Childs
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Everything posted by Childs
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I liked that Kingston main event, but these posts remind me that I hate Chikara more than maybe any wrestling ever. The one Chikara show I attended -- believe it was night two of KOT in 2008 -- featured a legitimately great main event with Danielson on one side and Johnny Saint on the other. But I just loathed the hyper-self-aware, jokey shit and the way the fan base lapped it up. When Phil, Tom and I drove up to Philly, we thought we might attend both Saturday and Sunday's shows. By the end of Saturday, despite buzzing from the aforementioned main event, we had zero desire to return. Paraphrasing Tom: I don't want to be winked at constantly when I'm watching pro wrestling. -
New Japan. Great depth and variety, and the idea that "shitty" Koshinaka matches made up any significant percentage of it is just silly. All Japan might have had more matches that I'd call great, but it also presented fewer surprises or discoveries. Memphis was my favorite of the American sets -- best high-end matches, best lead guy in Lawler and plenty of surprises. Texas was my least favorite set so far -- plenty of good stuff but not a whole lot that would contend for my top 20 lists on the other sets.
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Based on yearbook watching, I'd say 1990 was the last year Flair was a top 10 guy in the world. I don't think he was the best that year. He wasn't as good as Dandy or Satanico, and I'm not even sure I'd put him above Bobby Eaton if we keep it to WCW. But he was still awfully good, at least until he dropped the belt to Sting. In general, I really appreciate the thinking behind this thread. Way too often, we hear that so and so was great for 20 years without any attempt to assess the individual years. The yearbooks and 80s projects have been revelatory in showing that even the best of the best had peaks and valleys.
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Was it ever clear to you why Dave and others thought Brody was better than Hansen, John? I came to the matches years later, but for the life of me, I can't see how anyone would come away with that view. It's not like Hansen's character was fucking subtle or something.
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Haven't we already fleshed out Jerry's bizarre inability to see Tenryu's charisma? What's the point of even arguing with someone who hasn't seen any of Tenryu in the '90s or '00s? On Jumbo, there's nothing to be said about Dylan's position. He's seen a ton of him, understands that he's good and doesn't find him appealing. It is what it is.
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Muraco is a good one -- just a real sack of shit who is for some reason beloved in certain corners. The Dick Murdoch thread reminded me of my dislike for Adrian Adonis. Adonis had a lot of talent, and I like his stuff against Buddy Rose. But I found him almost universally disappointing in New Japan, and though he was fine on the AWA set, he didn't stand out there either. I hate Manami Toyota. She could be phenomenal for five minutes at a time but on the whole, represents everything that bugs me about Joshi -- from the screaming to the racing through every damned spot. I know this is completely non-controversial in these parts, but Brody might be the all-time "fuck that guy" worker. It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone ever thought he was better than Hansen.
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There was a lot of good wrestling in this, highlighting the contrast between Owen's athletic style and Finlay's rough-and-tumble brawling. But that made it all the more frustrating that it never went anywhere as a match. No build, no highlight moments, no real conclusion, nothing.
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These guys are always a pleasure. They worked complicated sequences so smoothly and quickly that it's like watching bugs dance on the surface of a lake or something. This was another trios where most of the competition came in the first fall, and the last two kind of whizzed by. But that dive train interruptus was so cool that I hardly cared. Dandy's no hands tope over the top rope always looked amazing, and I loved the way Azteca's receipt dive hit him almost as soon as he turned around. I could watch this crew every week.
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They certainly kept it simple, as Loss indicated, but this was my kind of thing. Vader did eight minutes of Vader stuff. Then Choshu staged a stirring rally capped by an awesome series of lariats. And bang, title change. I've seen them have a better body of a match with a worse finish. But I'll never complain about these guys working a hard-hitting 10-12 minutes without any bullshit.
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Really well-executed match, no surprise there. But it left me a little cold compared to my favorite juniors matches of the year, which would probably be Liger-Sano and Fuchi-Kikuchi. There wasn't a great sense of fight to it. As great as these guys were and as many good matches as they had together, I'm not sure they ever pulled off a "Holy shit, that was amazing!" match.
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Yeah, Hansen's my guy, and I'd say he was pretty brilliant at maintaining a core character but adapting it to fit various opponents and settings. For example, his matches against Inoki were pretty different than his matches against Baba a couple years later. His great 1983 brawl against Funk was a hell of a lot different, in the ultimate effect it created, than his 1993 stuff against Kobashi and Kawada. Most would think of him as primarily an offensive wrestler, but he was good enough to build a match around selling, as he did in the '94 carny against Taue. He evolved in the sense that he wasn't doing topes and power bombs in 1981. But I don't think anyone would say 1993 Stan Hansen was a fundamentally different performer than the guy in those Inoki matches. So yeah, I basically love his act and appreciate that it was so durable and that he cared enough to tweak it over the years. You could say a lot of the same things about Flair, though Ric did less to keep up with state-of-the-art offense.
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It's just nonsense to say all of his WWE work is built around that spot. His selling, bumping and teasing of comebacks -- all top-notch -- aren't built around it. His finishing runs are often built around setting it up, but isn't that what you're supposed to do with a finisher?
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Some of the points in NintendoLogic's post strike me as criticism of a style of work more than of Murdoch. I'd say he was excellent at working holds to pass the time in long matches, which was what you did as a top-of-the-card worker when he came up. But if you can't abide limb work that leads to no specific payoff, well, something like the Reed match is always going to be a chore. I agree with Dylan on the Adonis/Murdoch tags -- said it during the nominating process for the NJ set, never changed my mind. But I really enjoyed Murdoch in the multi-man matches on that set, especially the trios tournament at the end of 1988. He was always coming up with nifty rope spots to tease eliminations and other little creative touches. The Mid-South and NJ sets capture most of what's good about him, so if you don't like his stuff from either, you're unlikely to be converted. My favorite part of Murdoch is his athleticism. You expect a pot-bellied guy named Capt. Redneck to throw great punches, and he did. But you don't expect him to spring up for some of the world's greatest leapfrogs. I've said this elsewhere, but he's like the middle-aged guy in your rec league, who played minor league baseball before he let his body go and is still ridiculously more coordinated than everyone else.
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I always thought Misawa treated the TD91 sort of like a nuclear bomb -- such a deranged thing to do to someone that he only pulled it out in the most dire circumstances.
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Terry is not a contender for my No. 1 overall spot, in part because I sometimes get tired of his cartoonish side. But I give him tremendous credit for fully animating so many different roles. He wrestled like a classic NWA champ in the Jumbo match. Then, four years later, he was a compelling loon in the empty arena match against Lawler. Then, two years after that, he was the greatest babyface in Japan. Then, six years after that, he had the unbelievably intense match with Flair at the '89 Bash, where he played a hybrid of lunatic and serious threat. And then he had a whole other career in the '90s as indy wrestling's favorite crazy uncle (a hit-and-miss period, but there were certainly some highlights.) It reminds me of something Bill James said about Rickey Henderson: "You could cut his career in half, and you'd have two Hall-of-Famers." The unifying theme is that he found some way to put his stamp on almost everything he was ever in. If you bought a ticket to see Terry Funk, he was going to do something to send you home with a memory.
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Lawler and Jarrett were great in this. I expect it from Lawler, but Jarrett as a fiery young babyface has really impressed me. There's such a difference between what he brought to the table here and his Double J stuff five years later. I loved Lawler going to the hidden chains as a face move. This feud has been fun.
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I dug this as well. Goto is probably my favorite FMW guy, because he always came off as a guy who could straight up kick your ass, barbed wire or no. And yes, Onita was one of the great facial performers in the history of wrestling. The explosion spots seemed a little off at times -- like they popped when Onita even rolled near the ropes. But the climactic one, with Goto taking a full-on whip into the barbed wire, worked pretty well. They also kept it nice and tight at just under 12 minutes.
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The caning spots certainly made this memorable. The image of Nakano just standing there, inviting Aja and Bison to hit her in the head with sticks, bordered on sadomasochistic. No doubt it put her over as pretty indestructible. I really didn't like that they built to that sequence, wandered out into the crowd and then came back to do a fairly normal wrestling match. After all that violence, it just kind of ended. I feel like I watch Joshi through some sort of distorted lens. So often, when Loss and FLIK absolutely love a match, I really like parts of it, but the structure lets me down. This had all the parts of something incredible. As presented, however, it didn't get there for me.
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I got bored at times after two straight years of it. There often was a predictable nature of who would get pinned, in the sense of knowing it's just not going to end with this guy in trouble: "We're in deep into the run to the finish, Misawa just tagged in Kikuchi to face a hurt Jumbo which means Kikuchi this will get turned around in a minute or two and Jumbo will pin Kikuchi... hey now, everyone is outside the ring except for Jumbo and Kikuchi... backdrop... that's it." Lots of pro wrestling is predictable, and you kind of go with it. The six-mans and other non-big tags month after month did. There were times when they changed things up in 1992, or there was an extra passion to it, or they surprised you. There were around 20 non-big six-mans and tags between the two sides, and I just can't say that all of them were fresh or compelling. That's from someone who loves the match up, and pretty much anytime I put in one of those matches gets a smile on my face. But I can't sell it as a series where, if you watch every available match in the rivalry between the two side, you're going to find everything awesome, or even solid, and not get a little bored at times. John Watching them on the yearbooks probably eliminates some of that because you're only getting the top-shelf matches, and there's such a variety of stuff in between. It's been a long time since I've watched a whole year of All Japan in a continuous push, but the effect is certainly different.
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Gimmick matches in general tend to suck because they limit what the wrestlers can do and force them into various stock spots. With triple threat matches in particular, there's only two storylines you can really do. 90% of the time, it's "one guy gets taken out, the other two fight, the third guy comes back right when one of them gains the advantage, repeat until it's time to take it home." The other one is one guy getting double-teamed the whole match. There's also the more indy approach of trying to come up with "creative" three-man spots, which look contrived and awful 95 percent of the time.
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I've seen most of the Jumbo-Misawa six-man tags multiple times, and I've never gotten bored with them. Actually, as a group, I might find them more rewatchable than any other "class" of All-Japan matches. They were so good at shifting the focus among various match-ups while always cutting a hell of a pace.