Unlicensed wrestler homages in other media

[pol]

As a big fighting game geek I've noticed a very common trend of characters that are clearly based on one wrestler or another. Going to name a bunch from memory here and others can chime in with theirs. Was originally going to restrict this to video games but I know this is common in at least other Japanese media since copyright laws are pretty lax there, so why not bring other media into it too? I'm gonna avoid wrestling games since pretty much every character in every unlicensed wrestling game is based on some real wrestler, but others are welcome to chime in with those if they wish

Zangief (Street Fighter): Victor Zangiev

Hugo (Street Fighter): Andre the Giant

Alex (Street Fighter): Hulk Hogan

King (Tekken): Tiger Mask

El Blaze (Virtua Fighter): Rey Misterio Jr.

 

Raiden/Big Bear (Fatal Fury): Vader

Marstorius (Fighter's History): Bruiser Brody

 

Muscle Power (World Heroes): Hulk Hogan

 

Dasher Inoba (Ehrgeiz): Antonio Inoki

 

Some I'm unsure about...

 

Gai Tendo (Buriki One): Kazushi Sakuraba? (I believe he had dyed red hair at one point)

 

Patrick van Heyting (Buriki One): Dick Vrij? Nationality is the same.

[JerryvonKramer]

If you're a Capcom guy, there is a wrestler in Final Fight who is actually called "Andre", in some versions "Andore" -- more or less the same design as Hugo in the later Street Fighter games.

 

Some people claim that Haggar from Final Fight was based on Jesse Ventura, but I don't see that since it came out in 1989 and I don't think Ventura's political career had started.

[pol]

Udo from one of the Dragonball Z movies looks very familiar

 

[pol]

As far as wrestling games go, the Fire Pro Wrestling series is probably the most shockingly blatant in its copyright infringement. The Undertaker appearing as "The Undead Taylor" is the best.

[Boondocks Kernoodle]

 

I think Titan Mogan was a Billy Graham ripoff.

[broccoman]

There was the reverse case of AJPW making a character based on Wolf Hawkfield from VF.

[funkdoc]

There was the reverse case of AJPW making a character based on Wolf Hawkfield from VF.

 

another accidental one: The Super Shockmaster. seriously, look him up and you'll see that his outfit & build look EXACTLY like Raiden's!

 

also yall forgot another really obvious one from Final Fight: blatant Road Warrior ripoff Abigail!

 

 

Hogan & the Road Warriors are by far the most oft-referenced wrestlers in video games, with Vader/Andre/Abdullah/Muta/Kabuki getting more than their fair share as well. Brody might be up there as well.

 

i'm also shocked nobody pointed out that the Ultimate Warrior is a boss in Streets of Rage 1 & 2!

 

for some other more obscure ones, the crappy (but kinda funny) SNES beat-em-up Rival Turf! has at least 1 and arguably 2. They aren't who you'd expect at all, either...check this out:

 

 

that guy's name is "Gigante", so i think that one is pretty blatant; his palette swap is named "Arnold" and is a dead ringer for the Terminator himself, as well! So basically Giant Gonzalez has been in a non-wrestling game and Dory Funk Jr. hasn't...i smell top 100~ ~ ~

 

that game also has someone named "Butch" who i always thought was a Repo Man clone (albeit with Bossman's build):

 

 

You be the judge.

 

to go even further, Rival Turf! also has an enemy with hurricane kicks and palm strikes, with two palette-swapped versions. their names? Dingo & Warrior. something tells me somebody at Jaleco miiiiiiiight have been a bit of a wrestling geek.

 

the final (and infinitely better) game in the same series as Rival Turf!, The Peace Keepers, has you fight the Steiner Brothers as one of the bosses! well, sort of...

 

 

it also has a boss fight against 3 pirates. their sprites don't look like wrestlers at all, but check out their portrait in the US version:

 

 

the Japanese version had anime portraits instead of those digitized ones, so methinks this was that wrestling nerd working his magic with the localization again.

 

 

i'll definitely have more later, this thread is right in my wheelhouse!

[funkdoc]

in addition to non-wrestling games, it's also interesting to figure out the real-life inspirations for fictional wrestlers in video games. for instance, let's look at the legendary NES Pro Wrestling:

 

- Inoki, obviously. humorously enough he's the worst character, as the enzuigiri is impossible to land on anyone with a pulse.

 

- this is definitely Mil Mascaras, what with the flying cross chop and all.

 

- this one is a bit more interesting, with some suggesting he's based on Killer Khan and others not believing he'd be a big enough deal in Japan to warrant that. i tend to side with the former group, given the Mongolian deal and his name being fairly close.

 

- we've got a hybrid here, with Hogan's look and the Von Erichs' finisher.

 

- the only one who can't be tied to a specific wrestler at all. the moveset is strongly suggestive of the general "brawling cheating gaijin" archetype, though.

 

- people always say this is Flair but i don't see it. the moveset definitely doesn't fit, and i don't even get the vibe from his portrait. dunno

 

- The Great Puma. Tiger Mask as the final boss...somehow that seems fitting for this forum!

 

 

another good example is Tecmo World Wrestling, which i would say was hands down the best NES wrestling game. this review gives a rundown of the roster, though i might question a couple of their listed IRL wrestlers.

[pol]

Mark Rose strikes me as more like Adrian Street than anything, but I don't know if he ever wrestled in Japan?

[funkdoc]

Mark Rose strikes me as more like Adrian Street than anything, but I don't know if he ever wrestled in Japan?

 

omg that was my exact thought too haha

 

 

so here's another more obscure one: 3 Count Bout

 

i shouldn't need to explain Master Barnes or Red Dragon on here, and Blues Hablam/Blubber Man is clearly Abdullah (with a knife in place of the fork). Roy Wilson could be Brody perhaps, and MAYBE Terry Rogers is kind of a Terry Funk stand-in? the one who gets me is Leo Bradlay, as he feels like he SHOULD be based on someone but i can't think of anyone.

 

EDIT: i've also seen people in Twitch stream chats go "HEY LOOK IT'S VADER" when they see Gochack Bigbomb, but i'm not as sure about that one.

[sek69]

Saturday Night Slam Masters has a lot of wrestler homages, since it's basically a Capcom fighter cosplaying as a wrestling game.

 

A ton of mid 90s action/fighting games have a Hulk Hogan type since that seemed to be the default "American character" look in Japan.

[Matt D]

Is this guy a Vader stand in?

 

[funkdoc]

i'd say no on that one Matt, as i believe the arcade Double Dragon 2 came out before the Vader gimmick made its debut.

 

funny thing is that there IS a different sort of wrestling connection with arcade Double Dragon 2: one of that game's bosses (White Mr. Hughes) has the exact same sprite & animations as Andre the Giant in the WWF Superstars arcade game! this game came out first, so it appears that they just recolored this sprite and replaced the suit with the singlet to make Andre. stuff like that happened more often than people realize back then...

[funkdoc]

Saturday Night Slam Masters has a lot of wrestler homages, since it's basically a Capcom fighter cosplaying as a wrestling game.

 

yeah, pol & i talked about this game a fair bit. here's what we came up with:

 

Great Oni = Great Kabuki (the outfit is what separates him from Muta)

El Stingray = Mil Mascaras (Hardcore Gaming 101 disagrees here, but i point to the flying cross chop)

Alexander the Grater = Vader

King Rasta = Brody

Jumbo Flap Jack = John Tenta (the tiger tattoo is the giveaway here)

 

Gunloc is clearly meant to be Guile: Pro Wrestler, while Biff Slamkovich doesn't seem based on anyone. i actually recall seeing a Chris Walker WWF match where he looked like Biff, but can't find that now. Scorpion seems like he should be based on a luchador, but we aren't experts there. Titanic Tim is another fairly original design, though his old tag team with Birdie from Street Fighter references the Megapowers.

 

As for the sequel, Ortega is another obvious Hogan stand-in, which is fitting since he's the undefeated champ of their federation. The other new characters in that game all seem to be rather original, with Black Widow being especially creative since she's actually a woman.

[DR Ackermann]

It very well could be be based on Vader. He debuted in New Japan in December of '87 and the arcade version of Double Dragon 2 came out in December of '88.

[funkdoc]

It very well could be be based on Vader. He debuted in New Japan in December of '87 and the arcade version of Double Dragon 2 came out in December of '88.

 

oh wow, i forgot Vader came that early! further complicating things is the fact that Vader was a manga character adapted to wrestling, IIRC

 

i guess you could extend this sort of argument to all the "Road Warriors" characters in video games and argue that some of them were meant to be based on Mad Max instead of the wrestlers...

[pol]

I believe the story of Vader being based on a manga character is wrong as nobody has ever been able to produce the manga he supposedly originates from. I heard what actually happened is they commissioned Go Nagai to design the gimmick (maybe just the helmet/mask thing).

[GOTNW]

Piroshiki from Dragon Ball Z is a Vader rip-off.

[funkdoc]

oh hey i remembered this thread exists

 

so this one is going to be in the form of a question. i've been playing more arcade games in recent months, and though i knew it was really good i never fully appreciated Violent Storm before. it's a Konami beat-em-up from 1993 that feels nothing like their more famous TMNT/Simpsons/X-Men games, and it blows those completely out of the water. the best way i can summarize it is The Best Possible Final Fight - it blatantly rips off the moves and animations and general feel of that game, but improves upon it in a number of ways in my view. it also embodies early-90s cheese better than just about any other game i can think of, and i think it would be a huge hit with this forum in particular.

 

so the stage 3 boss in this game is a wrestler you fight in a steel cage, named Drigger. i'm inclined to call him another Brody homage, but not positive...any thoughts?

 

 

EDIT: oh yeah, forgot to mention that there are yet more Road Warrior clones in this game, serving as the toughest normal enemies. they even have the exact same attire unlike Abigail and some of the other homages out there.

[pantherwagner]

Terry Man from the Kinnikuman (MUSCLE) cartoon is based on Terry Funk and even uses the same signature moves.

 

 

Well.. there's also Gagne Mask... forehead tattoo included.

 

 

Sky Man is based on Mil Mascaras and I'm sure that there are many others I'm forgetting (haven't watched this cartoon in two decades!)

[funkdoc]

here's another criminally underrated Konami beat-em-up with blatant copyright infringement: Vendetta! just check out the heroes of this game...

 

 

 

yep, you guys know who two of those are! the other two main heroes are often assumed to be Mike Tyson & Jean-Claude Van Damme, but there isn't much of a resemblance there beyond "black boxer" and "blonde martial artist".

 

there's also yet another boss who reminds one of Bruiser Brody, and much more obviously so than that guy from Violent Storm i posted before. and his name?

 

 

seems like Brody could have fit into that gimmick, now that i think about it...

[pol]

The Japanese Diet as depicted in the Kinnikuman anime

 

[Ricky Jackson]

That's fantastic

[pol]

Forgot this one: Wolf from Battle K-Road

 

http://i.imgur.com/F3EplNc.jpg

 

[Death From Above]

There's a great SNES game that dances around the edges of copywright law called Jikkyou Power Pro Wrestling '96: Max Voltage. Years and years ago I wrote a partial FAQ on it for GameFAQ's dot com just to help people that may not have a translated ROM. There's also a more-or-less translated ROM floating around out there somewhere.

 

Anyway, it had four federations. One was New Japan, but with Mitsuharu Misawa added. One was UWFi and I think a RINGS merger. One was a sort of FMW/IWA Japan merger, then there was a US company including the obligatory Hulk Hogan. I remember New Japan was called Super Japan. UWFi was called REALS. FMW was called BOM. The US fed was called WWC.

 

It's also a noteworthy game because it had unique alternate rulesets for the time. You could do UWFi fights with knockdowns and rope break scoring. Also had electrified barbed wire exploding board deathmatches.

 

I got a real kick out of running Atsushi Onita vs. Antonio Inoki in a deathmatch.

 

The AI in the game is pretty soft, but it's a great little multiplayer game that even a lot of big time wrestling fans don't really know exists, so if you're into completionism, there you go.