ohtani's jacket

Who asked you to give a crap?

That's funny. John Have you ever missed the last train from Tokyo Dome when you live in Chiba or Saitama or Kanagawa?

Dunno that I'd put Saint ahead of Michaels and Marty Jones' stock has dropped a bit for me lately after watching some of the non-TWC World of Sport.

One limiting factor is that, if I'm not mistaken, not that many people have personal computers in Japan. They mainly access the Internet through their cell phones, which is less conducive to that sort of thing. Most people have a laptop.

I like a number of Tito's matches. His career was a disappointment in terms of matches.

Shawn is pretty clearly above Tito in the pecking order. Tito's career is a disappointment when it comes to matches.

Reminds me of the time I came across an 80s Joshi bulletin board where they were posting pictures of crotch shots for everyone to admire. I've seen and read the equivalent of Japanese sleaze threads. It's the internet; all sorts of carry on goes on.

Looks like a comedy sketch from a variety show. Japanese TV dramas have low budgets. Even the serious ones are cheap looking.

They were British fans. Don't think that really counts.

The cool thing about that Toshie match is how much she cares about that WCW title. It's a neat undercard match. With AJW you'll need to capture the story of LCO vs. Ito and Watanabe. With JWP it's the Yagi matches before her retirement and the Kansai/Fukuoka title match. With Jd' you'll need to concentrate on the Jaguar vs. Lioness feud. I would be extremely wary of Lorefice's star ratings and instead try to plot how the year went for each fed.

How so? As the 90s wore on there was a real push towards show topping matches. In Japan in particular there was nowhere else the matches could go expect bigger and longer. And with things like the sitdown interviews with Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels there was an effort to present them as real people not just characters. The fact that they were real people connected to their work made their matches seem more like personal accomplishments. Michaels was supposed to the show stoppa and this great entertainer who had classic matches long before his comeback, and JR was beating us over the head with how emotional everything was long before the current era. The whole manufactured classics thing really isn't special to WWE, though. CMLL and the Japanese feds are just as bad. Wrestling was always going to evolve into something that tried to outdo what had come before in the 90s and the 90s was an incredibly bloated decade in terms of upping workrate.

Michaels is an awful actor and I don't like the manufactured classics, but it's not surprising that wrestling evolved that way. You can see the roots on the 90s yearbooks.

The Rude/Dustin match I liked from '93 was in May, I think. They had a lot of poor matches that year so you have to be careful. EDIT: Checked the Smarkschoice WCW results and it must be Dustin Rhodes vs. Rick Rude - Worldwide 5/15/93.

Ricky Steamboat vs. Brutus Beefcake, 5/26/85 I've been meaning to watch this for a while as Beefcake had a shocking decent run in 1985, but this was dreck from Steamboat. There are some guys who can go through the motions and still be reasonably entertaining but not Steamboat. His schtick was so heavily built on fired up babyface selling that if they're not working at a certain speed and adding fuel to the fire his shit looks hokey. We'll call it the Tito Santana conundrum, in that Tito needed to be fired up for his matches to be good, but unlike Steamboat, Tito's selling wasn't goofy looking when the match was tepid.

He also had a great match with Dustin Rhodes in 1993, but his '92 is head and shoulders above any other year in his career.

I don't really care about objectivity in these arguments; I think it's more important to understand why you like something. I like soul music more than rock music. I used to like rock music when I was in high school, but in my early 20s I got into funk, soul, jazz, blues, gospel and hip-hop (i.e. black American music.) Because I like these genres I dig a little deeper than musical styles where I only have some general knowledge of artists and albums. Now maybe it would be fun to say "fuck Sabbath, this Johnny Guitar Watson album is fucking amazing", but I don't really like Johnny Guitar Watson because he's better than Black Sabbath. I like Johnny Guitar Watson more than Black Sabbath because I like funk/soul/blues more than rock or metal. But if you really want to get into it -- who's better! Johnny Guitar Watson or Black Sabbath! -- I think it's stupid to use personal taste as a determiner. What makes me the arbiter of who's better? Besides, it's a pretty short argument: Johnny Guitar Watson because I like him more. I just think you need to stretch yourself and challenge yourself a bit if you want to make such arguments. I mean nobody's really forcing anybody to compare Shawn Michaels and El Dandy, but rating Michaels above Dandy because you don't like watching lucha is a bit of a cop out to me. I like watching lucha but that's not the reason why I'd rather Dandy over Michaels. There might be a fair number of luchadores I rate above Michaels because I like lucha so much, but really Dandy is better than Michaels for the same reason that Fujiwara is better than Takada and Tibor Szakacs is better than Marc Rocco or Johnny Saint in my eyes. It's more about my take on greatness than personal likes. I actually think the standards I would apply to artists within the genres I like is the same I would apply to wrestling, so if I like an Ann Peebles or Millie Jackson more than Aretha Franklin or think Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder are overrated it's comparable to the way I compare wrestlers. I'm not really sure wrestling breaks off into genres as distinctly as music does. Don't know that any of that made sense. Sorry for so much name dropping.

I'm not trying to defend Joshi. It's something I watched a lot of at one time, but I can barely stand it myself these days. I guess the point I've been trying to make is that you can't expect it to be something that it's not. You're not going to turn on a match and see some kind of Toshiaki Kawada selling performance.

You'd obviously think so because you're a lucha superfan. For me, it boils down to "who would you rather watch." I'd rather listen to a decent metal band than the greatest reggae band of all time. Sure, but if you had to argue which is better, the metal band or the reggae band, what would you do? I'd rather listen to the 23rd best soul album of 1970 than Black Sabbath, but it would pretty outrageous to claim that Wilson Pickett in Philadelphia is better than Paranoid, and I'm a guy who loves making outrageous claims. Now Wilson Pickett in Philadelphia is a pretty good record, especially if you're a soul collector like me, and I'd just as soon ignore Sabbath and listen to my soul record just like I watch Dandy matches and ignore Shawn's matches, but in the spirit of endless comparisons it's not like comparing Sabbath with a late career Wilson Pickett record. We're not comparing Shawn and say Javier Cruz. Dandy and Michaels is like comparing Stevie Wonder and Sabbath (not a Stevie Wonder fan, but it's musical heavyweights.) I don't really care about objectivity in these articles, but it does require a bit of thought and more consideration than which you'd rather watch/listen to. Dandy tore shit up in 1990. When has Shawn ever torn shit up?

Pierroth in 1992 was pretty spectacular.

Has Shawn Michaels ever had a match as good as the best Dandy stuff? That's not a very fair comparison for Michaels.

Tony and Bobby were such a disaster as a pairing. Either Tony didn't get Bobby's sense of humour or he didn't think he was funny because he shat on Bobby's jokes all the time, whereas he would crack up when Jesse was around.

Maybe because he did a lot of long matches in 1992 with Steve Austin? Yeah, and none of them were any good. Windham was better at short TV matches and tag matches than long singles matches.

Don't know why you think Windham can do long matches, especially with a 1992 Steve Austin.

Never had a problem with Nikita Koloff in 1992 WCW. Don't get why he's rousing your ire so bad.

From memory, Chigusa Nagayo argues in GAEA Girls that matches are about a succcesion of moves not a sequence.