The character Pigeon was inspired by Mike Tyson's childhood love for pigeons. At a young age, Tyson got into a fight with an older bully that decapitated one of his pigeons.
John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury and the inspiration for the character, endorsed a code of rules for boxing which were written by John Graham Chambers and first published in 1867. The code then became known as The Marquess of Queensbury Rules, which became the basis for the modern rules of boxing.
The overly camp persona of John Douglas is a dig towards his disdain for the homosexual relationship between his son and Oscar Wilde, which lead towards him discrediting Oscar Wilde and his eventual bankruptcy and exile.
A spoof of celebrity-driven adventure cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s, such as I Am the Greatest!: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali (1977), Mister T (1983), and Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos (1986).