voltage.

Old timers used to talk about the "Seven Year Rule" with the theory being gimmicks and angles can be recycled in the same territory after 7 years due to older fans drifting away and newer fans coming in during that time frame. I'm not sure if this still applies today what with everything being so easily accessible due to the internet.

I don't get that bent out of shape about plagiarism in wrestling nowadays, let alone move stealing....but you should have seen me back in the day! I'd get so annoyed over Carlito as Fake Razor or Masters as Fake Narcissist, etc. Yet the truth is even all time greats like Flair & Hogan ripped off the likes of Buddy Rogers & Superstar Graham. Very little is truly original in pro wrestling. Even the stuff that I thought was revolutionary and ground breaking growing up had usually been done before with ECW brawls having been done in places like Memphis & Japan and all those cool moves having already been done in Japan or Mexico, sometimes even decades before coming to America.

Accusations of plagiarism were huge during the Monday Night (mark) Wars. Hell, probably half of all wrestling debates on the internet in the late 90s involved this in one way or the other. DX=NWO Ripoffs! Goldberg=Austin Ripoff! (with the more clever WWF fanboys calling him a ripoff of both Austin AND Shamrock).

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of wrestling creative people do steal a lot of stuff from internet fan fictions, it seems preposterous at first but I've seen it happen, too many similarities with Lucha Underground and T-Money's WPW fan fic that was on the old PW back a few years before Lucha started, also theres coincidences and stuff but this:







That was about as blatant as it gets. I seriously doubt somebody like Vince Mcmahon or Paul Heyman or Triple H does this but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some of the underlings that are at this creative think tanks pitching ideas are scouring the fan fiction forums for some fresh motivation to take into the creative meeting, I refuse to believe that doesn't happen. 

KING KID you know what I'm tom'bout, get in here boy.


Oh, and that whole broken Matt Hardy thing?! Yeah, all me. You're all welcome. 

shinobimusashi, I can only see your first image!

Dec 19, 2017 18:20:40 GMT Baker said:

This is the first I ever heard of the Goon/D'Amore story. Fun Fact: A young Chris Jericho being offered the Goon spot and turning it down was a big rumor back in the day. Has Jericho ever confirmed this?

Storm and Callis did mention this on the same podcast. Jericho was offered a position as an enhancement talent with a gimmick. Jericho turned the role down. As soon as The Good debuted, Jericho knew that was the position they were intending for him, but they didn't explicitly tell him that. Jericho's dad is a famous hockey player, after all. They didn't mention the time span between the offer made to Jericho and the debut of Bill Irwin as The Goon.

Another fascinating story was told in that Killing The Town segment. Melina (with Morrison and Mercury) got over by doing the splits on the apron during her ring entrance. When they got called up to work the house shows with the main roster, Tommy Dreamer specifically instructed Melina to not do the splits during her entrance. Why? Because one of the established woman would steal it for themselves before Melina would get a chance to show it on TV.

Dec 19, 2017 18:58:58 GMT Emperor said:

shinobimusashi , I can only see your first image!

Dec 19, 2017 18:20:40 GMT Baker said:

This is the first I ever heard of the Goon/D'Amore story. Fun Fact: A young Chris Jericho being offered the Goon spot and turning it down was a big rumor back in the day. Has Jericho ever confirmed this?

Storm and Callis did mention this on the same podcast. Jericho was offered a position as an enhancement talent with a gimmick. Jericho turned the role down. As soon as The Good debuted, Jericho knew that was the position they were intending for him, but they didn't explicitly tell him that. Jericho's dad is a famous hockey player, after all. They didn't mention the time span between the offer made to Jericho and the debut of Bill Irwin as The Goon.

Another fascinating story was told in that Killing The Town segment. Melina (with Morrison and Mercury) got over by doing the splits on the apron during her ring entrance. When they got called up to work the house shows with the main roster, Tommy Dreamer specifically instructed Melina to not do the splits during her entrance. Why? Because one of the established woman would steal it for themselves before Melina would get a chance to show it on TV.

Thanks for the heads up, I forgot about photobucket. Fixed. 

The ones where they would sign a wrestler and then use their gimmick for somebody else were the cruelest ones. WCW did this to La Parka, stripping him of a lot of his entrance and costume only to turn around and use it for Wrath and Mortis. 

Also they did that with Vampiro in 1998-99, pretty much giving Saturn his gimmick after they signed him in 98-99. It just makes no sense, why would you even waste the money signing them if you are going to steal their stuff and use it on somebody else anyways? :lol: That's WCW though. 

Triple H's "The Game" was more Shane Douglas's "The Franchise" than seemed necessary.

The Undertaker's crucifiction of Austin probably only happened because Vince Russo saw Raven crucify Sandman (As Kurt Angle clutched his pearls backstage).

Asya because she's bigger than Chyna.

Watching Brad Armstrong ripping off his no talent brother as Buzzill was sad, although that might lean more towards parody.

Larry Zbyszko bought a World title in Georgia, which caused controversy in the company, which vacated the belt and had an eventual tournament to
crown a champion before DiBiase's Million Dollar shenanigans did the same thing in the WWF.

I'm sure there are dozens of territory angles that the WWF is now taking credit for. It seems like every cool thing WWF ever did, Memphis or Bill Watts did it first.

I've been saying the WWE was stealing from us for all these years. Think about some shmuck who used to read our shit on Fan Fic and jot it down. Now think about him smoking a cigar with 7 figures in his bank account because of our ideas. He literally got rich off of "some dumb kids on the Internet." For young people that we are, I'll always swear to it, we were fucking writing Gods when it came to Fan Fic. We all pushes ourselves and each other to levels the WWE creative could never do. So yes, Shin, totally agreed. We should be rich.

Tiger Ali Singh = The Million Dollar Man

Dec 20, 2017 0:29:23 GMT Kilgore said:

I'm sure there are dozens of territory angles that the WWF is now taking credit for. It seems like every cool thing WWF ever did, Memphis or Bill Watts did it first.

Jake blinding angle= The Freebirds/JYD blinding angle in Mid-South
Hot Lesbian Action= Tommy Dreamer's "dream girls" Kimona and Beulah
Stone Cold=Sandman
Demolition/POP and many others= Road Warriors
Hogan/Orndorff/Andre/Savage= Lawler/Dundee/Savage/Idol aka enemies turned friends turned enemies again

Dec 21, 2017 2:47:03 GMT Kilgore said:

Yes! I loved Renegade so much and was so confused when I was younger.

Also the Four Horsewomen idea from Ronda Rousey's kliq. It was acceptable because they had Flair's daughter involved but still you know where they got the idea from. When someone points this out I love when wrestling fans get bothered and start acting like pro wrestling invented the Four Horsemen concept, there was a Four Horsemen on the Notre Dame football team in the 1920's(writer Grantland Rice gave the nickname to Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden) and I know Flair is old but I don't think he wrote the bible. It's like Chael Sonnen using Razor Ramon lines, that he got from Scarface.

The saying "There is nothing new under the sun" comes to mind when reading this thread, I bet a lot of ideas that got rehashed from the 70's, 80's, 90's were rehashes of something that happened in the old days. You would be surprised what all was going on in pro wrestling in the 30's-40's-50's across the territories and just got lost to time. I read a Kevin Sullivan quote once that said there was no such thing as a good booker, only guys with great memories, putting a new twist on an old angle that nobody remembers.