ohtani's jacket

Marvin gorilla pressed all the normals in this thread. Warrior for the top 100!

I don't remember. Here are my brief comments about it from WKO:

Ikeda's 2/20/97 match with Greco is bad ass.

The maestro. Ken Joyce. WoS's answer to lucha maestro matches. Retired and came back more times than Terry Funk. Here is against protegee Johnny Kidd: Johnny Kwango, one of the looong time WoS stars. He was in his mid-50s in the 70s, but you wouldn't know it. This is a bit of a cheat as it's also the only full match of Jackie Pallo's we have available. Mind Walton's off colour references about Kwango's skin colour.

Peter "Tally Ho" Kaye, equestrian, landowner, country gentleman... Johnny Saint, you might have heard of him... rolls himself into a little ball... here he is in one of the better tags I've seen from a country that never really got tag wrestling. Oh they liked it all right, but they never got how to do it. This match also features Jeff Kaye, who often appeared as a referee in later years but was a fine wrestler in his own right.

His resume is good by WWF standards, but for a list like this we need to compare him with guys from outside the WWF. I don't meant to handicap him with the working environment he was in, but if you compare him to today's WWE guys they have much better week in/week out stuff.

There's no particular order to what I'm posting. I'm just introducing the characters and people can take it from there. Many of the wrestlers I introduce I don't expect to be nominees, but they were part of the WoS landscape and will help people get a feel for the television and discover what match-ups they'd like to see. There's two distinct eras -- the 70s and the 80s. The 70s has a lot of aging stars from the 50s and 60s who are still hanging on to their spots while Joint tries to push their latest bright young hope. Business was flagging in the mid-70s before Daddy got hot and they try to create a bunch of new stars in that era. The matches tend to better in this era and I'd say the 70s really encompasses what most people imagine WoS to be. The 80s are fine for the first few years, but a lot of talent jumps to All Star Wrestling and there's not the same variety to the television as there was in the 70s. The matches become more workrate driven to keep up with the times. 1974 is the starting point for the 70s and 1980 the starting point for the 80s.

I see. My comment was more for anybody who might be wondering why I chose the match. Lassartesse is a guy both Jetlag and I have enjoyed from the 80s where he's a thousand years old so it was great to see the two catch bouts from the early 60s. I haven't watched enough catch to know what I should chalk things up to, but there are certainly idiosyncrasies.

John Naylor vs. Jackie Turpin (3/31/81) This was all right I suppose, but you have to ask yourself why a Wigan trained wrestler like Naylor relied so heavily on pinning combinations and simple takedowns. Maybe Turpin couldn't work the mat. but any rate the mat work was zilch. Johnny Kidd vs. Jackie Turpin (11/30/81) Fun bout with Kidd doing plenty of matwork (mostly of the Ken Joyce variety.) This was a tournament bout so it was on the short side, but it was kind of JTTS meets JTTS so it had a more interesting dynamic than a lot of Kidd footage where he's up against an established star. Tally Ho Kaye vs. Jackie Turpin (10/11/82) As you can see, the promoters booked Turpin with Tally Ho Kaye a lot (presumably because Kaye was a veteran hand.) The last time we saw these two fight, Turpin took a nice bump over the top rope and was unable to beat the count, and Brian Crabtree got the heat back for himself... err, I mean Turpin... but cutting a promo on Kaye afterwards. This time round Turpin had grown in stature and they actually gave Jackie the win after having him work an injury for most of the bout. Progress Jackie! Tally Ho Kaye vs. Jackie Turpin (12/15/82) Just to prove it was no fluke, the pair were back on television a few months later in the semis of a knockout tournament. Props to Turpin for wearing a cape in 1982. Again Jackie worked the bout around a leg injury before surprising Kaye with a pin. I wonder if they plotted that out in the halls. I would have liked to have seen Kaye in the halls actually as I heard he had a number of bloody stip matches, which is a side of him he was never allowed to show on TV. Alan Dennison vs. Jackie Turpin (2/24/83) Dennison took this pretty seriously and actually wrestled for a change, which was interesting. I half expected some bullshit to creep in, but he treated Turpin pretty well. Dennison wasn't a bad worker. He was similar to Kaye in that he knew his way around the ring without being spectacular. The bout ended up being less competitive than it seemed at first, but still if Dennison had worked like this more often I would have a better image of him. Dave Finlay vs. Jackie Turpin (1/28/86) 1986 Jackie Turpin -- still rockin' the cape, but now with a moustache. This was a fun bout. It was for all intents and purposes a competitive squash but Turpin threw in some headbutts and open handed strikes to make life interesting. Finlay was heavy on the shtick at this time being under Princess Paula's thumb. Whatever plans they'd had for Jackie were over by this point and he was just another guy, but this was short and sweet. Daddy came down afterwards to demand a match with Finlay. Not sure why your super heavyweight needs to demand a match with a middleweight, but his comically bad mic work made it entertaining.

For the record, I didn't nominate the Allary/Lassartesse match because it's a great match per se, but instead to get Lassartesse out there.

The Embry match was great. I've become a dyed-in-the-wool Invader fan after only two matches.

Both, but generally the former.

It's not really a footage issue with CMLL. The problem is that the booking doesn't follow traditional American patterns. It's difficult to understand why Felino and Casas are always squabbling without guessing. If CMLL had run it like Bret/Owen it would be easy to understand but moments that would lead to one wrestler turning on another in the States are blown off and they're back to tagging the next week. I would actually go so far as to say that everything story related in lucha is by and large disappointing aside from hot trios matches in the lead-up to a singles match and a nice narrative structure in said singles match. Rudos in fighting, mask ripping, baby face or heel turns, all pretty disappointing.

Which just adds to the shitty feeling of "this is not a triumph." This almost feels like the sort of payoff that should kill a territory to me. The best moment was when Chigusa hugged the ref at the very end though. That was heartwarming. The nebbish scholarly bullied scribe was able to find his courage and help the heroine stand up to the bully and together they vanquished her, at least for today, etc. The only way you can kill a territory of schoolgirls is if something more interesting comes along. It was a fad not so much a territory.

If have a feel for serialised lucha, please explain 1993 CMLL to me, Matt! Chigusa had actually been moving away from the Dump stuff for some time prior to this match and concentrating more on being a serious wrestler and not so much of an idol. Even Dump began to change after the bout. She slimmed down and they stretched out her forced retirement to milk a bit more cash out of her. As she gets closer to retirement she becomes more of a fan favourite out of sentimentality. The '85 bout was the peak of the feud and then the '86 bout was the blow off, which may feel like more of a coda judging by your comments.

Japan is a collection of islands so the entire country was the territory (plus Guam and to a lesser extent Hawaii. ) You'd have to study the match cards to determine which company drew better in which prefecture, the cities they ran and the venues they used. I'm not sure which wrestlers were the best draws in which region. For many people, wrestling was Baba and Inoki and they were the draws. New Japan was traditionally the bigger, more successful company outside of the occasional downturn in business. They ran bigger venues in Tokyo than All Japan did. I'm sure there were variances in the different prefectures and how each company drew, but it would take a lot of work to find that info.

Since you know that wrestling is an imperfect form of storytelling, aren't you just using the anime analogy to amuse yourself? How do you deal with the lack of continuity in lucha?

Taue was polished in 1990? Misawa wasn't polished in 1990.

Indeed. I am very keen to see other Invader matches after that.

The Invader I match is awesome. By far the best thing I watched today. Everybody should check it out:

The Flair match was a bit of a disappointment. I think that's enough casual viewing of Jake. Time to move onto a more deserving worker.

Man, the 12/26/97 Kansai/Ozaki match is not good. I think we can easily draw a line in the sand with Kansai where anything she did after the 4/97 Fukuoka match is for the hardest of hardcore fans only.

He wasn't that type of worker early in his career. In his original AAA run he was a comedy worker who could go. He'll pop up with strong performances in trios matches, but it wasn't until that Monterrey Santo brawl in 2001 that we really saw the bloody side of La Parka. I'll take a title match over a brawl six days a week and twice on Sundays, so I would recommend people watch the first Parka/Lizmark match from Triplemania. AAA booking decimates the feud thereafter, but the first match is sensational (in my view at least, opinion was slightly divided in the yearbook feedback.)

The trouble is that '84-89 output isn't very good when compared with the rest of the wrestling world. I love Tito, but when you get outside the Valentine and Savage feuds, some of the Strike Force tags and a few random matches like the Bob Orton Jr ones, there's not a lot to hang your hat on. I always wanted to see that early Adonis/Santana match that Kevin recalled. I sometimes check to see whether it's popped up yet, but I think it's a bit of a lost cause.

It's interesting that you think Zoltan is in that tier. I really need to re-watch his stuff. I like Kidd, but wouldn't nominate him. Jordan has never really impressed me. In the Microscope, I had a thread ranking the European workers into different tiers. I haven't updated it since October of last year, so it doesn't reflect many of my current attitudes, but these are the top tier guys for me: However many WoS workers I chose, they will likely come from these names.