PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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That didn't seem like 16 minutes to me either but I had a long break and don't feel like going back to check. In any case I didn't think this was as good as the early-'90s brawls involving this troupe, even though I love Tanaka. But it was certainly action-packed and never boring...it just didn't really have the highs and lows and ebbs and flows that the best of these type matches offer amidst all the chaos. Tanaka's final comeback is very well-done, though. I would have paid money to see Tanaka and Hiroshi Hase just countering each other with rolling elbows and uranages for 20 minutes. -
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UT playing mind games was the whole story of the first casket match, and he lost. I actually think Undertaker and the Warrior were *more* interesting when they were vulnerable. You couldn't get away with using Chuck as a badass after UFC really took off (unless you wait until 2005-06 when the Chuck Norris Facts really exploded), but in 1994 it was still semi-believable. The Texas connection helped, too.
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It's been speculated that English is pretty set for as long as he wants, since he's engaged (or married) to Eddie Guerrero's daughter, and Vince more or less promised to take care of the Guerrero family.
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You know, I've been waiting for someone to stick it to those Woodward & Bernstein fucks, who clearly don't know anything about on-the-record sources being the bastion of real journalists.
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I was just a lurker on DVDVR and Zach Arnold's puro board at the time, also reading Don Becker's stuff on Rantsylvania which was Japan-focused...but I remember, ironically, a lot of people expecting Misawa to take NOAH in a more sports-entertainment-y direction, and with more interpromotional stuff. Instead, aside from Akiyama turning on Kobashi on the debut show, NOAH basically picks up where All-Japan left off while AJPW eventually became all about angles and interference and American-style work and booking, at least for awhile.
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I don't particularly care about seeing Taz vs. Sabu again, but Taz does his best to sell us on it.
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New Jack cuts the start of a pretty decent promo for a match that absolutely no one could want to see, and then more gratuitous references to the Big Two, which is a tack that's easily 4 years out of date by this point.
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Wait, what? "Real journalists" don't use unnamed sources? What alternate universe am I living in?
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Much better match on 3/6, with all four guys trying to be as giant of dicks as possible with big games of one-upsmanship all throughout. I don't really see it as a MOTYC because the issues I had with the '98 BOSJ finals cropped up again--Wagner throws bomb after bomb without selling much of anything, then goes down to a pretty perfunctory and unearned Kanemoto comeback after killing him dead. It didn't bother me nearly as much this time, but it did a little bit, so this is just really good instead of Great. Wagner has tons of offense and is charismatic and engaging but I really want to see him work for underneath just once instead of acting as a junior heavyweight Bruiser Brody.
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I don't think the Rock 'n Rolls got there until '83, but Rude was around as a job guy before that.
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Piper's motorcycle wreck was a work to cover for his first hip surgery.
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I don't buy the idea that the story of WM3 was Steamboat's "righteous vengeance coming for his pound of flesh." That was the story told in the house show matches like Toronto leading up to WM...matches that Steamboat lost. Here, he was out to get the title, period.
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Fun little sprint with Liger having way too much fun, including a Popeye-esque wind-up leading to an eyepoke, and celebrating a palm strike in the corner like he just won the Slam Dunk Contest. Kind of ends just as it looks like it's going to enter a big finishing stretch. Aaaand we've got the wrong match on the disk. Well, that will have to come at a later time.
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Of historical significance if nothing else, as Vader wins the vacant Triple Crown. Not bad action at all, with the highlights being Vader doing a splash off the apron to the floor and taking a cool bump off the second turnbuckle and eating a Taue boot. Still, hard to follow that whirlwind of a tag match.
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I agree that this slowed somewhat in the middle. But my goodness, what a beautiful opening period of wrestling and a true holy-shit finishing stretch that had me practically bouncing in my chair, not knowing what the result was going to be. It's been a long time since I watched a match that provoked a reaction like that in me. This is an AJPW match where anyone could conceivably have pinned anyone else the way these guys worked and the way the story was told--Ogawa was overmatched, but he's so darn SMART that he holds his own and actually gets an awesome credible near-fall on Kobashi. The trading of holds to open was great and so was the way he leveraged his way to an advantage--drop-toe-holding Akiyama onto the ropes, knocking Akiyama into Kobashi on the apron, do-se-do'ing with Misawa on the outside as a countermove, and of course all those awesome roll-ups. Then he gets put into holds for awhile in a FIP segment that's not quite as compelling as it should have been as Burning sort of does their MVC impersonation--part of that is the holds aren't worked that great and part of it is that holds and submissions have taken such a backseat in AJPW in the latter half of the decade. That's a minor nitpick though, the kind that separates MOTYCs from MOTDCs. This was as great as anything in 1999 and on a level just below the all-time great '90s All-Japan tags. It really started in '98, but Ogawa is practically a lock for my Most Improved in the year-end awards.
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Hogan calls out Flair for blowing off the David turn on Nitro. He...has a point, actually. Ric didn't address that or his supposed "retirement" on Nitro. This would be a great "heel who thinks he's a babyface" promo, if it wasn't leading to a genuine face turn.
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Wild scene as Onita crashes an introduction from Chono, and is just pelted with crap from the audience. Chono comes out in his George Costanza Gore-tex coat and is attacked. NWO Sting and the other folks supposedly having Chono's back kind of look like morons here. The language barrier is there, but it seems pretty clear that Onita is issuing a challenge.
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Since we can't have two Rocks in one company, the skinnier member of PE is now just Flyboy Rocco. This isn't *bad*, and it's short, but they're horribly out of place in the WWF and this would have come off better as a quick vignette like they would have gotten in ECW rather than being done in front of a crowd.