WWE wants you to think that they are the be all and end all of sports entertainment, but the wrestling world is much bigger than it's ever been and even as the leading brand they haven't always been pioneers. WWE actually has a sordid history of taking other promotions ideas, gimmicks and talent to try to maintain their top spot in the industry. They have certainly had their own creative successes as well, and since impersonation is the sincerest form of flattery they can't be upset when other promotions over the years have made similar moves to replicate what they think they can succeed with on their own terms.
From the 80s where Vince saw Terry Bollea and decided he had to have him to helm his growing empire as Hulk Hogan, WWE has always taken what they can when they can. In the 90's it was reversed on them when WCW threw mountains of disposable cash at defeating Vince's promotion and in the course of events recruited, stole, and re-enacted many of WWE's ideas, good and bad alike. TNA/Impact Wrestling has gone and done the same since their inception, shamelessly stealing what is good, or having their good ideas replicated far better in WWE. The cycle continues and these are the times WWE was ripped off, and also did the ripping off themselves.
20 Ripped Off WWE - Feast Or Fired (Money In The Bank)
Here's a multi-man match where you climb up something to grab a briefcase with a certain prize in it. It's not hard to see where Impact Wrestling formed that idea after WWE had successfully created the new match type as a WrestleMania attraction. While the match has had some interesting results, it's been a case of Impact overcooking the idea without replicating the best parts. Instead of a single briefcase with a world title shot, there are title shots for all the championships and you don't know which is which, creating a gap between the result of the match and the reveal of what actually mattered.
You don't need a ladder, you only need to scale the corner turnbuckles to grab a prize, lessening the danger, intensity, and spectacle that ladder match brings. Finally, the 'Fired' briefcase means the match paints Impact into a corner if they don't want to fire somebody, and also again lessens the joy fans have when someone gets a briefcase because of the implication it might end their Impact career. There haven't really been any classic 'Feast or Fired' matches, and this convoluted setup compared to it's WWE predecessor is why.
19 WWE Ripped Off - The Light-Heavyweight Division - (WCW's Cruiserweight Division)
There are some facets of wrestling that Vince McMahon can rightly claim to understand better than anyone on the planet, but when it comes to the reasons people enjoy fast-paced smaller athletes doing things the larger ones can't, he's all at sea. That didn't stop him from seeing hte success of WCW's amazing cruiserweights and deciding to counter with a half-hearted Light-Heavyweight alternative that barely scratched the surface of the original and only highlighted Vince's lack of appreciation for it.
Only Taka Michinoku and later Essa Rios were given mildly decent pushes as quality athletes before the belt became a prop and then disappeared.
It returned as a joke title around the waist of Gillberg (rip-offs carrying rip-offs in rip-off-ception) and was eventually absorbed into the Cruiserweight Championship altogether during The Invasion. A fitting end.
18 Ripped Off WWE - Eric Young - Daniel Bryan
Right around Daniel Bryan's ultimate ascent to the top of WWE at WrestleMania XXX, Impact Wrestling decided that they would shamelessly copy that formula with one of their own unsung talents. The issue was that they tried to compress years of built up goodwill, stacked odds, defiant courage and an epic journey into a single broadcast. While the win was very deserved for Eric Young after years of toil, the clear comparison to Bryan made his accomplishment come off as the company grasping for relevance with a cheap carbon copy.
At least the actual title run was very good, as was Young's transformation into the World Class Maniac and then eventual move over to WWE as the leader of SAnitY. The only issue was the blatant copying without shame for little foreseeable upside. A great evolution marred by the perception of plagiarism.
17 WWE Ripped Off - "Razor Ramon & Diesel" (Kevin Nash & Scott Hall)
When your big names jump ship, why not rip them off and pretend they never left? Well, plenty of reasons, but that didn't stop WWE from committing one of the most pathetic acts (among many) over the course of the monday night wars. Coming off like jilted lovers replacing their former interests, WWE trotted out the soon-to-be Kane as 'Fake Diesel' and Rick Bogner as 'Fake Razor Ramon'.
The pair looked like ugly Create-A-Wrestler versions of the originals and lasted less than a year before being rightly abandoned.
Obviously, this was all the better for Kane once he was The Undertaker's brother, but if he hadn't had that mask to hide his face that fans had come to know as ripoff Diesel, it would've sunk him forever.
16 Ripped Off WWE - The Renegade (The Ultimate Warrior)
A much simpler case of WCW seeing something that worked wildly well for WWE and trying to make their own version. WWE is not immune to this same chicanery (as you'll soon see) but this was still ham-fisted and a waste of effort from Ted Turner's outfit. With some initial momentum after associating with Hulk Hogan and Jimmy Hart, he captured the WCW Television Championship and held it for a couple of months.
When The Ultimate Warrior himself called WCW out for their sham version, his push was immediately squashed and he spiraled into a losing streak.
Jimmy Hart disowned him on television, and he spent the remainder of his time flitting between nothing feuds before his eventual release in 1998. The man behind the paint took his own life after his wrestling dream fizzled out, so the entire thing was not only pathetic but sad on a whole other level.
15 WWE Ripped Off - Laycool (The Beautiful People)
For a while, Impact Wrestling's highest rated division was their Knockouts Division, with Gail Kim, Awesome Kong, and The Beautiful People driving ratings and commanding viewership. The Beautiful People were an excellently entertaining female duo with a wrestling version of Mean Girls style to them, and WWE saw a template they could swipe. Cue Michelle McCool and Layle El combining to form the much more annoying Laycool.
Unlike The Beautiful People, Laycool were rarely funny and Michelle's grating voice and stilted promos did nothing to make viewers tune in to their antics. Layla was the driving force of the duo being underrated and entertaining but their storylines like the famously terrible 'Piggy James' saga made nobody look good. They received an out-sized push due to Michelle's relationship with The Undertaker, but nothing close to the quality of the original was achieved and it saddled WWE with 'copycat stank'.
14 Ripped Off WWE - Oklahoma (JR)
There isn't much that JR hasn't endured from bosses in his time in the wrestling business, having Vince McMahon for an employer will do that. What you don't often see though, is a rival company ripping off the persona of a non-wrestler to cruelly mock him over his illness under the guise of 'entertainment'.
Ed Ferrera, the lesser known of the pair of writers also including Vince Russo, was the man under the black hat in this case.
For whatever reason, the potshot at the respected Raw commentator made it onto WCW television and he actually won the company's formerly vaunted Cruiserweight Championship, although he vacated it for being too heavy. None of this was in good taste or even really justified, and so the pathetic-meter goes off the charts here.
13 WWE Ripped Off - Jinder Mahal & The India Experiment - TNA's Ring Ka King
WWE saw Impact Wrestling making small inroads into the Indian market and realized that their ignoring of the region since The Great Khali became a joke had opened a potential avenue for competition that they deemed necessary to squash. After Ring Ka King came and went, Impact continued to feature Indian talent, most notably Mahabali Shera. WWE went a bit overboard with their response, catapulting Jinder Mahal to the WWE title and signing Mahabali Shera to a developmental contract, as well as taking WWE shows to India. So far it hasn't worked that well, with Jinder failing by most metrics, one of their tour shows needing to be canceled over weak ticket sales, and Network subscriptions in the region moving negligibly or even negatively.
Mahabali Shera still has a chance of making that dent, but as a work very much in progress it has so far been a pretty significant failure.
12 Ripped Off WWE - Asya - Chyna
Get it? Do you get it?!?
Christi Wolf was slightly bigger than WWE's Chyna, and so despite her having nowhere near the charisma, WCW created something so pointless and weakly combative that it was always destined to fail hard. They named her Asya since 'Asia is bigger than China', and somehow her previous name of 'Double D' was less embarrassing. She was featured in the United States Title situation for a while, moved on to the Filthy Animals, and left an almost negative impact.
Her most noteworthy interaction was with the already mentioned Oklahoma, her interference actually leading to his cruiserweight title win.
She didn’t do much else, clearly wasn’t the phenomenon Chyna was, and wouldn’t be remembered at all if she hadn’t been a ripoff.
11 WWE Ripped Off - Daniel Bryan Falsely Accused (AJ Styles/Clair Lynch)
Some people think that at times there were forces within WWE trying to undermine Daniel Bryan's momentum. Conspiracy theories most likely, but when WWE up and tries to copy Impact Wrestling's worst angle (perhaps of all time) and attach it to him, you can see where the skeptics get some of that fuel for their fire.
In this case, TNA had AJ Styles suffer through a horrendous angle where he got a girl pregnant on the side, and she turned out to be a charlatan named Clair Lynch. It was a thousand times dumber than that small recap indicates, rivaling the infamous Katie Vick angle.
WWE, not looking to miss the 'popular face has illicit affair' boat, had future Impact Wrestling Knockout Champion Laurel Van Ness play a physical therapist to throw a wrench into Stephanie McMahon's feud with Bryan's wife Brie Bella. Luckily it didn't last half as long as the original, but for a few weeks WWE looked like they wanted to challenge for a Wrestlecrap award that year.
10 Ripped Off WWE - Gut Check (Tough Enough/NXT)
WWE's Tough Enough series of reality shows was designed to find new WWE superstars from unlikely sources and when it wound down, NXT essentially replaced it. It began as a hybrid reality show, competition, developmental experiment that evolved into WWE's source for all talent, so you can see why Impact Wrestling was inspired to try something similar to the previous concepts of their competition.
What came of it was initially okay compared to WWE's foray's but ultimately was crippled by poor decisions, lack of follow through, and Ric Flair going rogue.
Having indie wrestlers 'try-out' during live shows led to some notably bad matches featured prominently on Impact Wrestling. Not a good look. Worse, some future notable wrestlers competed in the series and were overlooked, and the judging process was strangely oblique. Overall it delivered few notable recruits and less good television.
9 WWE Ripped Off - Summer Of Punk (ROH's Summer Of Punk)
It should've been the best storyline in years, and in some ways, it still was because it came after years of lackluster 'lolcenawins', but it ended as a farce. CM Punk's too early return, Alberto Del Rio's cash-in, Triple H and Kevin Nash bumbling and interrupting Punk's momentum, it all paled in comparison to the excellent storyline it was lifted from in Ring Of Honor. Years earlier, Punk won the ROH Title and began months of toying with the company, threatening to leave to WWE with the title and generally being his excellently provocative self.
The angle was great for the time and signaled that WWE's version years later should have been at least that good, but it was a mess. Punk's lengthy title reign was somewhat of a saving grace to the whole thing, but WWE wasting that initial momentum trying to shoehorn their own imprint on the formula ultimately made everything worse.
8 Ripped Off WWE - Main Event Mafia/Fourtune - Evolution
The copy of a copy of a copy, with The Main Event Mafia and Fourtune, Impact Wrestling went through a phase where all the factions members wore suits and they all had signature hand gestures just like The Four Horsemen before them. They even had Ric Flair, the original of it all involved, grooming Impact Wrestling mainstays as a group of elite, cocky athletes with Fourtune.
It was honestly a better effort from Impact than many of their other 'borrowed' concepts.
The Main Event Mafia, in particular, holding a consistent thread through a long period of time that makes other fractious ideas they had seem even sillier. The rosters of both groups are a who's who of excellent talent as well, so even if the ideas were essentially copies they at least got the personnel right to make it succeed.
7 WWE Ripped Off - Wyatt Family Compound Match (Final Deletion)
WWE is rarely outdone on the production side of things simply because they've got the cash and clout to compete and eclipse most other efforts from outside promotions. In this case, WWE overproduced in an attempt to capture something wholly outside their normal domains. Matt Hardy's Broken Universe in Impact Wrestling served up insane, bizarre, and supremely entertaining brawls on location at his home, the 'Hardy Compound'. They involved brawling into the woods, near a lack, with fireworks and drones and holograms and more that captured the wrestling fans imaginations.
WWE tried to copy it superficially with 'Bray Wyatt's Compound' and The New Day, but by all reviews, it was a failure.
Despite employing decent effects and filters to try to create the grimy, low-budget feeling of the original, it captured none of the insane magic and served as a reminder that not everything is better in WWE.
6 Ripped Off WWE - Dixie Carter Authority Figure (McMahons)
The Authority figure trope in wrestling has been done to death but that doesn't mean it's going anywhere anytime soon, and Dixie Carter had to have her go at it while she was in power at Impact Wrestling. flagrantly mimicking The Authority angle going on in WWE she hefted her power around her for her chosen wrestlers including her 'nephew' Ethan Carter III.
Much like Stephanie McMahon, Dixie showed a vacant appreciation for wrestling that seems to come with your position being bought rather than earned. She wallowed in being an onscreen personality to the point she became reviled, avoided comeuppance for years on end, and every time she picked up a mic, she turned viewers away with her voice. She was a far cry from the engaging figures Vince McMahon and Eric Bischoff portrayed before her, but she kept at it to Impact's detriment for far too long.
5 WWE Ripped Off - The Juniors (Lucha Libre)
While little people have been a staple of wrestling due to its carny/circus roots since forever, WWE's adoption of an entire division in late 2005 was way out of its time. Thinking that they could recreate the prominence of Mexican companies use of the smaller superstars badly misjudged the audience SmackDown was catering to, and fans quickly soured on the entire thing.
From quite a varied division initially, it was very quickly pared down to a couple of decent wrestlers, and the final result was Hornswoggle being the last man standing.
In no way did this replicate or play to the strengths of the similar concepts south of the border and the idea hardly lasted half a year before quietly being consigned to the junk heap. It insulted both the fans and the men briefly introduced in the Juniors division.
4 Ripped Off WWE - WCW Hardcore Division
The WCW Hardcore Division is one of the most blatant half-effort ripoffs in wrestling history. It was hardly given any respect and quickly devolved into a comedy segment and dumping ground for WCW's excess signings who needed a place to fill out the card. Norman Smiley is hardly a representative for the hardcore label, but even stalwarts of the style like Terry Funk couldn't drag this to anything resembling good television no matter what violent designs they had.
WWE's division may have had some similarities but it retained an entertainment factor, unpredictability with the 24/7 rule, and some levity among the competitors that contrasted nicely with the show around it. WCW's was just a quagmire for fun and another bad decision en route to the company closing down.
3 WWE Ripped Off - Evolution (The Four Horsemen)
One of the few true factions currently in the Hall Of Fame, it was only a matter of time before Ric Flair, and Triple H's reverence for the man manifested in WWE trying to copy the formula itself. Recruiting first Mark Jindrak and Randy Orton into the newly dubbed 'Evolution' of professional wrestling, they jettisoned Jindrak before replacing him with Batista. Turning to suits, collecting titles, and lording over the entire Raw roster, Evolution recreated The Four Horsemen shamelessly, with Ric Flair gifting the leader role to Triple H while both mentored the young Viper and new Animal. The group did succeed wildly in creating a collection of top tier talents and prolonging Flair's prominence, but the blueprint was stolen and recreated instead of invented.
2 Ripped Off WWE - Sting Returns (Undertaker Returns)
In 2011 WWE began airing some vignettes featuring a dark cabin a mysterious figure and an upcoming date. While it was meant to signal the return of The Deadman, some fans got it into their heads that lack of direct confirmation meant these could be for Sting, who had been in Impact Wrestling since WCW ended.
Over a couple of weeks of the vignettes continuing to not clearly mention who they were for, fans hyped themselves into a frenzy over The Icon being the one.
When it turned out to be The Undertaker, fans were a little disappointed, and Impact Wrestling saw this as a chance to squeeze some relevance out of the confusion. Mimicking the style of the vignettes, they themselves gave a deadset ripoff to announce the actual Sting's return, with fans laughing over the clear imitation effort. Impact didn't need to so blatantly copy WWE so when they did so shamelessly it came off as pathetic.
1 WWE Ripped Off - WWECW (ECW)
The greatest case against WWE when it comes to respecting legacies and incorporating outside visions for their own. Vince McMahon took the momentum from the first One Night Stand PPV in 2005 and relaunched ECW under the WWE banner, but fans immediately knew something was awry. With ridiculous tie-ins enforced by the host network Sci-Fi (SyFy now) and the complete marginalization of ECW original talent in favor of newly introduced ones, it failed on most fronts to capture fans' imaginations.
The core principal of ECW, which was maintaining an edge of progressive wrestling content faded away until even mainstays like Rob Van Dam were gone from the brand. By its end, it more resembled the future NXT brand we know today, but even then it was ended with a whimper rather than a bang, Christian's strong championship reign eclipsed by footnote big-man Ezekiel Jackson. That summed the whole thing up, with a great original taken over by a flawed figure of little substance.