NintendoLogic
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Everything posted by NintendoLogic
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Another way to look at this would be who achieved greatness the quickest. The usual suspects here are guys like Jumbo, Angle, and Akiyama. Conversely, who took the longest to "get it?" Rick Rude's already been mentioned, but how about Triple H? He debuted in 1992, and he didn't really hit his stride until 2000.
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Nobody could have predicted that the fans wouldn't immediately take to a guy who has been booked like a chump for the past year, is constantly buried by the lead announcer, and who fluked his way to the world title. And the national championship game isn't much of an excuse. The game was a snoozefest whose ratings were down like 15% from the previous year.
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Just about every promotion plays fast and loose with the rules when it suits them. A while back on Raw, Dolph Ziggler and Kofi Kingston had a 2/3 falls match for the US title. Kofi won 2-1, but the third fall was a DQ, so Dolph retained. But HHH won the title in his 2000 Iron Man match with The Rock despite the last fall being a DQ. I watched a Lawler/Hennig AWA match recently, and the commentators made note of Madusa being a "licensed" manager. Was the idea of needing credentials to be at ringside a prominent part of old-school wrestling or was that just an AWA thing?
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Misawa's selling struck me as rather curious. Shortly after Kawada's arm work, he throws elbows with no apparent ill effect. Later in the match, long after Kawada had abandoned the arm, he does a rolling elbow and acts like his arm is about to fall off. This is their third-best Triple Crown match, but it's pretty far behind 6/94 and 7/95. This is notable mainly for establishing the recurring theme of Kawada throwing punches when he gets frustrated.
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This was fine as the beginning of a rivalry, but it felt like they hadn't quite figured out how to fill out the body of a match with each other yet. The body part work felt like more of a time sink than anything else. Kawada in particular seemed kind of aimless. He started by working on Misawa's arm (his non-elbowing arm at that), then he went to the back, then he went back to the arm for a bit. I'd say this is their fourth-best Triple Crown match.
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The thing about Hansen's matches with Misawa is that they're not really Stan Hansen matches. Hansen's matches with Kobashi and Kawada were brutal brawls. His matches with Misawa, on the other hand, tend to be more conventional wrestling matches. From that perspective, this was fine. It's not remotely close to either guy's best match. It's not even their best match with each other. But I'm kind of surprised that it wasn't even nominated for Ditch's best of the 90s project. Knowing about Misawa's shoulder going in helps quite a bit, I think.
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It was rendered irrelevant by the debut of the Funkasaurus.
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I think you're thinking of Dean Malenko. He fought Billy Kidman in a "catch-as-catch-can match" at Souled Out 2000. One of the ways you could win was by making your opponent's feet touch the floor, so Malenko lost when he instinctively rolled out of the ring to take a breather about two minutes in.
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OK, can we stop talking about soccer now?
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It doesn't look like anybody's going to get it, so here's the correct answer (or at least the one I came up with). Both were inspirations for fighting game characters. Vader was the inspiration for Raiden/Big Bear of the Fatal Fury and King of Fighters series, while Andre was the inspiration for Hugo of the Street Fighter 3 series. Hiroshi Hase or Mariko Yoshida?
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Holy shit, I can't believe I missed that. And it still hasn't been corrected. Yes, but it's a dated one. When I hear hoofbeats, I don't think of zebras.
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Well, the match was in Charlotte.
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I was a bit confused as to why the announcer kept saying "Die Hard Kansai." But I looked it up, and that's apparently the name for her Splash Mountain off the top turnbuckle. Was the ending where Kansai tried to do a regular Splash Mountain on Kong but couldn't quite get her up so she had to go to the turnbuckle a planned spot or was it improvised? I'm in pretty much the same boat as Childs with regard to joshi in general, and I liked this match a lot. I didn't really understand why they kept going back and forth between pinfall attempts and ten-counts. I also wasn't a fan of Kansai doing a John Cena-esque "I'm completely motionless for the first nine seconds and then get a burst of energy at the last second" job. Great match otherwise.
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I thought Bret was pretty clearly heeling it up. He started by refusing to observe rope breaks, and the chairshot to Diesel's leg was the coup de grace. That's my biggest problem with the match. Stuff like that is bad enough in promotions like AJW where refs generally let the wrestlers do whatever they want. But in the WWF, where weapon shots are almost always an automatic DQ, it creates a huge plot hole.
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Anybody who said that this match doesn't hold up due to lack of MOVEZ is a blithering idiot. And in the thread that jdw quoted from, I see that Baba had a policy of giving wrestlers their first title wins in their hometowns. I guess that makes him the anti-Vince. I agree that this represents the Southern tag in its highest form. Bonus points for Fukuzawa yelling "FIYAAAAA!" after Kobashi's double clothesline and again after the moonsault. I also liked the ref's decision to raid Joe Higuchi's closet.
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For pure emotion, I think Eddy/Brock at NWO has this beat. But I agree that this is a very good match. As far as "Vader beating up an old man" matches go, I'd say this and the Inoki match are roughly equal. Vader/Inoki is more of a great spectacle, while Vader/Flair is more of a great moment.
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It's a shame Bret drank too much of his own Excellence of Execution Kool-Aid, because this match and his work with Austin show that he could be a damn good brawler when he wanted to be. And his work in Memphis and his 1997 run showed his heel promo skills. I'm starting to think that Bret's true calling was as a brawling heel rather than a technical babyface.
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I'm a huge mark for limb work, so I found a lot to like in this match. The biggest problem was the complete lack of limb selling when both guys were on offense. I don't think it's asking too much to want Samurai to show a little bit of difficulty climbing up the turnbuckle or Ohtani to have a little bit of difficulty pulling himself up to do springboard dropkicks. The match did end in a submission, so it wasn't completely blown off. But in a way, that makes it worse. If Ohtani's arm was injured enough for him to tap out to an armbar, how was he able to hang on the ropes by that same arm less than ten seconds beforehand? It's much better than most juniors matches, but put me in the "not quite a classic" camp. Ohtani's dad ruled, though.
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Figured this was worth a bump after the rise of former WWF lobbyist Rick Santorum to become the not-Mitt-Romney of the moment. The NYT did a piece on him: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/polit...-tone.html?_r=2 I find it somewhat interesting that the author knew the term heel but not babyface.
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Well, Taker, Backlund, and Chono are all in the HOF now (interestingly, they were all inducted in the same year), so that point is pretty much moot.
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So are Misawa and Kawada. See, that's the problem. US-style rasslin'/sports entertainment is your only frame of reference, and you're acting like anything outside of that doesn't exist. It's kind of like saying that film is inherently limited as an art form and only talking about Hollywood blockbusters. What makes you think Misawa and Kawada were morally neutral? I mean in the sense that there wasn't an obvious good guy and bad guy. Yeah, kicking Misawa in his broken face was kind of a dick move. But so was going after Kawada's injured leg.
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Chris Masters. EDIT: Crap, beaten to it. So when was the last time you saw a babyface (male) manager?
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I think the Best Technical Wrestler award should simply be retired. One, that style of wrestling is basically dead in the US, and not too many WON subscribers seem to pay much attention to Mexico or whatever shoot-style promotions are still in business. Two, the term has been debased to the point where a lot of the voters apparently see it as a synonym for "good worker," as evidenced by Shawn Michaels ending up in the top ten a couple of years ago. Three, the award is given out as much for reputation as anything else. Witness Chris Benoit winning it even long after the point where he had become another WWE Main Event Style wrestler.