Liouville remarked that the fundamental theorem of algebra could be derived from his theorem that elliptic functions (doubly periodic meromorphic functions of one complex variable) must have poles. The proof goes by substituting the inverse of a polynomial as the argument of, say, Weierstrass $\wp$-function with large enough periods, and observing that it has no poles.
Of course, the proof of Liouville's theorem on elliptic functions requires the same kind of arguments used for proving the famous Liouville theorem (due to Cauchy) that bounded holomorphic functions are bounded and, apparently, already used before by Cauchy for algebraic functions.
But Liouville's observation is really more complicated than the present proof. What it simplifies, however, is the compactness argument. For elliptic functions, or for algebraic functions, one has at hand a compact Riemann surface on which some holomorphic function is bounded, hence achieves its supremum, etc. This may be the reason why the general form of Liouville theorem came only after the case of algebraic or elliptic functions.
