Loss
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Everything posted by Loss
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Really nice match. It's short, but really stiff. Landell lays in some crazy shots that either just look good or he was just potatoing the hell out of him. Armstrong wins the SMW title, but Landell is the star of the match. Cornette tears into Landell after the match. Landell is close to throwing a punch at Cornette, who ends up costing Buddy another match by trying to help when he was specifically asked not to help. -
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SULLIVAN! Hogan just drops in like this is a talk show and starts cutting a promo, which is funny. The Dungeon of Doom looks like a spa with a lot of smog and some really animated clientele. Sullivan's group attacks Hogan, and Vader drops in and makes the save. This is so bad it's amusing.
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Great action from MSC, and a match that was probably pretty great in full. Cornette is at ringside for the Bodies too, which I think makes him the hardest working man in wrestling in 1995. Typical finish with the racket, and the Bodies win the USWA tag titles. Back at the studio, PG-13 promise revenge in a quick interview.
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This is the biggest, most confusing clusterfuck I've ever seen, but it involves the Gibson, Lawler, Landell, Rich, PG-13, Dundee, Pat Tanaka, Billy Jack Haynes, Smothers, Brian Lee, Tom Pritchard, Doug Gilbert, Brian Christopher and probably some other guys I'm missing. There are handcuffs attached to the cage, so they are handcuffing guys on the other team. We only get a couple of minutes of footage. This isn't an example of a match I'd want to see in full, even though it's an interesting mix of names. We cut back to the studio for an interview with Doug Gilbert. Doug talks about Eddie's death and his role in the SMW feud. I think he's trying to do a great promo, and it's good in tone, but there's no real focus to go with all the emotion. He mentions the turn from Brian Lee on the USWA. Some will like this more than me because of the pitch-perfect tone, but this promo just felt a little empty.
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Fun fact: This, Kawada/Kobashi and Kawada/Taue are the only matches to show up on every single yearbook so far. I've come to enjoy Muto/Chono as a yearbook tradition because I like seeing the matches progress over time. I loved the '96 match, and one thing that stands out here compared to the '92 and '93 matches is that Chono has so much more charisma and presence than he did before the heel turn. Muto is fired up here and gives a great performance. He juices and Chono works the cut like crazy with punches, kicks and gouging while Muto plays up great facial expressions for the camera. He's on quite the athletic roll before this and Chono slows him down and throws him off his game. Muto's comebacks are tremendous in that he has brief offensive flurries before Chono does something underhanded to turn the tide back in his favor. Chono's STF looks brutal because he's doing more of a choke than a crossface. This is an interesting match to compare to Misawa/Kawada and Misawa/Taue, in that it has the unconventional focus on Muto's face. Chono wrestles like Kawada-lite with some of the tactics he uses against Muto and of course, Muto's bloody face is an added dimension the All Japan matches don't have. I hate out-of-nowhere finishes, and this was an out-of-nowhere finish, but there's too much other good stuff for that to take the match down too much. The post-match brawl between the two is awesome and Muto's celebration is a great moment. Easily the best match of the G1 Climax matches on this set so far.
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Oh, New Japan booking, you and your upsets. Another match where I was sure who was going to win and I was surprised. So I guess the early stages of the G1 were about giving both Muto and Hashimoto an early loss so they could fight back from it. This was a really solid, hard-fought back, but it's pretty slow-paced. I think some people will really dig it because of the stiffness. I liked it myself, but it felt a little on the bland side. The Tokyo Dome match from earlier in the year is the Hashimoto/Sasaki match you want to see.
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Great way to start off the G1! Very good match between two guys who seem to always have good matches together, this one not being an exception. This is an interesting match in that I genuinely didn't know the results and figured Koshinaka's role was to make Muto look good. And that is how the match was laid out. Muto had the quick, flashy highspots, Muto dominated most of the matwork and even Koshinaka's late rally seemed like it was designed to show how much punishment Muto could take. But the end result was something different, and then looking back on it, it works to put Koshinaka over too. I don't know how much of a surprise result this was, but I do know I was genuinely surprised by the result. Koshinaka countering the top rope rana attempt into a powerbomb was a holy shit spot and was the turning point in Koshinaka winning.
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Mikey Whipwreck gets the best songs for his videos -- this one to Weezer's "Say It Ain't So". This is a music recap of the Sandman/Mikey angle from the previous TV interspersed with clips of the Weezer video. Paul E. did a much better job picking songs than the Big Two. This is tremendous.
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This I liked much better than the other matches in the series. Hostile City Showdown is the best match of them all for me, but this I think this is the one I enjoyed the most. This isn't a parity match. Malenko is way more dominant than normal and throws everything at Eddy, who keeps hanging on. Dean spends a lot of time working over Eddy's ribs and there's at least a takeaway from this match that one wrestler is better than another. One thing I HATE about this feud is that the guy who looks the worst in the body of the match seems to be the one who wins every single match, but that's ECW. The Jeff Hardy lookalike on the front row getting heat from other fans was the best heel in the match.
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Again, Yankem is treating a promo while Lawler is screaming at Bret Hart. I wonder if the patient thought it was just the laughing gas.
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Today's lesson: Teamwork These segments are HORRIBLE.
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Last few minutes. I always thought the idea of this match was stupid, because either guy should have been a formidable singles opponent for Vader without a partner. Pretty decent action, but the booking is hard to look past. Vader gets the win after powerbombing Arn. After the match, Flair blames Arn for the loss to start THAT feud. Flair/Arn was hyped as a big deal, but should have been hyped more as earth-shattering considering their history.
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This is paced more like a Japanese match than an American match. It's not really a face/heel divide, and there is a build to Eddy getting a hot tag, but that's really secondary to the highspots. It's more about the pairings than the teamwork, and about getting a chance to see all the various wrestler vs wrestler combinations the match provides. Some of them are pairings I've never really seen outside of this match -- like Scott vs Malenko, which has some nice matwork -- or they haven't made much of a lasting impression outside of this match -- like Rick vs Cactus, which has some fun brawling. The series of Eddy highspots off of the Steiners' shoulders was great, although Dean botched the Frankensteiner by not taking the bump. That was a pretty nutty move to even try though. Dean getting the pin after taking all that from Eddy was frustrating, but this was really fun.
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Not a great match, but a really good one that accomplished quite a bit in the storyline, and gave Buddy the chance to work a long, relatively high-profile match with a top shelf opponent. I wish they'd doubled the amount of time they gave them and had them work a more traditional main event-style match, just because I think it would have gotten Buddy over even more. But otherwise, they pulled this off well. My original thought was to do a comparison to the Jarrett match at In Your House, but that's not exactly favorable for this match. This is more back and forth action than any type of consistent narrative. I enjoyed it, but I was hoping for more.
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Ricky Morton is out of SMW at this point, so Bob Armstrong and Robert Gibson come to the ring. Bob Armstrong explains that Ricky Morton has left SMW over the fight between his girlfriend and Tracy Smothers' girlfriend. Gibson puts his hand out to bury the hatchet with both guys, as tensions had been building. Finally, Cornette is out with the house mic and goads the Thugz into putting their titles on the line against his team, which happens to be the Bodies, and we have a match! Very good tag. Smothers tries really hard, but he just isn't a Ricky Morton-level FIP guy. I guess no one really is. But I liked that they worked this as a straight up tag instead of as a brawl, as while this was a territory built around tag teams, there just aren't a ton of standout tag team matches (at least that look good compared to anything going on in the world anywhere). I like the finish with Cornette pulling out the ether rag. Nothing that hasn't been done better elsewhere, but still really good, and seems better than it probably is because these types of matches are starting to fall by the wayside as wrestling changes.
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Fantastic match, maybe one of the better U.S. matches of the year. Snow looks ready for the big time, and I really like the spot where he hides under the ring and Jannetty figures out what he's doing. Nice mix of highspots and ground work. This is much better than Malenko/Guerrero from TV a few days before this because the face/heel line in the sand is much sharper. A smarter, more thoughtful build than Malenko/Guerrero too. Jannetty's spin bump off of the clothesline was just great, as was Snow missing the slingshot legdrop and Jannetty immediately catching him with an atomic drop. Lots of parity spots that work well. As good as or better than any Michaels/Jannetty matches. There are some "boring" chants in this, but they win over the crowd by being patient and sticking to their guns, to a point where the heat is really strong down the final stretch.
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I really loved the finish of this, with Mikey having Sandman where he wanted him, and losing because he slipped off the top rope. Now, Mikey has to take 10 Singapore cane shots. In the post-match, Mikey takes a shot, and the referee offers to take the shots on his behalf, but Woman won't have it. After three shots, the ring announcer offers to take some shots on Mikey's behalf, but again, Woman won't hear it. Woman is GREAT here. Todd Gordon tries to put a stop to this, but Bill Alfonso won't let him, saying if Mikey only takes the seven shots he's taken so far, that's fraud and false advertising. Everyone who tries to make the save takes shots, including Marty Jannetty. Really fun angle that makes you want to see Sandman get his.