[quote name='O.D.D']When did Burchill debut the C4 in WWE?[/QUOTE]
Someone who knows the name of *that* finisher knows more about wrestling than even me. Impressive. Who else has used the C4? I'd never seen it before that Velocity.
If you went back to watch the Burchill match on that show, check out the Jamie Knoble/whoever (probably some jobber like Paul London) match. Knoble's dragon sleeper with leg lock is just awesome, as is the knee drop/gut buster combo (which, I believe, is used by someone in TNA - Roderick Strong maybe?).
Y'know, if I were to develop a wrestling gimmick, I want to say I'd steal from Raven (at the risk of giving DemoMan a giant boner), but with some qualifications:
1) I wouldn't do any of the stuff Raven did from 1997 on. His whole character's motivation was "whiny bitch" from WCW on. He completely changed from his apathetic anti-hero character in ECW; he was no longer Johnny Rotten, he was more like one of those girls on the MTV "Sweet 16" shows, who throw temper tantrums because their father won't buy them a jewel-crusted Hummer for their birthday, or pay to have Britney Spears perform for her and her friends privately. Seriously. Go watch a Raven promo from any point after 1997 that makes him look like anything but the ugly girl in high school going "WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
2) I'd be more than happy to "take my real personality and turn it up," as many popular wrestlers (Austin comes to mind) say. I'm an unabashed liberal, "just a touch to the right of Marx himself" as my conservative mother might say. I'd be glad to use the wrestling ring as a motivation for pointing out people's egregious spending habits, overwhelming debt accumulation, environmental disregard, hatred for other people based on superficial means, etc. Like JBL but a communist; being an environmentalist worked for Ludvig Borga. Now, part of being a good heel is being transparently lying. Heenan used to do it as an announcer (claiming he never saw the bad guy cheating when it was as clear as day); with a politically-motivated figure, it's easy for me to remain dead serious about what I say (I hate you people because you treat homosexuals as second-class citizens in this nation) and for the crowd to respond as if I was *just* as trandparently lying as Heenan ("that queer likes queers! KILL HIM, IRON MIKE SHARPE!"). At the same time, you can point to many nationalist/ethnic/political angles that either went too far (Sgt. Slaughter) or just plain sucked (La Resistance). Now, I'd differ in that my character would flow naturally, and that I'm not French; I'm not a minority; I'm a bleeding-heart liberal American, and if cast in this role, I'd demand more time to develop my character than simply walking to the ring with an upside-down American flag, or something stupid like that. Think about La Resistance; why were we supposed to hate them? Because they were French (later French Canadian)? what kind of bullshit is that? Now, if a crowd knows what I stand for (that which they, in their infinite ignorance and hatred, do not), they could find it easy to want me to get my ass hella kicked.
3) I would certainly like to steal Raven's body language, at least when he played the character who was indifferent to the crowd. That, and some of his aesthetic, is what I'd rip off. Maybe the braids (I've always wanted blue dreadlocks, but the wife tells me I'm too old for that shit).
4) No Offspring for theme music.

ing awful, they are.