ohtani's jacket
DVDVR 80s Project
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Everything posted by ohtani's jacket
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#321 I haven't watched this since the days when I was renting PWFG tapes from Champion. This was a lot of fun. It wasn't high end shoot style and not a classic like Fujiwara's bouts with Vale, Fuke and Malenko, but it's Fujiwara. One of my all-time favourites taking an opponent to school. That'll wash the taste out of your mouth from any bad wrestling experience.
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#317 I remember liking matches like these back in '99 when we were starved for quality wrestling on TV. Now that we have so much quality wrestling at our finger tips it's not quite the same. I felt like tapping out a few seconds in but watched this out of respect for Loss calling it the best Nitro match ever. I'm about as big a fan of Fatal Fourways and Triple Threats as I am that influenza test where they stick a swab up your nostril and tickle your brain. This was awfully spotty and hard going. I didn't help that Bobby kept reminding us how long it was. At least Psicosis won. That was a cool result even if the Cruiserweight division was a shell of what it was in '96 and '97. Did Eddie and Rey clock the Cruiserweight division at Halloween Havoc '97? It all seemed to go downhill from there, but I suppose you could say the same about the entire promotion post Starrcade. Sorry for not liking this more, Loss!
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#320 I've been meaning to revisit Williams & Gordy's WCW run for a while now. I remember liking it during the Smarkschoice poll but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. This was every bit as good as I remembered. As far as a match with four big men go, I thought it was much better than Doc & Gordy's match with Jumbo and Taue from the same year. A bit long maybe, especially since it's a match I've seen before, but I couldn't pick too many faults with it. Arn wasn't entirely comfortable on commentary for a guy with his promo ability, but he did a good job of fleshing out the psychology and providing insight into basic tag match strategy. Williams and Gordy's run is strangely unpopular among fans despite the fact there's no changing it now. You'd think people would have melllowed with age, but it's still largely viewed as a mistake by Watts. Give me a great TV match over retrospective booking any day of the week.
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#323 I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on the Jumbo vs. Misawa six-mans I liked best. This feels like an appetizer for the Jumbo/Misawa Budokan match rather than a great six man in and of itself, but I watched it for fun more than anything else. Misawa was amazingly athletic in 1990 and Kobashi did a great job of playing FIP in between all of the Jumbo and Misawa scuffling.
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I've started using my blog to get caught up on 2016 using that playlist and whatever other recommendations I can find. The Black Terry/Aeroboy apuesta match was very good, especially when watched from all the different camera angles.
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So, it's the first day of 2017, and as usual I've done a piss-poor job of following the modern lucha scene as it happens. But in this day and age of YouTube playlists, there's no excuse to not get caught up. I'm going to start with the Black Terry vs. Aeroboy apuesta match, which is where I left off last time. Black Terry vs. Aeroboy (mask vs. hair, 6/10/16) This was a nice, scuzzy apuesta match. I liked how they started fighting before Aeroboy had taken his jacket off just like in the good old days of yore. They ambled about a bit in the beginning despite Aeroboy hitting a nice looking tope; but as soon as both men were bleeding and Terry had his shirt off, it was another masterclass in how to have an indie apuesta match. Terry's forte is usually character work and brawling outside the ring. This was mostly worked between the ropes, and for an apuesta match, really only had a minimum of violence. What made it work was the stiffness. These days when you watch a lucha indie match, you can choose from all sorts of different angles. It's almost like watching the special features on a DVD. I watched this match from three different angles, and it was the handheld footage that added the most. A complain complaint with lucha is that it's not worked stiffly enough, but when it's shot from ringside, you can really hear them lay their shots in. Terry's always been good at working offense exchanges with young professionals like Aeroboy, and he's able to draw on years of experience in laying out a bout; but it was the stiffness, and laying those shots in, that made this seem like an apuesta match and not some regular bout. The submission work was also excellent. Terry, in particular, had a couple of pearlers. Both men sold them like death, and in the handheld footage you could hear them scream as soon as a submission was applied. Aeroboy only had one hold that he went to, but Terry was a maestro on the mat. Stiffness, submissions, some well-worked offense exchanges; these were the ingredients of an apuesta match as honest as the blood that was shed. Blow-for-blow, it was everything it should be with a wager on the line. While I was watching this, I saw the highlights of the Wofan match, which looked amazing. I desperately need to see that match as it looks like a prime example of a Terry masterpiece, but Wofan is a different worker to Aeroboy. I thought Terry did an excellent job here of working to his opponent's strengths and adapting to what they're good at and how they prefer to work. What we're witnessing now feels like Terry Funks' 90s run in ECW and other indies and the work Funk did in that era with younger workers. Yep, Black Terry is fast becoming the Terry Funk of Mexico.
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#324 This was all right. The Can-Ams threw Kawada and Kikuchi around like rag dolls to begin with, and it was a bit like video game wrestling with the classic 90s trope of hitting a finisher to start the match. I liked the heat segment where the Can-Ams were abusing Kikuchi, especially that cobra clutch where Kroffat tried to rip his heat off. You could tell Kawada was itching to get into the match, but the hot tag was a huge let down and the match wound up being a pretty cliched finisher spurt with partners saving each other and all the rest. I really wanted to see Kawada clean Kroffat's clock. I've never gotten the appeal of Kroffat, but he was a king sized dick here to an underdog whom Korakuen had a love affair with. Kawada should have gone to town. Instead, he ended up on the apron again for another hot tag (warmish, really.) Didn't like that. Kick him in the head, Kawada! Lance Storm his ass.
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#333 This was much better than I remembered it being. I was really into Bret Hart around this time so I got a kick out of his entrance. I always dug his "best there is" pose when he stepped through the ropes. They did a good job here of playing up Bret's desire for revenge against both Backlund and Owen. I thought Owen was awesome at putting the heat on Bret instead of stealing the show with his comic antics. Bret's selling was tremendous, but I agree that the heat segment could have used a few more hope spots. I wasn't enamored with Davey Boy's hot tag, either, and I couldn't understand why the ref didn't overturn the result when Bret refused to let go of the sharpshooter. To me that would have made sense with Bret being too irate to care about the win. I'd say the first half of the bout was better than the second, but it didn't take anyway from an outstanding WWF television bout. Ross was in his element and it felt closer to a Worldwide bout than your typical WWF fare. Even Todd "Didya get your free gift? Pettengill couldn't drag Ross down. Ross gets a lot of shit for prattling on about football and grade point averages, but when he's calling a match that he's into there are few better. Unfortunately, this match was the end of the road for the great Hart family feud that felt more like an old-school territory feud than the stuff the WWF usually put out. They went down the wrong path with the Bret vs. Backlund rematch at Wrestlemania XI. Bret would go into a funk after that, and while the Yokozuna/Owen team was fun at first, that too would ultimately see Owen lost in the mire. At the same time, I'm not sure if an Owen vs. Bret blowoff at Mania would have excited folks since they wrestled so many times in '94. Still, it was good to see a quality match from a year that almost killed off my interest in wrestling completely.
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My memory isn't what it used to be, but I remember liking Yoshida's IBUKI stuff for the most part. It wasn't on par with her ARSION stuff, but if you're a Yoshida fan then I think her match with Emoto is worth checking out. I watched a couple of matches from first Queen Bee show. AKINO vs. Kimura was decent, as far as I recall.
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#331 This was a recommended match back in the day, but it did come across as lightweight. At least it was breezy. EDIT: How does Misawa/Taue compete with the Hashimoto/Mutoh G1 Final? The answer is that it can't. Misawa's selling is beautiful and everything is very orderly. The build progresses logically and all the little boxes are ticked, but the bout is hurt by Taue not hitting his chokeslam cleanly. All of the early work and the heat segment on Misawa is building to Taue hitting the chokeslam and he barely gets a hold of him. A Triple Crown match where Taue doesn't fire his best shot? There's no way that Taue misfiring is as dramatic as the G1 Final. Misawa's pop up on the german was not cool. And his superman punches were too much. We've all seen Misawa make comebacks where the natural order is restored and it's business as usual just like Jumbo before him but knocking Taue out like that sucked. Your elbows aren't that bloody strong, Misawa.
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#338 This was a solid bout. In fact, it may have been the most solid bout in the countdown thus far. Taue had a game plan here and stuck to it, chipping away at Kobashi until he was able to put him away. I liked how the early stalemate led to heated sumo slaps and the general burliness of the first 15 minutes. Taue was still a bit blue-collar here, but Kobashi added plenty of pep to the bout. He did a great job of selling his destruction, which made it seem even more thorough than it was. I liked his theatrical selling of the choke slam struggle and the final lights out moment. Vintage All Japan, a notch or two below the best stuff.
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#335 This was a good match. I have vague memories of downloading it on Hotline back in the day. IIRC, it took me three days to download it on my dodgy dial up connection. What made this entertaining was that Ohtani had transitioned into a surly juniors vet. He still did some of his signature selling, but he'd moved on from the lovable loser that he played in '96 and '97 and was beyond that now. I remember people thinking that Takaiwa was fairly bland outside of his signature power moves, but I think he's the perfect partner for Ohtani to take under his wing. Anyone above Ohtani's station wouldn't feel right. Kanemoto was fun in this as a poor man's Ikeda and his heat with Ohtani made it better than the average juniors' bout. Tanaka looked like he belonged in the New Japan Juniors division far more than in BattlARTS and his flash added to the bout. Good shit all-round.
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#329 Decent big man contest. Taue does most of the work for his team, understandably, with Jumbo only working in brief flurries (one of which injures Gordy.) Nothing you haven't seen in a hundred All Japan tags (many of them involving Jumbo Tsuruta), but perhaps a fitting and familiar way for Tsuruta to end his competitive career.
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I'm not sure I would put Satanico vs. Gran Cochisse on the level of Flair vs. Steamboat or Dory vs. Brisco. We don't have enough footage to judge how good it truly is. It's the best of the Satanico footage we have from '84, but for all we know he may have had better title matches with other people, or there may have been better title matches between different workers. What we do know for sure is that it was nowhere near as important as those NWA title feuds. All I can really say is that it's a wonderful match; one of the best from the limited footage we have. I'm not sure what star rating I would give it, but even if I agreed with you that it wasn't much higher than four stars, I would still consider it one of the all-time great lucha matches. I think I've said it before, but to me if a match is four stars it's in a pantheon along with every other match I've considered four stars or above. I honestly wouldn't give a match four stars if I had as many criticisms of it that you did of the bout. I had forgotten that Dylan thought so highly of it. I think it finished 6th in the DVDVR voting ahead of Perro Aguyao vs. Sangre Chicana, which is another of my all-time favourite lucha bouts.
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I personally didn't have a problem with anything that happened during the "Puro vs. Lucha" thread, but I think it would be a good idea to draw up some guidelines. There's a lot more discussion about politics and social issues than there used to be, and while there was a call for the MIS forum, it's been under-utilized to date. So, I think you need to make a call on political you want the site to be since as we all know politics and message forums don't mix well.
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A few things happened between Baba founding All Japan, becoming an NWA member in February '73, and Brisco's first tour in January of '74. After Baba left JWA to form All Japan, the Momota family presented him with Rikidozan's old NWA International Heavyweight belt, which he used o create a World Heavyweight title for his new promotion. On All Japan's second night (10/22/72), the World Heavyweight Championship Series began; a series of 10 matches which lasted through to 2/27/73 when Baba defeated Bobo Brazil and was awarded the World title. At that stage, the title didn't have a name yet so Baba came up with the idea of a sanctioning body with his old buddy, Blears. Baba was officially recognised by the Pacific Wrestling Federation as PWF World Heavyweight Champion on 3/16/73, the day before the first Champion Carnival series. Baba defended it as a World title throughout the rest of 1973, but after his double title match with Jack Brisco on 1/23/74, the title was reduced to the PWF Heavyweight title as per the NWA's demands that no promotion under its umbrella have their own World Championship titles. . So, basically the idea at first was for All Japan's top title to be a sanctioned World Heavyweight Championship and the plan changed slightly after Baba started bringing the NWA Champion in.
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Gran Cochise vs. Satanico may be my all-time favourite lucha match. Either that or Blue Panther vs. Atlantis from '91. Let me dig up my review of it. I wrote this back in 2008 and might a different view point on these days.
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#334 Jumbo vs. Kawada feels like a match-up I should enjoy more as some kind of gritty alternative to Jumbo/Misawa. I do like a lot of their exchanges in tag matches and six man tags where Kawada is doing his best impersonation of a lumberjack trying to chop down a redwood, but their singles matches have never clicked for me. I watched this twice and couldn't find the hook. Jumbo slapping Kawada was great, but he wrestled within himself for the rest of the bout. I was going to write something about how he looked like he was already past his best here in his grumpy old man phase, but that could just be me writing my own narrative for the bout. In many respects, this reminded me of Kawada's work with Hansen in '92. I also found that to be slightly lacking, and if I were to put my finger on it, I'd probably say there's a gulf between how good Kawada was in '91 and '92 compared to his peak years of '94 and '95. Misawa and Kobashi too. People used to talk about how much Taue improved in those years, but I think it's true of all four of them. I tried to view this as something smaller and look for a hook -- maybe some great matwork, some awesome strike exchanges, or a bear with a sore head performance from Jumbo -- but it felt more like Jumbo being pushed a bit in a bout he was expected to win and there was nothing about it that really seemed like a breakthrough for Kawada. It's probably unfair to call it a competitive squash but it sure was fashioned that way.
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I believe so. I've seen a few thousand WoS bouts so I'm a bit foggy on the details, but they would occasionally have a surprise victory late in the final round when a draw seemed inevitable. Perhaps the reason you see so many falls happen early in the round is to shorten the length of the bout. The standard length of a TV (at least in the 70s) was four rounds. I saw so many of those that I ended up calling them "four rounders." My guess is that they were shaving time, though most of the bouts were joined in progress on the actual WoS broadcast and picked up where the scoring began. Later on, when wrestling was a standalone show, they would edit out entire rounds. You' skip from the 2nd round to the 5th and then you'd have a pinfall or a submission without seeing what happened in the 3rd or 4th round. That always bugs me.
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Your point about Mascaras is pure conjecture and not borne out by the fact that many luchadores worked Japan at the same time that Mil did, which was a big payday if you were a luchador. Lucha kept being promoted in California long after LaBelle folded by both Mexican and American promoters. Southern territories had Mexican workers and luchadores. I'm pretty sure the Houston footage folks have been watching has matches from Gran Markus and El Halcon. Japanese promotions may have had strong ties to the NWA, but can you name any particularly special appearance by a Japanese worker in the States post Rikidozan? Arguably, the most famous event involving a Japanese wrestler from an American point of view was Inoki vs. Ali and that was at Budokan. Most of the Japanese heels post-WW II were Hawaiian born Japanese, so if you're going to discount Jose Lothario or the Guerreros as luchadores then I don't see how Mr. Mojo or the Great Togo can be considered a Japanese wrestler. You're also ignoring the fact that when the internet first began it coincided with Mysterio Jr. and other AAA luchadores being booked in ECW and then being part of WCW, which reached millions of more viewers than Mike LaBelle's promotion ever did. And cruiserweights were popular even if strictly speaking it was a hybrid style. Japanese wrestling had similar exposure through Muta and Liger, but I don't think it had as large a presence as you're making out. The fact that American wrestlers toured Japan far more than they toured Mexico is what made Japan seem important, and as I said before that boils down to the strength of the peso vs. the strength of the yen. Mexico did draw American talent during UWA's peak years, but by the mid-to-late 80s that had dried up and even during the TV boom and AAA's hot run, there wasn't much foreign talent working in Mexico and definitely no headliners.
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WWE is available on cable and satellite TV in Japan. It's covered in the magazines and you can find just as many WWE DVDs at the major DVD rental chains as you can domestic releases. And, of course, the WWE run houseshows. That in itself is not so different from most countries with the WWE being a global company available on cable and satellite in a large number of markets. Pay TV penetration is extremely low in Japan, but the WWE must do well enough to tour on a consistent basis. I used to know a guy who did freelance work changing the English used on WWE shows to something more easily translatable. The speciality stores obviously have a lot more memorabilia and so forth. I've met Japanese fans of WWE before. I used to know a guy who was a big Triple H fan and another guy who was a huge wrestling and MMA fan who was pretty clued up about US wrestling and loved the Attitude era stuff. One comment I would to make is that there is nothing art house about mainstream lucha libre. Art house lucha, if there is such a thing, is the indie promotions and the YouTube handheld videos shot with someone's phone. The match Grimmas keeps mentioning as a MOTYC candidate is comparable to an art house film but a CMLL match shouldn't be.