November 1992

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

IWGP Heavyweight Champion The Great Muta vs Sting - NJPW 11/22/92 Not nearly as good as the awesome Hashimoto match, but this is still pretty damn entertaining. Once you understand the Great Muta character as this stalking, maniacal monster his matches become a lot more interesting. Sting is controlling via the arm early. Muta is missing moves here and there to keep it moving allowing Sting to go back to the arm. Then Muta just goes into glorious heel offense, deep eye rakes, whips into the railing, scaring the photographers, choking with the cord. This dude is a master heel. He reminds me of heel Jimmy Snuka or early Undertaker. Just a slow moving, demonic presence. …

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Big Gene Lydick makes his debut and while he's got a ton of energy, he's all over the place and his execution isn't very. Him vs. Takayama to open looked like two drunk dudes trying to grapple and fight. Lydick just wants to SLAM and eats a bunch of Takayama's knees to try and grab him. It wasn't pretty but it was pretty fun. When Silver gets the tag, he's firing blindly and knocks down Takayama, and later, hits a neat German suplex on Kanehara. Kanehara looked decent here and got better exchanges out of Lydick -- I liked him repeatedly dragging Gene down in chokes. It's hard to tell what Silver won with - maybe a dragon sleeper? - but I like Silver a lot now.

Dan Severn, 36 years old, makes his pro-wrestling debut and he ain't fucking around because the first thing he does is kill Miyato with a German suplex. He gets some nice throws and slams on Miyato, who, in turn, gets a pretty sweet belly-to-belly of his own. Severn taps him with a side STF and that's all she wrote for a perfectly decent sub-five minute squash.

This was probably the best match on the show and the interactions between Albright/Takada were more heated than their singles match. A slow start with two guys not great on the ground (Takada/Albright)...on the ground...but luckily, Yamazaki's energy is great, Fleming isn't in long enough to stink it up and comes off a little meaner here than usual. Albright throws suplexes, Yamazaki throws suplexes, and finally, Takada and Fleming dick around a bit before Takada taps him with the armbar.

A disappointing match with Kaki working a little less slappy and eating a shit ton of knees from Anjoh -- great knees, of course, but Kaki looks weak and nervous, taking more strikes than he's able to dish out. Anjoh mocking Kaki's big open hand attempt is such a dick move and it's great and then Kaki immediately gets kicked in the junk. I mean, throughout the match, you're really rooting for Kaki to just give it to Anjoh but Anjoh doesn't take much at all and quickly submits Kaki with a nasty facelock.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Nailz cuts a laughably bad promo before this match. The action in the ring was better than I thought it would be, but there is no consistency on the rules of the match. Vince says it's a no holds barred match, but the referee starts a count when Nailz starts choking Bossman. They keep saying that whoever gets the nightstick first can legally use it, but Nailz faces no penalties when he uses it after Bossman pulls the weapon down first. I'm probably looking way too into this. This was a serviceable brawl with a hot crowd. Bossman wraps up his feud with Nailz, who's fired right after this show. ★★

Talk about it here.

Owen Hart in the ring with the future Rikishi whilst Bobby Heenan commentates feels like we've entered some sort of time warp with three different generations are clashing with each other. It's good to see Owen again, but there's really not much to say about this one. Both teams are making their PPV debut, but this is the only PPV appearance High Energy would make before they would quietly disband in February 1993 after a year of beating jobbers on TV. Headshrinkers gain the clean win after leading a top rope dive. Fun fact: this was the second and last time High Energy would lose a televised match. ★★

Talk about it here.

This was the first time that the Survivor Series match felt like an afterthought. The crowd are still quiet after going wild in the Flair/Razor vs Savage/Perfect match. This really shows how weak the tag division looked at time. Beverly Brothers are crap, Money Inc. clearly don't have much left in the tank, The Nasty Boys aren't clicking with the audience and the Natural Disasters are doing the best with what they had to work with. There's not much to say about this. It goes 15 minutes, but all the eliminations happen in the last third of the match. Like most of the undercard matches on this show, it's fine. ★★

Talk about it here.

Martel has stolen some of Tatanka's feathers from his headdress and that's the reason they're fighting. After a hot start, Martel locks on a front facelock and the match starts to drag. Doink randomly comes down the aisle, but he doesn't do much apart from making some balloon animals. Tatanka's comeback makes him look like a million bucks. This was slightly better than their Wrestlemania match, at least Tatanka got a decisive finish. ★★