Posted November 9, 200816 yr comment_5435629 DVD #2 January 14th: Korakuen Tatsumi Fujinami vs Kengo Kimura - Not as heated as their previous match. They worked this more like Fujinami's matches with Choshu from 1983, with lots of intense matwork broken up by spurts of violence. It was still really good. I dug a sequence in which Kimura kicked Fujinami off the top rope to the floor and then almost knocked him out with a flurry of punches to the body. I also liked Fujinami's relentlessness in going after various submissions at the end. The only real disappointment was the respectful postmatch handshake, which signaled the end of a feud that seemed to have a lot more legs. Definite nomination nonetheless. January 16th: Higashi Osaka municipal central gymnasium Keiji Muto & Tatsumi Fujinami vs Brett & Buzz Sawyer - Cool moment when Buzz caught Mutoh on an attempted cross-body and turned it into a powerslam. But not enough Fujinami or Buzz for my taste. George Takano & Umanosuke Ueda vs Osamu Kido & Akira Maeda - Other than the vague possibility that Maeda might kick Ueda's head clean off his shoulders, this lacked much allure. Antonio Inoki vs Konga The Barbarian - Not much of a match. Barbarian used his chain to tie Inoki to the turnbuckle early. But then a huge gaijin trainee (not sure who) interfered on Inoki's behalf and that was about it. February 2nd: Kazo Shiro Koshinaka & Tatsumi Fujinami vs Nobuhiko Takada & Akira Maeda - Not sure why I've never seen any talk about this match. You had probably four of the company's top five workers going at it for about 25 minutes. The Koshinaka/Takada and Fujinami/Maeda pairings are classics, and they showed why here. But really, all four pairings produced nifty sequences. The match ended a little abruptly on what might have been a legit Takada knockout of Koshinaka. But this is an easy nomination. George Takano & Keiji Muto & Antonio Inoki vs Cuban Assassin & Tony St.Clair & Bam Bam Bigelow - Bigelow destroyed all three natives, landing a top-rope splash on Inoki to punctuate his introduction as a monster. This certainly worked to build interest in a Bigelow-Inoki match, but it wasn't much in its own right.
