I stumbled on a clip from Madusa's podcast discussing Bret Hart & Curt Hennig wrestling each other. It's pretty entertaining and I think is referring to their '91 Summerslam match which is probably a classic. And this got me thinking about Madusa's time wrestling in Japan. I went through her backlogs to see if there's any reference to wrestling the AJW women or wrestling for AJW. And lo and behold, there were a couple clips. Then that led me to want to check out if she had any interesting ma
Nothing says "Halloween" like two grown men dressing up as skeletons. La Parka is that fun "mom made my costume" skeleton and Mortis is more like you went to Kmart and bought your outfit. Watching all of these matches should hopefully put you in a good mood. Have some candy or pumpkin spiced snacks and check these out
Mortis vs Silver King (01/09/97): Silver King!!! This is a lot of fun. This is probably a little too even considering the size difference and everything but screw it! It's 20
Thanks for waiting This wasn't a "quickie" blog post/watch...but for consistency I'll label it such.
Now onto ASW V Night 2!
No Holds Barred Match
Joey Ryan vs. Kevin Steen - I'm not sure how I feel about having this booked first but they didn't make this an over-long match. It was heated and pretty brutal with some of the spots BUT it didn't feel like a hardcore spot fest. Steen can definitely get over indulgent with the brutality but I think it was just right here. If you legitima
Here's a couple teaser videos that PWG still has on their YouTube page:
Not sure on video quantity but hey...it's better than some homemade music video from 2008, right?
Now if you're interested, here's the reviews!
Nosawa vs. Disco Machine - Good simple opening match.
Roderick Strong vs. Rocky Romero - This was really good stuff. It was hard hitting and while longer than you'd normally see a second match go, they never went crazy
The YouTube account that had the DGUSA matches also has a bunch of PWG. Way too much if you know what I mean. But I was able to narrow it down to a few matches by the Motor City Machine Guns over the years. It's not complete or anything just some stuff I wanted to see.
Sabin vs Shelley (Hollywood Globetrotters 2006) - Pre Machine Guns...Shelley with two tone hair and Sabin with the alien on his trunks, yes! This was probably more towards Sabin's style (and the MCMG style) as opposed to Shel
I got in the mood to check out some vintage (vintage?!) TNA wrestling after enjoying my copy of TNA Impact for the PS2. I checked the matches listed and Hard Justice 2008 looked perfect. Check they even are promoting the game during the show.
This one has been up for 11 years so I'm thinking they won't pull it down or put it behind a pay wall any time soon. I am going to put it up top if you want to watch it sans reviews. I don't do spoilers/play by play reviews but if you want to go in fre
I'm taking a week break from 1985 AJPW to celebrate Halloween by watching some spooky wrestling. I'm going to look at some stuff you might have missed in TNA and Japan because that's more my jam. But there's plenty of Halloween/horror wrestling in lucha libre and lord knows there's always a spooky character in the WWE/F
Raven vs Vampiro (TNA PPV #68 2003): This was fun but maybe for the wrong reasons. The execution of moves was pretty lazy. Like only of handful of things beyond the dog col
Hi folks! A short impromptu post this week. I actually wasn't going to have much of anything to post as this has been a stressful week. Sometimes a good wrestling match can help blow off some steam or whatever but, I wasn't feeling it. Much of the stuff scheduled for this week was more high stakes than I was in the mood for. So I thought I'd give some AJ Jr. wrestling a shot. It just so happens that everything I picked out features Kuniaki Kobayashi
Mighty Inoue/Tarzan Goto vs Kuniaki Kobay
I'm going through more of my DVD library. I'm trying to knock out some odds & ends DVDs I got during the early years of the Covid pandemic. This one was part of a small lot of DVDs from eBay. I always wanted to get into Evolve but never did. So this wasn't the main draw of the lot but it was a nice bonus. As always, I pick & choose what I watched. I will say it is fun to watch Evolve/DGUSA after watching a fair amount of Full Impact Pro. It brings me back to that time
Let's take a
I'm going through my one-off DVDs trying to get some wrestling in while reducing my backlog of unwatched stuff. I've been meaning to watch Reborn Stage 2 for awhile after picking it up for cheap on eBay (longer than I can remember ago). As always with these things, I cherry pick. This is a pretty historically important show so let's begin!
Austin Aries vs Nigel McGuinness vs Jimmy Rave vs Rocky Romero: Aries' big show debut, Rocky Romero's 2nd night in ROH, Nigel's biggest match to date...
I've had some solid themes for the past few months but June sort of ended up being a time that I am using to handle a bunch of single show projects. This is in an effort to actually work my way through my backlog of DVDs. Here we take a look at the AJPW show from 01/02/15. It's my lone DVD for AJ 2015.
Kotaro Suzuki & Ryuji Hijikata vs. Masanobu Fuchi & Yoshinobu Kanemaru - There's a couple matches before this but this is the real start of the show. Fast paced opening with Kanemaru
Joshi January continues! This little post started out about Momoe Nakanishi and me reviewing a DVD I got 6 years ago. Anyway I was watched a couple matches and realized that the real hero was Kaoru Ito. Well shoot, I'm down with that. She's a great wrestler that unfortunately doesn't get the love because she was pushed at the tail end of AJW after many of the stars left. But Ito made the absolute best of it and had some fantastic battles. Here's just a sample from 2000 & 2001.
Kaoru Ito
Hi folks! Going through my notes and reviews while working on my year end Best Match Watched stuff and found a bunch of AJPW stuff that I never posted. Very interesting stuff. I'd normally do pictures but I think I used some of them from my last wrestling art show thing.
Giant Baba vs Stan Hansen (09/08/83): PWF Title match. For a Baba match, this was pretty good. He and Hansen work well together and work with Baby's limitations. Baba also pushed himself a bit. Perhaps I have seen this bef
This year has been relatively an AJPW focused year. So I thought I'd squeeze in a quickie spotlight on my favorite NJ wrestler, Tatsumi Fujinami. No real theme or anything beyond matches I found online that looked cool
Bob Backlund vs Tatsumi Fujinami (NJPW 01/01/82): Man, this is 40 almost 41 years old. Anyhow, this is 15 minute technical duel and I loved it. Its the type of match (and time) where they escaped or reversed holds rather than use rope breaks. This could have gone on much long
Welcome back! Another Big Japan show from 2007. This is another DVD from Highspots that they no longer sell in the U.S. Its listed as BJW #134 & #135 (07/08/07) but I believe it is episodes #132 & #133 if that'll help you locate it elsewhere. Let's begin!
Hiroyuki Kondo & Onryo vs Men's Teioh & Shinobu - clipped comedy match mainly. Really cool finish.
Takashi Sasaki vs Ryuji Ito: 300 light tube death match for the title. Sasaki and Ito do not disappoint at all. A great
I got this DVD from Highspots when they still had Japanese wrestling. They've got this labelled BJW #118 & 119 (03/14/07) . I think the correct numbers are episodes #116 & 117 episodes. In any case, this is for for the 03/14/07 show.
Takashi Sasaki vs Yuko Miyamoto - Scaffold and Light tube death match for the title. We get a really nice build up and back story to Miyamoto etc. I don't speak Japanese so other than the match footage, I fast forwarded much of this. But you can tell t
This show was kind of a holy grail DVD for me. Well holy grail for a reasonable price. But it is actually rather uncommon to find compared to later ROH stuff. The big draw of this is the main event of AJ Styles vs Bryan Danielson. It was the one major omission in the excellent ROH Year Two compilation. This match completed the trinity of all time classics from AJ, Paul London and Danielson in 2003 - Epic Encounter, Night of the Grudges being the other two. And let me say it again, Paul London w
I received this from eBay instead of the Best of Abyss DVD. I'm not one to make a big stink especially since I wasn't dead set on the Abyss tape. Plus this is a pretty damn good ppv...
Jay Lethal vs. Alex Shelley vs. Senshi vs. Sonjay Dutt vs. Austin Starr (Paparazzi Championship Series Five Man Elimination Match) - Austin Starr is Austin Aries and Senshi is Low-Ki. Very good multi man match, the paparazzi stuff has something to do with Shelley &Aries' gimmick under the tutelage of
Onita's FMW is starting out just right in '91. Back to back February Korakuen hall shows ain't to shabby. Here's Onita's main events from those shows:
Onita vs Tarzan Goto (02/26/91): Blood curdling blows- Haymakers, no touch headbutts that split skin, clotheslines, chair shots, table attacks! Oh yeah! This was just great wrestling, great brawling. Onita & Goto showed ultimate heart and guts. This was right up there with the Kurisu matches and so much better than their electric b
Akira Katayama was one of my favorite little discoveries from SWS but, sadly found out the he was paralyzed from a dive sometime in 1992. These are two matches found online.
Akira Katayama vs Kenichi Oya SWS from 9/17/91 and man, this was some good stuff! For whatever reason I thought Oya was gonna be some skinny crew cut rookie but, nope. He's a solid man with a beard and shit...perhaps rockin' a surfer gimmick?? I guess it was '91 so those orange and neon yellow trunks were pretty
They don't call Mitsuhiro Matsunaga "Mr. Danger" for nothing! Along with Jun Kasai, he's got to be my favorite death matcher.
I'm not positive but, the Bed of Nails has to be one of his signature death matches...although they aren't always the most spectacular. The fans love it so, I guess they keep doing it! Of course, they probably take too far nowadays but, here are some goodies (baddies?) with Mr. Danger!
Leatherface vs Mitsuhiro Matsunaga (Original Spike Nail Death M
Tatsumi Fujinami & Shinichi Nakano vs Osamu Nishimura & Yuki Ishikawa (03/03/98 MUGA): I hope you know what each guy looks like because everyone has black trunks, black boots, and black hair! This ain't your 2018 NJPW strong style with leather pants, dye jobs, and fancy colors! This is '98 MUGA and it's all about true Inoki style grappling and such.
Most of this puppy was fought on the canvas with a slap, knee or suplex thrown for good measure. 3/4 cup of matwork, scrambling
Giant Baba, Kenta Kobashi & Mitsuharu Misawa vs Toshiaki Kawada, Masanobu Fuchi & Akira Taue (01/29/94 AJPW): What do ya know!? Another match from today's date Just stumbled across this write up in the back of a notebook.
The 6 man matches of AJPW were really something. I know you're probably a little worried about Giant Baba working a match in 1994. I was too! If you've never seen Baba then, do yourself a favor and watch a couple older matches of his. One of many against Th
Here are some really great tag matches from New Japan in 1986 that don't get much talk. Thought I'd share the love!
Nobuhiko Takada & Osamu Kido vs Antonio Inoki & Keiichi Yamada (02/05/86): Wow what a great little match! The crowd really lets you know what's up since the work isn't mind-blowing or anything. This is the beginning of the legendary UWF/NJ feud and you can tell right here that dammit! It means something. Each guy just does his job well and it really pushes the i
