The Microscope

This new forum is a place for anyone to make the case for any wrestler as whatever they think they should be -- overrated, underrated, GOAT candidate, and so on. You can add YouTube links, match reviews and general thoughts into it over time. The threads can be used to debate the merits of the case being made, and can be bumped anytime. I think it'll make a good reference, and at some point, I'll scour the board and look for existing topics that we can plunk there.

Adrian Adonis Adrian Adonis Alex Wright Alex Wright Appreciation Thread Barry Windham Barry Windham Big Boss Man The Boss, Man is he Big Billy Robinson Billy Robinson / World of Sport Bob Armstrong Bob Armstrong Bob Holly Bob Holly Bobby Eaton Bobby Eaton Brad Armstrong Let's talk about Brad Armstrong!!! Bret Hart Bret Hart Bret Hart vs. Ric Flair Bruiser Brody Bruiser Brody For entertainment Renaming the Bruiser Brody Best Brawler Award Buddy Landell Buddy Landel Buddy Rose Buddy Rose ! Chris Jericho Chris Jericho is overrated Chris Masters Chris Masters Crusher Blackwell Crusher Blackwell …

There's so much to sift through that I'm gonna dump it here instead of dredging up individual wrestlers' threads. Dennis Goulet vs. Terry Rudge (Hamburg 10/11/87) German tournaments aren't like Champion Carnivals. That's the first thing you need to get out of your head. They're a string of houseshow matches, so try to have fun with them. Imagine you're there -- drinking beer, cheering on your favorite, listening to Europop between rounds. Hamburg '87 may be the last great German tournament to make tape since someone filmed a shitload of it. Grab a beer, put on some Scorpions, whatever it takes to get in the mood. Terry Rudge is a wrestling God. For most of this …

Blue Panther vs. Gran Hamada (UWF 11/13/90) Good match. Neat hybrid between Hamada's UWA work and what Panther might have wrestled like if he'd been a junior. Blue Panther & Guerrero Negro vs. Huracan Sevilla & Gran Hamada (Monterrey 1991) You won't find too many bigger fans of Huracan Sevilla than me. I dig his run as Huracan Sevilla, and I think his hair match with Bestia is a low key classic. He's not really that good, but he sure as hell thinks he is, which is fun to watch. Very good tag match by lucha standards. Starts off on the mat and ends with a bunch of challenges being made. And in this case, Sevilla and Guerrero Negro made good on the ch…

No one cares about Johnny Smith. Here's a guy with a 20-year career spread over three continents. A headliner on some poorly-attended Stampede shows and a bystander to some of the most talked-about wrestling that ever happened. Sure, he looked like Murray from Flight of the Conchords years before that could do you any good, and sure he was saddled with the most nondescript name a wrestler could possibly have, but he wrestled a lot of matches, he hit Dynamite Kid with a chain, and he got Korakuen to boo Misawa. It doesn't seem that anyone noticed any of it. Check out the Greatest Wrestler Ever subforum on this very site - barely a word about him. Danny Spivey has…

I've always been interested in this moment, but I never had the means or the time to do a deep dive into the topic before. For some, this period was the summon of the golden age of indie wrestling. It's time to give my completely unqualified opinion on the subject. Background I'll go over some highlights prior to the feud itself: Road to Necro vs. Show Mad Man Pondo & Necro Butcher vs. Matt Turner & Anthony Franco (Tag World Grand Prix 2005) - Chikara The match that preceded one of the most beloved indie classics. Before the bout, the ROH guys cut a basic promo of "Real Wrestling vs. Garbage Backyarders," burying Necro and Pondo, saying the…

I'm late to the party on this stuff, but I do enjoy a old-school WWF match. Bruno Sammartino vs Ken Patera (WWWF, 3/7/77) It's so weird watching old WWWF matches with a young Howard Finkel, a fat Gorilla Monsoon, Arnold Skaaland managing Bruno instead of Backlund, and Lou Albano looking like the splitting image of Mick Foley. Knowing what we do about Finkel's porn collection, you have to wonder if he was frequenting the peep shows at Times Square during this time, or something even dodgier. As always, people watching is a huge part of the appeal of 70s WWF. Not only that but the fashion. There are some cool looking vintage shirts but a lot of crappy looking 70…

Other Deep Dive stuff Introduction Carlos Amano's pretty based, but I was really bothered a few months back because there just wasn't much if any comprehensive coverage on WHAT matches represented her coolness factor the best, especially to a more casual audience that didn't have the time to really discover these sort of things. This totally original thread that hasn't stolen a lick of creative value will attempt to document and list pretty much every major match (alongside some random selections) of her career....minus some showings that I either wasn't able to cover or wasn't bothered to do so, like the VKF tags (mostly boring) her Kamen matches (they suck) a…

I dig this Billy Goelz guy from the 50s. Quick on the mat and a terrier once he gets a hold cinched, especially his spinning toe hold. Moreover, he makes everyone he works with look good so suddenly you want to see more from workers you've never heard of like Bill Melby, Jackie Nichols and Juan Hernandez. He was even good at more spectacle driven stuff like a rock solid tag against quality stooges Art Nielson and Reggie Lisowski. There's only 5 Goelz matches on YouTube but each of them is a gem. This will be a catch all thread for any 50s stuff I uncover. With no more old school WoS to watch this 50s stuff is filling my needs nicely. I kind of see a parallel between t…

For Regal, I thought the entire Regal vs. LArry feud was legit great as well as the "Boring" Arn vs. Regal PPV match. I would also call half the Finlay matches macro great. Regal is the next guy I dive into revisiting my comp to discover more gems.

So, is Thesz the Godfather? The Granddaddy of them all? I started watching matches to find out. The Don Leo Jonathan match from Chicago was a decent watch. DLJ was a fun big man and not really spoken about enough as we all know. I loved the way he pinched Thesz' cauliflower ears during the ref's explanation. That set the tone for a World of Sport style bout where there's plenty of needle and finally they start with the forearm smashes. That's been my favourite style of Thesz match so far. I don't find his matwork super impressive, but I do love the way he retaliates to inside moves. I think the crux of it is that because he's a hooker he knows dirtier moves than the h…

Introduction These are a collection of write-ups/reviews of matches within AJPW that I found to be interesting/obscure enough to be worth examining in further detail, namely due to the fact that a lot of them go pretty under the radar to the usual main event material. The company goes through a lot of changes in the 90s; arguably in doing so it makes a lot more exciting for a viewer than the relatively stable decades prior. Oddities #1: 1995 Johnny Ace & Steve Williams vs. Jun Akiyama & Takao Omori (24.01.1995) Spoiler This is cut as apart of a AJPW hour special, so this only gets a few minutes of action, it's still solid for a sp…

More Deep stuff here Introduction This is a collected version of my notes regarding Mariko Yoshida's volume of work from her departure from ARSION/AtoZ (2004 to be exact) all the way to her retirement in 2017. This was something that I originally set out to doing about 2 years ago as I was fairly curious as to what existed beyond her strongly acclaimed 90s stint especially since there really was next to no real documentation on the matter, so you kinda had to go off vibes for the most part. This sets out to cover almost everything from that time period barring a very small couple of things that I either did not watch (the Yoshida/Fujiwara vs Ishikawa…

Of course, Jim Neidhart is best known for his work with the Hart Foundation, but are there any solo matches of him worth checking out?

MS-1 vs. Sangre Chicana (9/23/83) EMLL (Hair vs Hair) 2/3 Falls This match doesn't need much context to be enjoyed, the brutality speaks for itself, that's why it is the match that we use to introduce lucha because almost every wrestling fan will have fun watching it. Sangre Chicana was a big match wrestler, it means that he isn't by any stretch of the imagination a wrestler of the year candidate in any year but he can have a match of the year contender with the right opponent like Shinobu Kandori in joshi. MS-1 was one of the original members of Los Infernales, the most important heel faction of Mexico for many years. There was someone called MS-2 if you were wonder…

I started arguing with @El-P about Kaz Fujita. Rather than continue to derail the RWTL thread I thought I'd start a new thread in the microscope. Fujita was a hell of a talent who was booked horribly. New Japan had several talented amateur wrestlers/shooters in the late 90s and early 2000s which I consider to be a good thing. Having legit badasses on a wrestling roster is a good thing. Ogawa, Nakanishi, Fujita, Kendo Kashin, Nagata, Don Frye, Shibata, Nakamura, etc. A few of these guys could actually work and had some charisma and personality too. Possibly my favorite of the legit basdasses in NJPW from that era was Kaz Fujita. He could work. He had an aura, a natural dic…

More threads like these Introduction Osamu Nishimura is one of my favourite wrestlers, but his coverage outside of his greatest hits is immensely lacking. I really wanted to get this made as a way to show off the vast versatility of the guy, while also being able to showcase his strengths and weaknesses in a pretty accurate manner. For the sake of changing things up I also wanted to cover him using a Gordy List, because why not? I'm going to go though essentially all of the questions to really discuss how he rules, as well as throw out some match suggestions. "1. What kind of candidate is this wrestler (Peak vs Longevity,Peak+ Longevity, Big Match W…

Yet another yearbook. This time around I've temporarily paused my run through the 80s to focus on the decade prior. Obviously there's not as much footage to dig through, but with the addition of the French stuff there's far more than there used to be. 1970 1970-XX-XX FFCP - French Catch Jacky Corn & Guy Mercier vs. Ted Lamarre & Jo Marsalo Best Two Out Of Three Falls Tag Team Match France ★★★ This is my first exposure to French Catch, so my thoughts and impressions will no doubt adapt rapidly on the fly as the matches rack up. For now though I feel like I’ll inevitably end up comparing it to the closest comp I have, which is early 80s World …

The MartMan wants to watch some wrestling that includes promos & angles. Dont get me wrong I am still gonna watch some great pro wrestling and include that in the match discussion archive, but I just wanna devour some down home 80s cooking. Of course if I come across anything badass Ill throw in a review. I like to start things in medias res must be the soap opera fan in my me, so lets start this completely randomly on March 9, 1985. Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling Format: Arena matches with interviews by Bob Caudle in front of the Mid-Atlantic Blue Backdrop. The TBS WCW show wouldnt start for another month and a half or so. Main Angle: THE CHAMP …

Other Deep Dive stuff Introduction This is a kinda/sorta continuation of my AJPW series from 1995 all the way to the start of 2000, mostly covering the weird/interesting matches that others may have overlooked or simply not known about from surface viewing. I was comfortable with ranking that stuff because I had pretty good experience watching and grading that material, but AJPW in 2000 was WAY different in scope so I really wanted to just watch every single thing possible from those extremely rough 6 months when nearly all of the roster had left and guys like Wolf Hawkfield and Giant Kimala were left to keep the boat floating. This is a era that historically ha…

Now that I've watched a couple of hundred European matches, I thought I'd set about trying to form some sort of hierarchy of workers. To do this, I concentrated on workers whom I've seen at least five or so matches from. That means no Adrian Street, Masambula, Jackie Pallo, Dave Barrie, Peter Szakacs, Abe Ginsberg, Billy Robinson, and the like. I also ignored strictly comedy workers such as Catweazle or Billy Torontos, as well as the super heavyweights whom I have no interest in. I tend to avoid the blue-eyed, boy apprentices like the plague, so you won't find too many of them listed either. The time frame covers roughly 20 years from 1970-1990. All-Time G…

Because the Silver Hurricane deserves his own thread. Quite possibly one of the most underrated talents of all-time. Mile Zrno vs. Dave Morgan (Hannover 10/27/85) Morgan was a British dynamo who preferred to work abroad than traverse the U.K halls. This was clipped (in true German handheld fashion) and mostly a Morgan showcase, but you could tell it was a crowd-pleaser. Early on, they worked some comedy sequences with referee Mick McMichael but later they got serious and were pissed at one another. Zrno was mainly typecast here as the good looking babyface like some kind of glorified Tom Zenk, but the German tournaments are nothing if not nightly house shows and t…

I don't know where to put a thread like this or if the board even does this sort of post anymore. This is something I started last year when I was trying to make top tens for the 1990s, and that ended up evolving into this list. It's pretty biased towards 1990s matches and CMLL matches, but, well, that's all I got. If, for whatever reason, anyone tried to use this as a stepping stone to getting into lucha, most of the top fifty have been vetted by other people, whereas the second fifty are more personal picks plus some stragglers. So maybe take the first fifty more seriously. I'll try to provide links and say something brief about each one over the next few weeks. 1.…

I used to be a regular poster here, but it's been years since I was following wrestling with any regularity. I moved abroad for work in 2015 and bar the very odd match that got exceptional praise (Omega/Okada, for example), you could count on your fingers how many matches (never mind full shows) I've watched since. And when I do, there's often something (or several things) that leave me a little lost. I just never seem to be on the same page or connect with what I'm watching. My brother recently watched several of the big '90s All Japan matches for the first time, and I decided to do so too. They still work for me as much as they ever did. So, what I'm hoping to…

As requested by ohtani's jacket... Mechanics (listed somewhat chronologically) MS-1, Espanto Jr., Hombre Bala, Rambo, Emilio Charles Jr., Bestia Salvaje, Pierrothito Smooth, bumping bruisers with big grins. Generally maskless, tended who have more personality than starpower. Can captain a team, but generally more natural as the #2 or #3 in a match. Often more workmanlike than their talents necessitate, and as such they tend to be better in 3v3 matches than 1v1s. A lot of these workers ended up in longtime rivalries with tecnicos who were much bigger stars (Espanto vs Santo for instance), perhaps because their inring ability and general selflessness made for …