NintendoLogic

For someone completely new to Toyota, I'd go with Big Egg Universe. It's the first joshi match I ever saw, and it remains one of my favorite matches of all time. For Toyota skeptics, I'd recommend watching her match against Kaoru Ito on 2/24/02. I wouldn't call it a great match, but she does turn in a legitimately great selling performance, both in general and of an injured body part (her back).

I think the best Jumbo/Martel match was on 9/29/85 in the AWA.

The thing with Toyota is that she'd largely blow off long-term selling during the matches but would sell her ass off after the match. The idea is that she was pushing herself to her limits to win and give the fans all she had and felt the effects afterward. It's not my preferred psychology, but there's a clear logic behind it.

The Observer reported a few months ago that talent was being told the old way of touring wasn't coming back even post-COVID. From a company perspective, why should it? House shows had become a money loser in recent years, and they've set record profits running in empty arenas. The main value of house shows is additional ring time for those who need it, but that's the kind of thing a multimillion-dollar developmental facility should be able to address. Maybe they can have them do something other than forward rolls and Olympic lifts.

No real sports HOF would be able to get away with half the crap WWE does. If Monument Park had a plaque for George Steinbrennner's limo driver and placed Mickey Mantle in a separate lower-profile wing because they didn't think he was as marketable to modern fans as Bernie Williams, the New York and sports media would rip them to shreds. With WWE, they don't care since it's just wrestling and it's all fake anyway.

It's not a phenomenon unique to pro wrestling. In economics, it's called the Veblen effect. Super-premium vodka is another example. In fact, a big part of Grey Goose's initial marketing strategy was pricing it way above all the other vodkas on the market.

Didn't Raquel's match go head-to-head with the latest installment of As the Elite Turns? There you go.

Ironically, it was The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior that marked the beginning of Warrior whitewashing. It was such an over-the-top hatchet job that it inadvertently made him a sympathetic figure. Dropping dead before he could embarrass himself on WWE's dime surely helped as well.

WALTER/Ciampa had the best body part psychology of any match I've seen in years. I guess they figured Ciampa was too brittle for a full-on violence party, so they decided to work a more story-based match (although it's not like they were playing patty-cake with each other). If that's the case, it was definitely for the better.

Top three for 2021 so far is up. I have to say, I've been quite pleased with the match quality so far this year. A little more than a quarter of the way in, there have already been three matches I would rate above my MOTY selections for 2018, 2019, or 2020.

The evidence that taking the belt off a walking tall kickass babyface and putting it on a dweeb with a penchant for overwrought interpersonal melodrama (see the above gif) was a terrible mistake continues to pile up.

It feels like the women's division has largely regressed to Divas-era booking over the past few months. Only one program on each show given meaningful time, women being catty and unable to get along, most matches lasting two minutes or less. And now Bayley is reduced to trying to book her own angle with Michael Cole.

Two members of the legacy wing (Hisashi Shinma and Joe Cohen) are still alive. It's really just for people they don't think are marketable enough for a full induction.

Sayama wasn't just a cool mask. If you go back and watch his 1981 debut with the Tiger Mask gimmick, the speed with which he moved and grappled is pretty mind-blowing even today. He made everyone else look like they were moving in slow motion even if it at times led to his reach exceeding his grasp in terms of execution.

I don't know, I kind of like the idea of Mutoh considering leaving wrestling for a career as a municipal employee.

Update: Genichiro Tenryu/Takashi Ishikawa vs. Tatsumi Fujinami/Hiroshi Hase (WAR, 2/14/93) Fujinami and Hase don't seem like the likeliest candidates to adapt to WAR-ism, but they manage to do just fine. The tone is set early on when Tenryu moves out of the way of a Fujinami tope attempt only for Hase to jump him and roll him back in the ring (the camera doesn't catch what exactly Hase does, unfortunately-it's a handheld). What this lacks in classic tag structure it more than makes up for in hatred and violence. This could very well be Fujinami's best performance of the 90s as he manages to come across as genuinely dangerous rather than simply a skilled wrestler. One of the match's highlights was him putting Ishikawa in a dragon sleeper and then turning toward Tenryu so he could talk trash. Tremendous finishing stretch as all seems lost for Team WAR on two separate occasions. First, Ishikawa wipes out on a plancha to nowhere, leaving Tenryu alone to be double-teamed, uranaged, and suplexed into oblivion. Later, after Ishikawa rises from the dead to rescue Tenryu from Hase's onslaught, he accidentally nails Tenryu in a sandwich lariat gone awry. However, he manages to redeem himself, as he recovers to break up a Hase German suplex and then detains Fujinami long enough to allow Tenryu to score the win with a powerbomb. The only real off note was Tenryu putting Fujinami in an abdominal stretch after his first powerbomb of the match, which served no real purpose other than to give Hase enough time to come in and break it up. Amazing match, right up there with the very best of the NJPW/WAR feud. ****1/2

Japanese Wikipedia does as well. If I'm reading it right, Yoshinosato gave him the ring name Akihisa Takachiho from the name of his (Mera's) hometown. He's actually from the nearby town of Nobeoka, but Takachiho is more famous due to its prominence in Japanese mythology.

How can anyone not be enthralled when the matches have such compelling builds like "Riddle steals Sheamus' hat" and "Asuka and Rhea are tag team partners who hate each other?"

Obviously not every vegan is an anti-vax kook, but they do seem to be unusually susceptible to pseudoscientific woo. Even Daniel Bryan, who's as level-headed as anyone in wrestling, sees a naturopathic doctor.

There are heel draws, but they tend to be situational and have a shorter shelf life. Take Superstar Graham, for example. A big part of why his title reign was so successful is that the WWWF had loads of over and protected babyfaces who had never received title shots while Bruno and Pedro were champions.

The graphic for Bart Gunn mentions that he's the guy who knocked out Steve Williams. As much as a disaster as the Brawl for All was, it gave Bart a new lease on life in Japan.

If there's we know for sure, it's that women who work dangerously stiff get nowhere in WWE.

I'm sure of it. In fact, The American Dream was originally a heel gimmick. The idea was that he was mocking the working-class fans in Florida by flaunting his wealth.

Odd couple tag teams were generally injury replacements. The 1993 RWTL began with Ted DiBiase as Hansen's partner, but Baba took Ted's place after the latter suffered the neck injury that ended his career. By the same token, Taue partnered with Hansen in the 1999 RWTL because his regular partner Kawada was injured. Jumbo and Yatsu were paired together because they had both wrestled in the Olympics (in fact, their team was called the Olympians).

I wouldn't point to 80s JCP as an example of factions done right. They mainly existed as vehicles for Dusty to drain the heat of other babyfaces by attaching himself to them like a lamprey or having them turn on him. I personally don't care for factions that aren't created for the purpose of achieving a specific goal like "destroy WCW" or "restore strong style."