5 WWE Superstars whose characters were inspired by real people

#3. John Cena / Vanilla Ice

John Cena as Vanilla Ice

John Cena arrived in WWE in 2001 as ‘The Prototype’, but there is one gimmick that he worked on a year later that helped him “save his career” in WWE.

During the Halloween-themed episode of WWE SmackDown! in 2002, Cena dressed up as the world-renowned 1990s rapper (and TV home renovation specialist) known as Vanilla Ice.

"I was told that I would be getting my release at Christmas cuts."A WWE without @JohnCena? See just how close that came to happening in episode 2 of WWE #RuthlessAggression, available NOW on WWE Network. pic.twitter.com/SAzLfpbFYg

— WWE Network (@WWENetwork) February 18, 2020

From there on, Cena worked his gimmick around Vanilla Ice and appeared in SmackDown as a rapper who cut promos while rhyming. This allowed him to come up with ‘The Doctor of Thuganomics’ gimmick that really clicked with the WWE Universe and, mostly importantly, Stephanie McMahon.

Cena revealed during a documentary on the WWE Network in 2020 that the company was planning to release the Superstar from WWE, but the gimmick and Stephanie’s intervention helped save him from that particular fate.

On Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard, we heard Prichard talk about Cena’s initial WWE gimmick:

“First of all, it wasn’t Stephanie, it was me. We would travel on buses and on private charter planes and Cena would be in the back of the plane. It was like a scene from a movie where the cheerleaders gather around and start singing and s**t like that. Cena would sit on the back of the plane and rap. And he would cut down everybody around him on the plane. I remember sitting there listening to this going ‘oh my god’ and everybody’s popping. The entire plane is popping at some of the s**t he does. It was entertaining as hell. Guys would throw things at him during the tour, say ‘hey John, how about his guy over here’ and John would just go into a completely impromptu rap.

"We were (in the UK), the Smackdown writing team, to have to come up with the Halloween show I believe was in Cincinnati. We had nothing for John. We had a big Halloween party where they were going to be dressed [up]. And I said ‘well, for Cena, he’s gotta be Vanilla Ice. Let him rap.’ Heyman looked at me like I had steaming turds hanging out of my mouth. His words: ‘If you saddle this young man with a rap gimmick, we might as well put a bow on his career and bury him now. It will never get over and he will die.’ I said ‘we have nothing else.’ … So we did the Vanilla Ice s**t and it kinda grew from there, but John did his own raps, but it was that moment in the hallway that Vince heard him and went ‘holy s**t, this guy’s talented.”

Cena put his own twist to the gimmick soon after to make it huge in WWE

While Cena did mold his gimmick later on and added a lot more edge to it, he has revealed that the initial inspiration for the character he portrayed as The Doctor of Thuganomics.

Cena later changed his gimmick as he turned into the biggest face of the company for over a decade, he still remembers his time as The Doctor of Thuganomics extremely well and appeared in character at WrestleMania 35 to take out Elias and during his match against Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 36.