FLIK

05/17/98 - Koji Kanemoto vs Yuji Yasuraoka - I have this listed as 5/16 but i'm guessing same match. I thought it was pretty decent but easily cuttable 05/18/98 - Jushin Liger vs Masakazu Fukuda - Damn good match, wouldn't quite say it's a MUST have for the set but if there's room toss it on for sure 05/28/98 - Jushin Liger vs Shinjiro Otani - Great match, def include this 05/31/98 - Shinjiro Otani vs Tatsuhito Takaiwa - Do you guys have access to more complete version? The one I have only shows about 6 mins of a 17+ match so i'd say no to including it if it's the clipped down one 06/03/98 - Koji Kanemoto vs Dr. Wagner Jr. - Awesome stuff, one of my fave NJPW jr matches ever, def a needs to be on 10/26/98 - Jushin Liger, El Samurai & Dr Wagner Jr vs Shinjiro Otani, Koji Kanemoto & Tatsuhito Takaiwa - I have this listed as 11/14 (airdate?). Thought this was great as well if 10/26 is the same match. Not mentioned on the list 6/03/1998 Kojima & Nakanishi vs Tenryu & Koshinaka - Really loved this match, i'd put it in the must have catagory as well I agree on thinking this match was garbage BUT I have run into enough ppl that do actually really like it for who knows what reason so i'd also vote yes on including it just because of that.

Apter himself has said in many interviews pretty much the same thing. What's funny is that Meltzer is the guy who came up with the term ""Apter Mag" to begin with which Bill never liked but it just ended up sticking.

Apter's done a lot of great interviews over the years that go over his history, his ones with Meltzer are always worth checking out. More recently and for those without a WON sub, his interview with Cabana on the AoW podcast last week is awesome as he gives a lot of insight on what he did & didn't do during his career for the magazines that you can credit him for. Except for the WWF, pretty much all the other territories were really welcoming towards him & the other magazine staff as they were greatful for the publicity, even putting him on tv after a while. As for making up stuff went it varied from case to case, some wrestlers wanted to be actually interviewd, a lot of others didn't care so long as you stuck to the general storyline that was going on. In the AoW interview he tells a great story about Bruno being pissed because someone else at PWI had previously printed a "this is your life" story on him with a lot of inacturate info they just made up like his sister having killed a Nazi so Apter went to him years later and tape recorded an interview that they printed correcting things which made Bruno love him after that.

Thanks Not in any rush since i'm assuming it'll be a while before they're out but yeah i'll get around to the other years eventually. I'd say 97 through 02 are the yearbooks i'm most looking forward to seeing released actually since between FMW, GAEA, ARSION & others there's a whole ton of hidden gems that don't get talked up much now that hopefully ppl will get to discover.

Ah, I couldn't imagine Dave having watched a bunch (if any) Jim Breaks footage so thought someone would have to have been in his ear about adding him to the ballot (though after checking out one of the threads at Classics I see that Marty Jones has been added too). It's not really a subject he brings up much but he's talked about having watched a lot of WoS years ago on a few occasions.

1998 GAEA TV Season Thoughts This was the last year of unwatched footage I had left for the promotion having started out following GAEA with their incredible 1999 and being hooked ever since. Knowing what was to come later on I def got the sense that 98 was being used as a set up year for some of the major stuff that was going to go in 99 and beyond. Also i'd have to say that the biggest theme through out the year was probably them making an effort to really grow their younger generation of stars as more then just talented rookies. In previous years they'd take on vets, ocasionally even getting an odd win here & thear but deep down you always knew there was still that strict heirarchy and it was exspected that most of the time the young girls were gonna fail in their efforts. This year it felt like they wanted all of that to finally start changing and the youngsters to be taken more seriously as threats. They removed the age limit on the titles allowing younger stars to challenge for the singles title although that didn't happen until the following year and allowing the vetrans to challenge for the tag titles which led to Aja & Ozaki winning them over the Summer. Other notable things in 98 - The really great angle that started in 97 with Ozaki manipulating partners Kaoru & Yamada into hating each other got wraped up in a really unique way. Traditionaly your disfunctional tag team always ends up with someone turning on someone else leading to a big fight to blow it off. Instead of that we get a great moment whear after Yamada & Kaoru end up fighting with each other again in a match vs Sakura Hirota & Devil Masami, Devil gets on the mic and basicly publicly ridicules them for acting like idiots which in turn leads to Chigusa smacking them around for embrasing her in front of Devil and they're basicly shamed into reconciling. - This all leads into a match a month later whear a once again buddy buddy Kaoru & Yamada take on OZ Academy members Nagashima & Sato only to have Akira Hokuto make a surprise run in, turn heel & allign herself with Ozaki's crew. - They'd kinda sorta teased this last year but weren't able to pull the trigger in 97 due to Oz being MIA for several months. Of course, like a week after Hokuto's heel turn here she found out she was pregnant with her first son and thus was gone from GAEA for about a year & 1/2. Really gives you the sense that when SSU finally kicked off that that was the angle Chiggy had been dying to run for years but couldn't cause shit just kept getting in the way - Lotta roster changes this year. Ozaki became pretty much full time though technically she was a freelancer. Aja Kong got brought in in April to fill Hokuto's spot as Oz's tag partner and became semi full time after that working about 60-70% of GAEA's remaining shows in 98. Aja & Oz had great chemistry too, really underrated heel tag team in joshi history. RIE "Bad Nurse" Nakamura also joined the company around the same time which I thought was a good pick up for them. She sorta ended up filling the void that Bomber Hikaru had left when she disapeared, a young vetran, about 5 or 6 years older then the GAEA youngsters, not a great worker but a solid capable one who'd always give you atleast a decent to good undercard match and help teach the younger girls in the ring while also putting a lot of them over too to elevate them. Hiromi "the other" Kato left which sucked as she showed pretty good potential in the short amount of time she was around, about a year & 1/2 total. Obscure (so much much so even I didn't know about her) flash in the pan Miyuki "the other" Ishii came and went. She debued mid year against Chigusa in an ok match, wrestled for about 1 more month and then was never heard from or seen again. Don't think she ever even had a match that lasted more then 5 mins. This was also the last year Maiko Matsumoto & Rina Ishii were with the company. Would kill to know what the reason for their departure was too. For most of their careers they'd largely been treated as lower to mid card after thoughts in the company but during the last few months of 98 they both started to improve greatly in the ring, especially Rina and they both started to finally get a few more higher profile matches and tv time. Really weird that they were done soon after. Although Makie Numao actually lasted until mid 99 with the company she gets injured in the later part of the year and only makes tv like 1 time in 99 when she returns so for all intents this is her last year as a major roster member as well. With things exploding in popularity in 99 and more & more outsiders joining up after then, 98 is really the last year whear GAEA feels like this home grown family promotion and seeing so many of their in house trained talent fade away for various reasons is little depressing. - Like I said earier, big focus on continuing to raise the profile of the younger girls this year both against each other and vs the older stars. Nagashima/Sato vs Sonoko Kato/Meiko feud that saw Sato & Nagashima win the tag titles. They lost them soon after to Aja & OZ but Nagashima & Sato were pretty much established as the tag aces of the promotion from this point forward. Meiko got a lot of attention this year and if it wasn't allready obvious it was hammered home that she was going to be the chosen one to become the future ace among her generation. She got big singles matches vs Toyota & Aja, they ran a Kato/Meiko feud post them losing the belts that led to an amazing 30 min draw between them, one of my fave GAEA matches ever. Meiko also had a mini feud with Kaoru that saw her get atleast one clean pin over her. Kaoru & Toshie also had a mini feud late in the year as well in another highlight. - Mid year Ozaki holds the first OZ Academy stand alone show as part of a double header with GAEA, another really important milestone as OZ would hold 1 to 2 shows under the OZ Academy banner every year from then on out and when GAEA shut down she started running OZ Academy as a full time promotion that most of the roster would then join and which continues to be arguably the #1 joshi promotion still around today. - Late in the year GAEA went through a weird Muga style phase that they dubed "Roman", complete with Tatsumi Fujinami paying a special visit to the GAEA dojo. Didn't produce quite as many cool matches as their shoot style phase in 97 did but there were a few nice ones, especially dug the Chigusa vs Sonoko Kato match. Also led to weird amusing stuff too like Chiggy going over Manami Toyota with an Octopus hold in a 3AW title defense in the main event of AJW's 30th anniversary show. - Lastly and most importantly, can't talk about 1998 GAEA with out brining up Lioness Asuka showing up in a classic angle at the end of the final GAEA show of the year. On 12/26 at a special interpromotional show (notable for having Jaguar Yokota's 2nd retirement match, she's since un-retired but still..) Lioness & Ozaki had a singles match in the semi main that saw Lioness get the win. On 12/27 Aja Kong & Mayumi Ozaki go over Yamada & Meiko Satomura in the main event, with Aja leaving Meiko bloody and knocked out. Aja & Oz go about clebrating their win, taunting Chigusa and the rest of the GAEA faces when Lioness suddenly shows up and the crowd loses their fucking shit like you wouldn't believe. At this point Chigusa had been out of retirement for around 6 years and Lioness had been out of retirement for about 4 and the 2 of them had never had ANY interaction in that time span. They hadn't faced each other, they hadn't teamed, nothing. They'd rarely even appeared on the same shows, like maybe 3 or 4 and that's it so fans had been dying to see a reunion. Chigusa, somewhat surprised to see Lioness thear at all but assuming her old Crush Girl team mate & best friend must be thear to help offers Lioness a handshake and in such a brilliant bit of booking Lioness doesn't attack Chigusa or say anything to her or say anything at all, she just calmly walks past her, leaving her hanging and embraces Aja & Ozaki instead raising their hands. Ozaki as always has a great evil genius "ha ha bitch look what I did" smirk on her face and Chigusa's reaction is priceless as you can see her slowly realising what just happened and processing it all in her mind like "WTF?....oh...hell....NO". Chigusa calmy helps the still knocked out Meiko out of the ring then procedes to lose HER shit and go complete 110% psycho trying to murder Lioness and a giant pull apart ensues. Chiggy gets draged away kicking & screaming, breaks free leading to a 2nd massive pull apart brawl with everyone fighting in the lobby of the arena. Backstage Chiggy gives a great "shits on, it's time to go to war" speach to the roster and Lioness/Aja/Oz finally explain themselves thus giving birth to SSU. Hands down the most iconic moment in the companies history leading to thier biggest angle ever and a huge boost in popularity. Top 20 matches of the year (Like with 1997, for yearbook purposes i'd only say 1-15 are MUST haves with the rest falling under the catagory of stuff that's also good to check out if there's room) 1 - 12/27/1998 Aja Kong & Mayumi Ozaki vs Toshiyo Yamada & Meiko Satomura 2 - 1/15/1998 Mima Shimoda & Etsuko Mita vs Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura 3 - 8/23/1998 Meiko Satomura vs Sonoko Kato 4 - 6/21/1998 Reiko Amano & Chikayo Nagashima vs Toshie Uematsu & Sonoko Kato *OZ Academy Show* 5 - 11/23/1998 Aja Kong vs Toshiyo Yamada 6 - 2/22/1998 Toshiyo Yamada & Kaoru vs Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima 7 - 6/13/1998 (3AW Tag Titles #1 Contender Tournament R1) Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura vs Kaoru & Toshiyo Yamada 8 - 6/21/1998 Toshiyo Yamada & Sonoko Kato vs Kaoru & Meiko Satomura 9 - 6/21/1998 Mayumi Ozaki & Sugar Sato vs Kyoko Inoue & Yoshiko Tamura *OZ Academy Show* 10 - 8/10/1998 (3AW Tag Titles #1 Contender Tournament FINAL) Aja Kong & Mayumi Ozaki vs Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura 11 - 4/29/1998 Aja Kong & Mayumi Ozaki vs Chigusa Nagayo & Meiko Satomura 12 - 6/14/1998 Kaoru vs Toshiyo Yamada 13 - 4/14/1998 Chikayo Nagashima vs Meiko Satomura 14 - 8/23/1998 (3AW Tag Titles) Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima © vs Aja Kong & Mayumi Ozaki 15 - 12/27/1998 Kaoru vs Toshie Uematsu 16 - 5/31/1998 Aja Kong & Mayumi Ozaki vs Kaoru & Toshiyo Yamada 17 - 1/19/1998 Mayumi Ozaki & Sugar Sato vs Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura 18 - 7/19/1998 (3AW Title #1 Contender) Chigusa Nagayo vs Kaoru 19 - 3/20/1998 (3AW Tag Titles) Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura © vs Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima 20 - 10/3/1998 (Roman Style Match) Chigusa Nagayo vs Sonoko Kato Honorable mention to (in Chron order) 1/15/1998 Yasha Kurenai & Carol Midori vs Toshiyo Yamada & Kaoru 2/21/1998 Chigusa Nagayo vs Sonoko Kato (Short but good match, Chiggy wins in like 5 mins. Worth watching just to see the post match whear Chigusa brow beats Kato & Meiko for being weaklings and disapointing her (they were still tag champs at this point but had been on a losing streak). Meiko tries to stand up for herself, bum rushes Chigusa or herself and is left crying with bloody nose for her troubles. 4/29/1998 Eagle Sawai & Michiko Nagashima vs Kaoru & Toshiyo Yamada 6/21/1998 Sugar Sato vs Dynamite Kansai *OZ Academy Show* 10/29/1998 Toshiyo Yamada vs Mayumi Ozaki (only reason this isn't high in the top 20 is because not much aired, from the 6 or 7 mins we got it looked awesome) 11/12/1998 (Premium League) Sugar Sato vs Sonoko Kato 11/23/1998 Meiko Satomura & Toshie Uematsu vs Kaoru & Rina Ishii (the best performance of Ishii's career...she was gone a month later) 12/27/1998 Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima vs Chigusa Nagayo & Sakura Hirota (Didn't bring it up before but it's also worth mentioning that 98 is the year Hirota went full on comedy as opposed to the goofy but largely straight wrestler she'd been before. It took me a while to warm up to her act the very first time I saw her and I remember hating this match at first. Years later she's one of my favorite wrestlers and I ended up loving this match) Wrestler of the year i'd have to give to Kaoru again for much the same reasons I did in 97. She's not the biggest star, she's not the most talented but night in night out she gives good to great matches, does well in a large variety of situations and is really the back bone of the promotion in a lot of ways. Prob won't get around to it for a while but now that i've finally seen every GAEA show ever which has taken me 10-11 years i'll post a top 100 or so match list sometime soon as well. *EDIT* Added Kato/Meiko vs Sato/Nagashima tag title match from 3/20 as my new #19, originally meant to include it on the list but forgot. Kato vs Sato from 11/12 drops down to the honorable mention catagory. It was a really good match but I mostly included it because of a great last few mins

Wait... the Matsunaga's not on the ballot? What the fuck? Yup, still not on. I remember you telling me last year you thought they were but searching through the HoF list both in the Observer and elsewhear I never saw them listed.

I tried to bring it up numerous times last year, posting on the F4W board and e-mailing in but never got a response. For me, Jimmy Hart & The Matsunaga family are the 2 biggest ommisions from the HoF that I can think of.

If Punk & Danielson can manage a few more years as top or near top guys in WWE I think both will have great chances of getting in. With Danielson, several years of being a good pick for best in ring worker walking the planet makes him a lock for the crowd that values work rate. Add in another run as World Champ or atleast a while longer as a main event lvl guy in the WWE and it'll get him over the hump with enough of the voters who value star power/drawing/championships/other non wrestling related criteria that I think he'll make it in. With Punk he has more star power then Danielson as he's been among the top 3 most popular full time guys on the roster for a while now and he's a good enough worker to get points with the work rate crowd too. With Mistico I thought he was awesome before he left Mexico and saw him have enough good/great matches vs a wide enough amount of oppoents to know it wasn't just him being carried. His disapointing Sin Cara run might hurt his chances unless he turns things around though with Konnan getting in maybe not as the precedent is thear.

Of all the 80's territories Memphis has always been the one i've most wanted to get into but just haven't had the time yet.

Naw, you're not alone in loving this. Loss & the others that didn't like it much are kind of outliers as traditionally this was always a pretty highly regarded match by most others who've seen it.

One of the funnier stories that gets talked about by the guys at the indy i'm training with is the time when an old man tried to rush the ring at a show a few years back and get in a fight with the trio of Anton Vorrhees (Canada), Alexis Darevko (Russia) & Shiek Khan Abadi (Iran) known as America's Most Hated. I was actually thear, just as a fan and they weren't even doing anything particularly offensive, just your typical evil foreign heel stuff so i'd always assumed the old guy was either a plant or drunk but talking with the guys i've since found out that it was legit and he just really wanted to beat them up in the name of the good old USA

Birth of OZ Academy highlight package, one of my favorite joshi angles/feuds of all time. Your female equivilent of the 4 Horsemen

Eh, by this point I pretty much exspect a DVDVR outtage atleast once every few weeks/month at most. Usually last a day or so & they're back up so I don't worry much anymore. Abraham Washington, was a manager in the WWE

Thinking about Yamada vs Kandori, don't think they ever did have a singles but have you seen the Hotta/Yamada vs Kandori/Harley Saito match from April? I have it in my big pile of unwatched shows so haven't seen yet but on paper that looks like an awesome combination.

Vader vs Aja isn't that natural of a comparison to me, Bull Nakano was much more the female Vader and a better one at that, especially for her 90 - 92 run. Back to Aja tho and going back to the point re versatility, she def has Vader beat in that area. As a pure monster heel comparison Vader is prob better at that specific role but Aja was great in a wide variety of situations (heel, face, sympathetic underdog, dominating monster, hardcore brawling, sprint style, stiff slugfest, technical, comedy, as a rookie & up & commer or as a vet) and overall career vs career i'd put her over him.

Not really something I was gonna go out of my way to recomend given the nature of the yearbook sets but yeah I agree that was a pretty good match and would say it's worth ppl checking out if they can find it. Also really dug LCO vs Kurenai & Nagashima as far as the Big Egg undercard stuff goes.

Eh, he sorta has a point. In another era for this company a line like that wouldn't have been given a second thought. Ofcourse, it's been obvious for a while that we're no longer in that era and he should have known better but still, bit of a harsh punishment for one slip up... Personally i'm not a fan of the ultra politically correct enviroment myself

Heh, actually his brother is a stand up comic, tho dunno if he's any good or not.

ICP were indy wrestlers way way before they ever made it big in music. For anyone that has an Observer subscription i'd highly recomend the podcast Alvarez did with Violent J either late last year or early this year, I actually thought it was one of the better interviews they've had on the site. ICP also was on one of the early AOW shows with Cabana which is worth a listen too. Anyways, besides whatever they're gonna have him doing at the wrestling show, i'm amused that they've got Flair hosting the Saturday IPPV concert portion of the gathering with this lineup

In an odd combination, Jim Cornette, Todd Martin & Bryan Alvarez actually did a 2 part podcast series covering the history of the company for F4W a year or 2 ago.

The matches are: 2. Chris Hero vs. CM Punk vs. Colt Cabana - IWA-MS 12/8/01 3. Chris Hero vs. Homicide - IWA-MS 8/1/03 4. Chris Hero vs. B-Boy - IWA-MS 11/20/03 5. Chris Hero vs. Samoa Joe - IWA-MS 5/29/04 6. Chris Hero vs. Alex Shelley - CZW 9/11/04 7. Chris Hero vs. Super Dragon - CZW 9/11/04 8. Chris Hero vs. Arik Cannon - IWA-MS 8/19/05 9. Chris Hero vs. Milano Collection AT - Chikara 10/21/05 10. Chris Hero vs. Dick Togo - IWA East Coast 4/5/06 11. Chris Hero vs. Claudio Castagnoli - wXw 5/4/07 12. Chris Hero vs. Equinox - Chikara 11/17/07 Worth paying a few extra bucks to get them? Some fairly solid names on the list, esp Togo. I was a big fan of early Hero until about 2002 and I like quite a bit of his recent stuff from the past few years but Hero from 2003 through 08 or 09 is one of my least favorite wrestlers of all time and I tended to hate the majority of his work so I wasn't a fan of most of these matches. That said any time he wrestled Arik Cannon (or Eddie Kingston) you were usually guaranteed a great match and the Togo ladder match was real good too. If you haven't seen most of those matches then for $5 extra bucks i'd say sure go ahead and pick it up.

There's atleast 5 or 6 Andre The Giant vs Randy Savage singles matches floating around youtube, does any one in particular stand out as being worth watching?

Fuck, had a big nice well written post done and I hit reply and the fucking website ate it and craped it out into the ether...gone forever Here's a shittier cliff notes version One, just to clear up a possible misconception. Established & regular are two diffrent things. AJW would go long periods without teaming ppl up sometimes. I'll use Toyota & Shimoda for example, not always a regular team but they were at one time in their careers as the Tokyo Sweethearts and had a lot of history together therefore they were established and it wasn't a random pairing out of no where when you'd see them together and periodicly reform their team over the years. A random pairing would be some shit like, I dunno, Toyota & Bat Yoshinaga, no history, no future, just a paired up for the heck of it. As far as the above quotes go, 7/92, Aja chooses Kyoko as her parter in a tag title match to replace an injured Bison, they fail but in the following months continue to team up including for Bull's anniversary show and going on a tour of Mexico together as a team, they continue teaming into the tag league at the end of the year, win it, then team up a fair # of times in 93 and are pretty much established as a pair on & off for the remainder of their careers. They even got a cool team name (Super Maniacs) and were voted one of the fans most favorite joshi tag teams ever in some magazine acording to what I read on an old joshi site a while back (Kyoko & Yamada were also on the list btw) Not a limited past or limited future when it comes to those 2. 2nd sentence contradicts the 1st thear. In every case but Hokuto, you've got her teaming with someone she'd been established as teaming with regularly in the past and or would team with regularly in the future. With Hokuto it sort of was random but they were running an angle with Hokuto & Kyoko feuding all year but also the dynamic of Hokuto taking Kyoko's place as Bull's best buddy while at the same time Kyoko was still under Bull's wing even though Kyoko had branched off to do her own thing a lot more by then. The latter is what led to them teaming and the former is what led to them failing and it'd feed into them feuding for the rest of the year and a whole buncha other crap so in that sense it wasn't a random pairing in that they didn't do it out of the blue for no good reason with no thought put into it which seems to be what Loss is trying to insinuate about AJW booking which yeah, just isn't true. Also re 1/5/92 Yamada/Kyoko tag title challenge, haven't seen the match or even knew it took place until you mentioned it hear but as best I can tell Jungle Jack hadn't vacated the titles back then. They did vacate them after their hair match loss a year earlier in 91 to Kyoko & Bull but then they won them back a few months later in the decision match vs Hotta & Hokuto then held them another year until losing to Toyota & Yamada in March 92.

Depends on the state. Jimmy Jacobs & The Briscoes are notable guys who started under the age of 18 off the top of my head.