PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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Eddy Guerrero has now turned heel in a career-altering event--Love Machine used the same "attack a guy while wearing the Santo mask and make him think Santo turned on him" trick that opened up the '90 Yearbook. Love Machine with his do-rag to hide his haircut and general mannerisms could pass for a third member of PG-13--he reminds me of every douchebag jock I knew in high school. Good look for him. I've had my fill of these post-produced announcers yukking it up all the way through the matches, by the way. It's more annoying than usual in this match because this is work that really depends on hearing the crowd response--you can tell they're loud, but it loses something with people talking over the noise in a studio after the fact. Lots and lots of effective playing to the crowd here before we get to business: Los Gringos Locos continuing to torture Blue Panther. Same story as before, with the heels continuing to pull him up during pin attempts. I loved Fuerza very casually stepping in front of the referee just as he was about to count three and blocking the ref's hand with his leg--that was smooth as hell. Same story leads to the same finish, as Barr murders Panther with a martinete and gets disqualified. Good, chaotic table-setter of a match--everyone looked pretty good here and Eddy looked spectacular. The heel turn definitely seems to be a positive turning point for his career. -
Could you elaborate? My criticism of Bret/Owen is that it's overlong and boring as fuck with lots of laying around and falling off cages. I can understand criticisms of WM3, but "overlong" and "boring" are not ones that come to mind.
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Man, I was not feeling this at all. Estrada, as Zenjo noted, looked completely fucking wasted. Everything he did was either a complete no-sell or an absurd over-the-top bump, with seemingly no in-between. There was some good high-flying from the technicos, especially Volador's amazing Asai moonsault, but structurally this was pretty much a mess. Tirantes fucks over the technicos again in a clever finish, though you do wonder what the point is of the other referee in some of these cases.
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Fantastic opening fall that the rest of the match sadly can't quite live up to, as this meanders quite a bit in the second and third. Espectrito takes one of the most ridiculous bumps ever, trying the Steve Austin "butt drop on the ropes" move, and bouncing off all the way to the center of the ring. Consider how short he is and you'll grasp how absurdly far he flew on that move.
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That's the one with the stupid bullshit involving Dynamite breaking a bottle, right? Even by the overrated standards of their series that match easily stands out as the worst of the bunch.
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A pretty fucking incredible war, that also plays off their exchanges in the multi-woman tag. This is probably the least joshi joshi match of these Yearbooks, as best I can remember. Very deliberate match built around ultra-stiff strikes, basic holds, and countermoves--essentially an AJPW main event at least until the knockout teases at the end. This is one of the strongest any losing wrestler has been put over in any match you'd care to name.
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Fuck I completely forgot about AWA Hansen. Zenk had a good performance against Pillman at WrestleWar '92. So...he's got that going for him, I guess.
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Hansen had enough runs in the territories to have had better matches. He wasn't some guy who found his niche in Japan. I'd find it odd if other American stars had only had great matches in Japan. I'm not going to hold it up against the Kobashi matches or anything, but I wouldn't hesitate to call the Hansen/Luger bullrope match "great." I realize I may be overstating its case but I thought it was really, really awesome. Did the Can-Ams ever have a Stateside match as good as Hansen's best? Or Johnny Ace? Or Scott Norton? I'm not sure it's all that odd. Hansen also has to get credit for his WWWF stardom. He may have stumbled back-asswards into that push because of a botched move, but regardless of the circumstances he still drew big money as the Man Who Broke Bruno's Neck (fact: Vince, Sr. was the only promoter I know of whose closed-circuit showing of Ali/Inoki was a success--because it was part of a larger show including the Hansen/Bruno blowoff). I know we're talking about working ability and not drawing power here, but that's a U.S. feud that has to be objectively regarded as a triumph for him. Yoshiaki Fujiwara, before he reinvented himself via the UWF, was basically an undercard NJPW version of the Junkyard Dog or Rufus R. Jones. Better than late '80s Dog or Rufus, to be sure, but his matches all revolve around his iron head in progressively less interesting ways.
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Interesting to see how, despite some missteps, ECW had its vision in order from the very beginning, when Terry Funk was repeatedly dropping the word "hardcore." Now we get hype for a bunch of crazy gimmick matches at the ECW Arena, with Paul E. taking a shot at Smoky Mountain in the process. Hype specifically for Eddie Gilbert & Abdullah the Butcher vs. Stan Hansen & Terry Funk. Thank God Gilbert is back to cutting actual promos.
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This may or may not be the same studio where that W*ING/Memphis crossover tag match from an earlier Yearbook took place. Or it may or may not be the AWA's Pink Room. Or it may be both. This was okay, but suffered in the face of raised expectations after their asskicking first match. There's some really crisp offense here but the opening matwork is rather meandering, and I don't get the necessity of the ref bump ending at all. Doesn't help that this is an Earl Hebner-type selljob where he's knocked into a coma and has to do absurdly slow "dramatic" three counts. That was one murderous German suplex that Delfin won with, though.
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Elvis laments impostors, something he discussed during lunch with JFK the other day. Holy shit, somebody foresaw Bubba Ho-Tep almost 10 years early. Bret promises a mutilation at The SummerSlam. Great promo befitting a great feud.
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New wrinkle here: the door will remain locked, so climbing over the top is the only way to escape. This is REALLY bizarrely edited. Two things that I absolutely am sure happened in this match aren't here: IRS superplexing Scott off the cage (which was in the "coming up..." portion of this telecast earlier) and Scott leaping off the cage and hitting a double clothesline on Money Inc. (which I think made it into a Coliseum Video release). I have no rational explanation why the WWF would edit out two huge highspots like that, but that hurts this somewhat. But the work is good and I'll break from the JCP Love so prevalent among these boards: I do NOT like cage matches with guys tagging in and out. You can like or not like the escape rules, but I strongly feel that multiman cage matches should always be worked tornado-style. As a WWF watcher as a kid I eventually got used to pinfalls in cages, but with my favorite match growing up being the Sammartino/Santana-Adonis/Savage bloodbath, anything past that was too much. And I often see the point made that the Bret/Owen SummerSlam match was the "best possible use of escape rules," which might be true if that match wasn't a total fucking bore. This isn't--because while it's short on blood and violence it's also very short on downtime. Generally while one or two guys are climbing, the other two are working each other over. And there are also some clever strategies involving guys having to climb back in. And the finish was something I totally marked out over when I first saw it and still holds up as one of the cleverer escape finishes ever booked, at least until we got to gimmicked cages and rings in the late '90s and early '00s. Crowd goes nuts for it--the Steiners in a way feel kind of wasted being relegated to "just" a tag team, though they do come off better than LOD in the same setting. They could have been just as big as they were in WCW, seen as legitimate singles stars. This was a fitting swan song for Money Inc., who I'm starting to think were an underrated team. I'm no fan of Rotunda's but he and DiBiase brought the goods when they had talent to work against.
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What's with all the Caras music love? MS-1's entrance is even better. Tirantes and the seconds make nuisances of themselves throughout this, as both guys work as straight-up heels with liberally interfering seconds. Eventually both Mascara Ano 2000 and Satanico get banished after each man causes their man to get disqualified. There's some cool matwork here, but most of the story revolves around Tirantes. I've made my opinion on such stories rather clear before, so I'll just say that it's well done for what it is. Caras finally gets a pinning combo on MS-1 and Tirantes, who was showing frustration with every MS-1 kickout before, says "fuck it" and fast-counts him to end the match and MS-1's hair.
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I haven't watched that Clash match in awhile, but I think this may have been better. That's not to say that it's a great match, but there's a lot of this that's admirable and worked differently than your typical Flair/Sting formula. As Jerome points out, it does revert into Invincible Sting vs. Stooging Flair as the match goes on, and there is quite a bit of sloppiness and/or hesitance at points. But it's a well-paced and generally well-worked match, from two guys who were working very hard. Schiavone and Jesse were on their game, too--Tony does what he does best which is invoke the history of JCP and early-'90s WCW, and Jesse calls the action straight without excessively focusing on his go-to jokes or by now cliched heel talking points. I even enjoyed the lighter, more low-key, and smartass side of Sid when he sat in on commentary. The ending's kind of bullshit but I was in no way expecting a real finish going in.
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One, that I can recall. And "really good" is about where it topped out.
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I really don't think it's a long list, and I've seen almost no Hansen from the back half of the '90s, but... - He and Jumbo were never really able to put it together against each other. You're talking about guys with very strong #1-2 GOAT arguments and yet they never had a singles match to approach classic status despite years of opportunities. - 99% of his matches outside of All-Japan have an attached bullshit finish that's practically a prerequisite. I get his reasonings to some degree but it doesn't make it any less frustrating to watch. One of the few settings where he would appear to put somebody over was in bullrope matches involving touching the four corners, leading to what eventually became an absurd, Kane-like inability to win his own "specialty" match. This tends to be the most frustrating part of his game to me. - Ridiculously and uncomfortably careless with his opponent at times, even in the stiff Japan setting. If your eyesight's that bad then it tone it the hell down some.
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Someone in power had finally made the decision to ax the Lost in Cleveland skits, and they're subtly buried here minus a few token acknowledgments. Cactus talks about "the look" wrestlers get when signing to face Vader--a look they once had for signing to face him. He admits a little bit of jealousy, but aims to put that same look in Vader's eyes. As a way to reintroduce Cactus after the disastrous Lost in Cleveland segments, I'm not sure this could have been done better. For all the faults levied against Foley as a person and a carny in recent years, at his best he was still a master psychologist.
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Loud mixed reaction for Vince from the TV taping crowd. Lawler does a pretty masterful job of playing both sides of the fence here--his complaining about the crooked referee rings true for the Memphis fans, but comes off as typical heel whining to the WWF audience. Vince is bemused by the idea of Lawler wrestling Paul Neighbors, and is won over by Lawler's invite when Jerry reveals that he's going to refund everybody's money if he can't put Neighbors in the hospital. Vince wants to get a refund, so he's going to be there! Burger King Lawler offers to give Vince a Whopper. Vince reassures him that if he does, it will NOT be a Happy Meal. This is the angle that got me to buy my first non-commercially-available wrestling tapes. Reading in PWI Weekly about Vince McMahon acting as a heel was too surreal for any younger fan to comprehend. Both guys were great here--I'm sure the talk about the Mid-South Coliseum and refunds was lost on the audience but Vince and Jerry each walked the line beautifully in working two disparate audiences.
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Hokuto put on a fine performance for the most part, but by the end this was getting absolutely silly. There are hot false finishes and then there's 2.9 bullshit, like Hokuto taking a straitjacket superplex and a straitjacket power bomb and kicking out. I was marking out when Asako was kicking out of bombs a few matches ago, but here I was rolling my eyes. And since Hotta is constantly cutting her off and Hokuto's on the defense the whole match or so it seems, the move she actually hits for the pin doesn't really mean anything other than, "This is where we were told to go home." Hokuto's victory doesn't come off as a gutsy comeback, it just comes off as a fluke. I'm fine with fluke finishes, but I don't think this is quite the same as Akira getting a win over Aja or Bull. I think Loss still liked this more than me, but I was heartened to the relatively cold reaction to this because I suspect some people had hailed this as a classic.
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Toyota is in fact Toyota, but with enough Japan viewing I've generally gotten over the piledrivers on the floor thing. It just isn't Memphis or Mexico, and the piledriver simply isn't the move of death there--it's to Japan what backdrop suplexes and lariats generally are to the U.S. Anyway, this was terrific, and a match to point to if you were going to make a Best in the World argument for Hokuto. With four and a half months to go I really have no clue who my Most Outstanding Wrestler for 1993 is going to be, but Akira was never seriously in the running until now. Sometimes Toyota as a worker seems akin to how I feel about the Ultimate Warrior (in what has to be the first time those two have ever been compared): she's at her best when she has something specific to zero in on, be it an opponent injury (multiple Hokuto matches) or a very strong and compelling overarching storyline (the JWP stuff). In those settings her style makes her come off as relentless and single-minded, as opposed to someone throwing shit at the wall.
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Holy shit, I'm not sure how far this is behind 5/25/92. It was *that* good--it just lacked the psychotic hometown crowd (though they were certainly into this) and the feel-good ending. Asako takes one of the nastiest beatings ever seen, and this is worked almost totally American-style with AJPW stiffness and psychology. Kroffat in particular is a real dick, taking a little too much pleasure in bloodying Asako and turning into a begging coward when the Japanese turn things around on him. Some ridiculous near-falls, as Asako gets two or three kickouts past when you'd expect the match to be over, but the Can-Ams won't let Kobashi back to his corner for the tag, and Satoru eventually goes down. Super-auspicious Yearbook debut for Asako. When I went through the '91 and '92 AJPW TV, sometimes I got more fulfillment watching the mid-card bouts than watching another epic main event. Glad to see some of this stuff make the set for '93.
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