The Corner Penthouse

Wrestlecrap.com, the Internet's premiere wrestling humor site, has chronicled the worst in professional wrestling since 2000 (which still makes it younger than Spook Central). Regular visitors to the site and its forum are called Crappers, and I'm proud to admit that I'm a Crapper. I even own all three Wrestlecrap books. This should all come as no surprise considering that I've written about wrestling on Spook Central and have a category dedicated to it here on The Corner Penthouse. Over the years, I have made many submissions to the site. Read on to find out more about them...

I had my letters appear in the RD's Mailbag/RD's Ramblings column on January 9, 2004, May 14, 2004, and December 10, 2004. On February 17, 2012, a video link I submitted, which I never thought would ever appear on the site, was published in the "It Came From YouTube" column. It actually surprised me to see my name up there. I literally thought, "Holy crap, that's me!"


A George "The Animal" Steele video I submitted appeared in the April 11, 2013 edition of It Came From YouTube. Fast forward three years to April 29, 2016, and my photos of a really unique bootleg TNA jigsaw puzzle was posted in the Someone Bought This column by the new editor of the column (and fellow member of the Paul Patrol wrestling faction) Paul "The Big Cheese" Kraft. On May 20, 2017, the other Paul wrote about a really creepy Brock Lesnar children's play outfit I saw in Toys R Us. (A Road To Wrestlemania 2014 Topps trading card I bought in 2017 that goes out of it's way to pretend that Chris Benoit was never in the Wrestlemania 20 Triple Threat match was never posted on the site.)

It was 10 years ago today (on Friday September 28, 2012) that I wrote a "Someone Bought This" article for Wrestlecrap about some bootleg WWE coloring books that I found in a local Mom & Pop discount store in East Rockaway, New York. Neither RD Reynolds (the cool cat who runs the site), nor anyone else, asked me to write it. I just bought the books and thought it would be fun to write about them. At the time, I didn't have The Corner Penthouse to write about non-Ghostbusters stuff. I submitted it to RD hoping he would like my writing enough to post it. There was no guarantee it would be "worthy". While I'm sure the article is in the paid archives on the site, I'd like to have more of my work freely available here for everyone to read, so I'm reposting the article here on its 10th anniversary (with some spelling corrections).



Usually I [RD Reynolds] handle the text on this here page, but not this week.

Paul Rudoff from Spook Central: The Ghostbusters Companion, here. I bought some bootleg WWE coloring books at a local mom & pop dollar store in my small town, and boy are these things prime Someone Bought This material! For starters, they're not technically "coloring books". No, no, no, that would make too much sense. They are "Decals & Fill The Color Originally" books. They had many different covers, but I liked these two the best:


Yes, that's the cover art from the 2009 PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 video game Legends of Wrestlemania, and lots of other WWE artwork that I'm sure was stolen from the internet. Click on that image to get a better look at the mish-mash of PPV promotional artwork, video game promotional artwork, and whatever else the book designers could get their hands on.

Now the reason this is called a "Fill The Color Originally" book, and not a coloring book, is because there are two copies of each drawing in the book. The first is colored in, and the second one is uncolored.


I guess the book designer wanted kids to know what color the wrestlers should be, lest you make a black John Cena. WHOOPS! Too late...


Even though the books have different covers, every single one has the same nine drawings inside. You have THREE John Cena drawings. Geez, even in a bootleg book he's still the one represented the most! Ironically, they're from his decidedly NON-PG "Thug Life" days. Did I tell you these books were made in 2009? Let's look at everyone in the book. You can click on the image below for a larger view.


So there's the three Cenas. The Undertaker, with his now-removed "Sara" tattoo. A lipstick-wearing Rey Mysterio bearing a misspelled "Mexican" tattoo, which must be so embarrassing for him. Kurt Angle wearing...WAIT, WHAT! Kurt Angle in a WWE book made in 2009?!? I'm guessing that who ever designed this book never actually watched WWE in 2009. They never studied! Okay, moving on... We have a drawing of some human-like creature with "HHH" on his trunks. I mean, seriously, were it not for the trunks, would you have guessed this was Triple H? And, finally, there are two drawings of a bald guy that I *think* is supposed to be Stone Cold Steve Austin. I can't be certain about that, because the top right drawing looks like something out of the Doonesbury comic strip, and the bottom left drawing looks like Larry The Cable Guy.


The best part of these books, and the reason I plunked down a whole dollar for each of them, is that in the middle they have a two-page spread of STICKERS!


It's good to see that Miss Tiffany approves. I figured she would like stickers. Who doesn't?!?

Even though all of the books have the same drawings, there are two different sets of stickers to be found. Here's what the two sets of stickers look like. Click on the images for a better look.



As you can see, there's a wide assortment of stickers covering such fan favorites as John Cena (no surprise there), Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Randy Orton, Eddie Guerrero, Kane, Edge, Ric Flair, Rey Mysterio, Finlay (sadly, without Hornswaggle), Batista, Chris Jericho, Jeff Hardy (sure, why not?), The Great Khali (okay?), MVP (really?!?), Mark Henry (is it the Worlds Strongest Sticker?), and Bobby Lashley (I guess Battletoads deserve stickers too). There's also a retro Bret Hart sticker, ironically placed right next to two Shawn Michaels stickers. And, look, there's Tajiri. He left WWE long before 2009, but it's nice someone remembered him. You know who else was remembered? I bet you weren't thinking Sabu! Yeah, not exactly the first guy I think of when I think "WWE". Not to mention the fact that he also was long gone by 2009.


You know who probably wishes he WASN'T remembered in a WWE book? That would be Kid Kash.


Even though those guys had long left the company, at least they all, at one point or another, stepped foot in a WWE ring. That's more than could be said for Hayabusa...


...or Minoru Tanaka aka HEAT (thank to Google for the image match)...


...or Jun Akiyama, seen here holding the Global Honored Crown (GHC) Heavyweight Championship - NOT a WWE belt! (thanks again to Google for so much assistance in figuring out who this is and what belt he was holding)...


...or this really generic-looking guy. Seriously, who is this? Tineye and Google didn't have a clue.


[The generic bald white dude was David Young, TNA jobber during the Asylum weekly PPV years.]

For a set of wrestling stickers like that, a dollar per book was definitely well worth it. For those drawings, a dollar was way too much! The fun doesn't even stop with there. Continuing on to the back cover, at the bottom we see this tiny set of warnings:


I have no clue what that first logo is (neither does Tineye or Google). The second logo is the CE marking, which is earned for medical devices, machines with moving parts, electronic devices, etc. being sold in the European Union that meet the required standards. What that's doing on a coloring book sold in the United States is beyond me. The third logo means "not for children under 3 years". That's all well and good, but the funniest thing found here is the large "WARNING!!" box. Apparently this coloring book presents a "choking hazard" because it contains "small parts". Well, I guess, the staples that hold the pages together could be considered "small parts" and a "choking hazard", but don't you think that's pushing things just a little too far? I think they're being a little too safe, don't you?

Finally, if you needed any more proof that this isn't an officially-licensed WWE product, look at whose name appears on the WWE World Heavyweight Championship belt sticker:


Whoever that Chris Benoit person is, the WWE website tells me he never worked for them.