In this post, this blogger will point out a few observations regarding some Tekken fighters. Particularly, with which real-life celebrity they might've been based on.
Let's start with the obvious ones.
Yeah, most Tekken characters are inspired by pop-culture martial arts heroes and anime cliches. With characters like Law and Lei, the reference is pretty obvious, but with some other characters it isn't quite that immediate. For example, anyone remember Cynthia Rothrock?
More on Cynthia, Arnie, B-Movie villains, and Connan O'Brien after the Jump!
Tag this as off-topic. This is not news. This is however, something that may be a bit entertaining if you're a Tekken fan. Consider this the byproduct of beer, too much Tekken: Dark Resurrection for the PSP, and a VHS/betamax marathon with buddies.
In this post, this blogger will point out a few observations regarding some Tekken fighters. Particularly, with which real-life celebrity they might've been based on.
Let's start with the obvious ones.
Yeah, most Tekken characters are inspired by pop-culture martial arts heroes and anime cliches. With characters like Law and Lei, the reference is pretty obvious, but with some other characters it isn't quite that immediate. For example, anyone remember Cynthia Rothrock?
Yes, we know, Nina Williams is a whole lot hotter than Cynthia Rothrock, but given that most of Nina's peers in the very first Tekken were obviously based on late-seventies, early-eighties action heroes, so Cynthia gets the credit for Nina, the Tekken 1 Nina. The future versions of Nina in the subsequent Tekkens owe more to anime-stylings, and peer pressure from Dead or Alive than to Cynthia (due to Nina's hotter bod), but if the Tekken 5 costume is to be taken into account, the influence is still there.
Other influences to be found in Tekken characters? There's King, and if you've got an international wrestling channel on cable, you'd be able to sniff the Luchador influence. There's Gon, who is more of a guest character than a "reference" Tekken character, since Gon is also a character in a classic Japanese manga. There's Jack Who's obviously a terminating Arnie.
Baek resembles the a cliche suave Korean soap opera elder. Hworang resembles a Korean soap opera punk. Wikipedia claims that Feng Wei is based on martial arts B-movie actor Bolo Yeung. Bolo is that guy who got beat a lot by Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme.
But what is the Tekken reference of ultimate power and ultimate destiny? Well, Paul always said he was the strongest. That, and Paul's dynamic with Law reminds us of another martial arts hero who had an interesting dynamic with Bruce Lee.
We have Connan O'Brien to thank for this.
Given that the game already is infused with a huge number of in-game hollywood/movie references, the supposed 2009 Live-action movie version by Charles Stone III better be good. The characters are already based on stereotypes, how hard can casting be?
What about the Mishimas? Well, they're all a bunch of anime-induced emo-boys ('cept for old man Heihachi) so I won't bother with them. Of course that's just me being a bit too lazy to do some research on them. If you happen to know some odd factoid regarding the influences behind Heihachi and his progeny's character design, feel free to comment.