As Wikipedia states, from a GamePro article that can be downloaded from RetroMags, John Tobias stated that Goro is based off a fight scene from a sinbad movie. The wiki article leaves out that he said it was a "multi-armed sword-wielding statue from a Sinbad movie."
You can watch that exact scene here Food for Thought:
* The entire MK game was a carbon copy of Enter the Dragon. The first movie compared itself to Enter the Dragon meets Jason and the Argonauts as well as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jason and the Argonauts meets John Woo (from Anderson/Kasanoff).
* Liu Kang is based off Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.
* Shang Tsung was based on the long, gray-haired men from many martial arts films. Some examples of this trope include: Chinese sorcerer Lo Pan from the film Big Trouble in Little China (I don't know where wiki gets Shang is actually based on him). Other men appeared in Born Invincible and Wu Tan Collection and Saturday Kung-Fu Theater.
* Rayden is based after the character "Lightning" from the 1986 John Carpenter movie Big Trouble in Little China.
* Sonya Blade originally was a black man named Jax but they wanted a female and rumor has it she is based off of the "lady dragon's" likeness, Cynthia Rothrock. Cynthia confirmed to me she had been asked to do MK but couldn't remember much about it. Sonya was named after one of Boon's sisters which likely explains why she wasn't sexualized like Kitana and Mileena in MKII.
* Kano, as a thug, is a common trope in martial arts films. His eye piece comes from Terminator films.
* Johnny Cage is Van Damme from Bloodsport, complete with a splitting ballbuster maneuver.
* Scorpion/Sub/Reptile aren't exactly based on specific existing media but many Ninja films do have revenge plots, though rival clans are often equated with the gang culture popularized in existing films like TMNT.
Fatalities:
* Kano's heart-ripping fatality was taken from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the heart continued to beat.
* Sub-Zero's head-rip fatality is from Predator.
Other movies often believed by fans to have helped influence MK's violence:
Riki-Oh (aka The Story Of Ricky)
Master of the Flying Guillotine
