Sorry for the delay! I'll get to that in a minute. It's nothing dramatic. So here we are in August & September of 1985 All Japan Pro Wrestling! The Funker...the late great Terry Funk is here. Lots of Stan Hansen and yeah this one is pretty star studded. Let's begin!
Riki Choshu/Killer Khan vs Genichiro Tenryu/Jumbo Tsuruta (08/02 aired 08/03): A great match without a doubt! Things started out with Jumbo and Riki having a technical fight. Once Khan started slapping people in the face, th
Hello! Back with more Mid South wrestling! This time we're looking at Butch Reed & the Midnight Express. Hope you find something you want to watch!
Hacksaw Duggan & Magnum T.A. vs. Hacksaw Butch Reed & Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart (10/13/83) - Very good TV episode title match with a clean finish. It was all action and Reed & Anvil were looking like a team ahead of their time with their athleticism. Again, really good stuff!
Jim Neidhart & Butch Reed vs Magnum TA &
Here we are with Part #3 of the very best of GAEA. We are looking at '98 which features a lot of Meiko Satomura and not so much Chigusa Nagayo. Don't think that's intentional just Meiko along Sonoko Kato seem to be the featured in the best stuff.
Etsuko Mita & Mima Shimoda vs Meiko Satomura & Sonoko Kato (01/15/98): Great match with Satomura and Kato getting plugged into the LCO vs young team equation. So this is very much Mita and Shimoda's match with the youngster team hanging on
This post came about by accident but it's been a fun one. KAI is one of my favorite new guys from watching 2010's AJPW. So here we're going to take a look at some of his bigger matches while in W-1. His arc here probably reflects his booking had Muto & his loyal pals not left and formed Wrestle-1. Anyhow all but the last match are readily available on the 'tube. Let's take a look
vs Seiya Sanada (09/08/13): I think this might be clipped a few minutes based on the time they give
I'm very excited to be watching more FMW after a long time away (Kudo stuff excluded!). I'm not limiting myself to just FMW but am including interesting stuff from ECW and AJPW as well. I'm going off my DVDs so there's a bunch of pics. They're grainy but you get that old school VHS video quality vibe like you're watching these in '98. Hope you dig 'em. Let's jump on in!
Hayabusa & Jinsei Shinzaki vs Yukihiro Kanemura & Hido (01/06/98): Oh yeah, this was just a blast! You kinda get e
We're FINALLY on to 1999 which has some of the best matches in the company's history according to many fans. I've got access to all of those but there are a couple others that are right out of that top tier that I can't seem to locate. Therefore I'm going to do my best to find some reasonable replacements. It's been so long since I made my watch list that I'm not sure which these are though Also I'm at my busy season with work so I'm going to break it up into two parts.
Lioness Asuka &
Here we are back trying to watch some of my DVD backlog. This is/was a pretty well known show for the Danielson and Davey matches. I didn't give two shits back at the time but I have mellowed out about DGUSA (it took 10 years) :D. I was able to get a few of the more praised shows for cheap on eBay a few years ago. Like FIP a couple years ago, I might skip a match and I will definitely watch these out of order for the best viewing experience. Also I watched this with commentary off (nice to have
Sorry for the delay! The big draw for this show is the return of Shingo and his challenge for Gabe's golden boy Johnny Gargano's title.
Shingo vs Johnny Gargano - This is the big selling point of the DVD. Shingo is back in DGUSA after right around where I stopped in 2011. Gargano's in ring abilities have greatly improved. He seems to know what to do more than before and doesn't have to do a fancy move all of the time...but he still favors doing something fancy over something basic. And this
I'm getting back to more of my DVDs. This time I'll be looking Extreme Championship Wrestling or ECW!! E-C-W! E-C-W! Haha! Specifically I'll be looking at WWE's ECW Unreleased Vol. 1 DVD set (along with some YouTube videos to round things out). For a little back story on this purchase, I had gotten vol. 2 a few years after it's release in 2016 or 2017 as I was pretty interested in a few of the matches featured. I bought it used. Vol. 1 I just got a couple years ago new as the price dropped and I
This is post #3 where I'll be looking at the 1997 matches from the ECW Unreleased vol.1 DVD and a boat load of matches from YouTube
Rob Van Dam & Sabu vs. Perry Saturn & John Kronus (ECW Cyberslam 1997 Feb. 1997) - ECW World Tag Team Title Tables & Ladders Match - An absolute war between the two most innovative tag teams in ECW. Bell to bell craziness... it's hard to tell what was planned and what was on the fly. Expect a few blemishes, this was a great ECW tag title match with
Here's the final post for the ECW Unreleased vol. 1 DVD. This is for the year 2000. Strangely, the DVD has more matches from this year than any other year. It's also not terribly representative of the year as they've avoided Steve Corino as a wrestler... was he doing commentary for ROH when this was released? Or maybe still wrestling with them? But I think he's a really big part of ECW from 1999 until closing. I really dug his feud with Dusty Rhodes for instance. I'm going to start with that.
I think this project was prompted by the WCW YouTube page started recently by WWE. They came out the gate with some great stuff and have been trickling out Hogan era schlock lately. Anyhow, 1994 seemed like a really interesting year in terms of their roster and matchups. As usual, I'm going to cherry pick certain wrestlers and matches. I want to focus on Steven Regal, Ricky Steamboat, Vader & tags that look interesting. I know I'm missing some stuff. I was going to do a comprehensive 1994 bu
We're back with more of WCW 1994! It's a heck of a year so far and really is an end of an era since Hogan eventually comes in and wrecks the shop. But don't worry, I'm not going to be looking at a single match of his. Instead I'm going to focus on the tag division, Ricky Steamboat, Steven Regal and the man they call Vader. Same as before
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The Nasty Boys (Brian Knobbs & Jerry Sags) vs. Cactus Jack & Kevin Sullivan - Slamboree 05/22/94 - There's a few Slamboree '94 match
Work was busy and the weather was nice so, I didn't get around to watching day #2 of wXw's 2010 tournament
I thought about skipping today but, figured I'd share my take on the most popular wrestlers not in WWE- Kenny Omega & the Young Bucks.
Although both are sort of the antithesis of the blog as they are just so darn well known and praised by Dave M. And that's cool because I do like them both. No, they're not my favorites or wrestle according to my stylistic prefer
AJW TV January 4th 1991 (1/4/91)
Yumiko Hotta vs. Bat Yoshinaga- Nothing too awesome here other than Hotta kicking Bat in the face a few good times and busting out a top rope backdrop. ***
Mima Shimoda & Etsuko Mita & Toshiyo Yamada vs. Takako Inoue & Miori Kamiya & Mika Takahashi- Really weird seeing Mita with short hair like Yamada and Takako was a little chubby here but, not in a bad way. Kind like you could tell she was 18 or so. Surprisingly Mima was
Hi, not taking a break from 2013 AJPW but wanted to share something in the meantime. This is a review of ZERO1 07/31/08 & 08/03/08 from Samurai TV. Its the last 2 days of their Fire Festival which is their Champion Carnival or G1Climax. A side project that I'm working on is checking out Zero One, Zero1, Zero- One Max and every iteration of that company. Its not going to be a deep dive since there's no ready made compilation that I'm aware of. In fact there's not a ton out there in general...
I very much wanted to call this post "The Champ is Here" but that is the title of Joe's second volume ROH DVD. Today we'll be looking at volume one which looks at Joe's first defenses of the ROH World Championship after defeating Xavier. These are the matches that really put that title on the map and really establish the prestige of that position. You may forget that Low-Ki was the first champ and his climb to the top was greater than his time there. That's OK since Xavier was a project for Gab
I got interested in the Atsushi Aoki & Kotaro Suzuki team from watching 2013 All Japan. Their bouts against Koji Kanemoto & Minoru Tanaka are some of the best this year. So I was curious what they were doing in NOAH a year before they jumped to AJPW. Let's take a look!
Suzuki & Aoki vs Nakajima & Kajiwara - (NOAH 01/15/12) - Story here is Aoki is gunning for Nakajima's Jr. Title. Man do we get that. Aoki is like Kawada or KENTA by going after Nakajima every chance he
I'm back with the second and final installment of the Samoa Joe - World Champion DVD released by ROH in 2004. Let's pick back up where we left off.
vs Christopher Daniels (Glory by Honor II - September 2003): A fighting champion for sure! Daniels used his speed & agility to take Joe to the limit. In a way Daniels maybe should have won because he showed tons of toughness withstanding Joe's awesome offense. If you've seen their TNA battles then you know Joe can really toss The Fallen Ange
I was really psyched on the Doug Williams match vs Samoa Joe from a couple weeks ago. Williams has been a favorite of mine since seeing TNA in 2007. I remember how it really impressed me with how he used his knees for much of his striking offense. Knee drops, knee lifts and such really resonated with me at the time. Not only didn't you see them very often at that time, Williams used them in such a deliberate manner. It wasn't just one knee drop, it was a myriad of attacks. Its almost like when I
In all honesty, this was going to be a quickie post of just a few matches that I stumbled across. But then I became intrigued by the match ups or was impressed by a worker and wanted to see more. And here we are! The entire 2003 Differ Cup watched out of sequence reviewed out of sequence. I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. Sit back and read on:
KENTA & Kotaro Suzuki vs Great Takeru & Kappa Kozou (02/08): Was going to skip this since I'd never heard of the IWA Japan team. But
This is a two birds with one stone post. I wanted to get a little more Zero One in this year as well as get back to early 2000s NOAH. I was going through my 2001 list and realized I had a mini project with Zero One vs NOAH in 2001. There's some better known stuff and a couple I'd never heard of. Let's jump in!
Mitsuharu Misawa & Yoshinari Ogawa vs. Shinya Hashimoto & Alexander Otsuka (January 13th, 2001) : A good match that goes a long way on the Misawa vs Hashimoto interactions. Ve
I've got a few New Years Resolutions and watching more Joshi is one of them. It's been a while so doing a spotlight on one of my faves Mariko Yoshida seems like a great way to get back into this style. As always, I'm cherry picking but here I'm omitting her stuff from 98-99 Arsion on purpose. I think I should do a separate post on that. Enjoy!
Kyoko Inoue/Takako Inoue/Mariko Yoshida vs. Cynthia Moreno/Etsuko Mita/Mima Shimoda (AJW - 08/15/92) Great 6 woman tag match! Intensely fought from s
It has been quite some time since I watched 1980's AJW. After getting a taste of a few of the classic matches of the 90's from a couple Best of the 1990's compilations, I was bit by the Joshi bug. I wanted to see what all of talk was about with Crush Gals. I have always been partial to wrestling from the 80's and I wondered some 14 years ago if it was as good as the stuff from the 90's.Well hells yeah it is! Just as wrestling changed for men's wrestling so did women's wrestling 90's. So as long
I remember being really stoked when Ayako Hamada, Awesome Kong and Cheerleader Melissa joined TNA for a brief time. Women's wrestling was actually the best stuff they had at that time. Hamada seemed to be a big deal to me as I was really getting into Joshi at the time and seeing a legit Joshi wrestler every week was pretty cool. Her and Cheerleader Melissa had an awesome match..maybe a hardcore match or something. Anyway, I never really got too see too much of her stuff in Japan. There's a coupl
