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
I decided to take a little break from JWP. No way I was going to meet my self imposed deadline. Instead I thought I would switch stuff up and watch the best of Megumi Kudo. As an FMW and joshi fan, it's a bit crazy that I've only seen like 2 Kudo matches and some clips. I skipped the one's I've seen 04/02/93 AJW and 05/05/96 Combat Toyoda retirement match. Oh I have seen the first inter-promotional match with Toyoda vs Bull & Bonito in 1992. That's covered in my 1992 FMW post from a couple y
This is a project I wanted to do for a good while now. When I decided to watch all Joshi this month, this it the one I've been itching to start all month. Jetlag has done an awesome overview and Quebrada.net's reviews are really great as well. I've used those as my guide. As Jetlag has said, so little is talked about this era. I hope to add a little bit to the conversation. For reference here's Jetlag's Microscope topic: https://forums.prowrestlingonly.com/topic/39849-early-jwp-pre-splitinterpro
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
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
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 was psyched to find this inter-promotional JWP show online. It's from right around the era I want re-explore. Having watched a ton of full Joshi shows, I skipped the following:
Kumiko Maekawa & Rie Tamada vs. Fusayo Nochi & Hiromi Yagi, Command Bolshoi vs. Bolshoi Kid, and Cutie Suzuki vs Takako Inoue.
Chigusa Nagayo vs. Mayumi Ozaki - Well, that was a war! I wasn't quite sure what to expect but the hate in this match was off the charts. It wasn't the quick burst of hate typ
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
I'm going to organize this years matches by what's 2010's AJPW and what's not. Sorry for some inconsistency with the labeling of dates & promotions. I hope this helps folks find cool stuff to watch as well as stir up a little interest in going back and reading old blog posts. Its my version of Match of the Year and other year end award type stuff. Let's do the superlatives first.
Best Surprise
I think something I would say to start with would be the high quality of wrestling AJPW
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
It's about the end of the busy season at my job. My eyes and brain are fried. I've got a quickie review in mind but in the meantime I thought I'd write something up. One thing I have been interested in talking about is my perspective on wrestling and how that effects my reviews.
I try not to do work rate reviews. I'm not trying to give you a play by play of a match. I'm past the phase of nitpicking every match to see if the arm work leads to something. I've out grown the idea that selling
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 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
Let's go back to 2011 and see what I missed the first time around. I'll post the links to the Gaora YouTube videos for your enjoyment:
Minoru Tanaka vs Kaz Hiyashi (01/02/11): This was a very good junior battle with two legends of the style. I think they have something better in them but this was still pretty good stuff. My issue is with how they're not really transitioning control from one guy to the other. It does seem a bit like 'your turn-my turn' and I'd like to see a reason why Minoru
Here we are back in 2013 -again! Some kind soul posted these since my 2013 project wrapped up. I stumbled upon them will looking for 2014 stuff. This is some really nice wrestling so let's take a look!
Minoru Tanaka, Koji Kanemoto & Hiroshi Yamato vs Atsushi Aoki, Yoshinobu Kanemaru & Kotaro Suzuki (04/29/13) : Thought maybe I saw this but, no! So this was from the 2013 Champion Carnival final night. First things first, kudos to the dude who gave Aoki the double birds right in his f
Here we are at the end of the road for 2014 AJPW. We're wrapping up with the 11/29 show which I found online.
Masanobu Fuchi vs. Naoya Nomura -skipped
Takeshi Minamino vs. Yohei Nakajima - Fun indie heel vs babyface match. Just simple stuff but so enjoyable.
Keisuke Ishii & SUSHI vs. Enoshima Man & Ultimo Dragon - I started watching this and it was pretty bland. It was just a generic junior tag match with not much spark. I fast forwarded to the last couple minutes and it n
Well looks like my sample of AJPW for 2014 is going a bit shorter than expected. My disc for 09/28/14 is defective. I'm going to be perfectly honest, this is why I stopped getting stuff from my "Internet Video Provider." This disc was probably from my last or second to last order when half the stuff was either defective like this or just the wrong show (labeled date matched what I bought but what was on there was different). And here it bites me in the ass a couple years later. If you're interes
Part Two and our first combo entry. We start off with a match found online then we'll go over a full show. As you can tell from the date we're skipping ahead a few months.
Jun Akiyama vs. Takao Omori (Vacant Triple Crown Title - 06/15/14) - I guess Akebono had to vacate the title. We get a nice lead in to the match showing the history between Omori and Akiyama. I'm a dork and know it already... it's one of things that makes this period of AJ special. It's as if Akiyama never left and he and
Thanks for waiting on me! If you've followed my blog you know I am easily distracted. I have a real good plan that gets interrupted by something that draws my attention elsewhere. I'm not like this with serious matters but it's something I do with my hobbies. The seasons usually play some part. In the summer, I tend to focus (fixate) on skateboarding. Invariably I'll get hurt or its too damn hot to skate and that's when I make time for other stuff like wrestling. In the winter, I just tend to ge
I haven't been watching anything lately but wanted to post something. I've been messing around with old AJPW footage and flares and distortion from the bright lights. I take whatever halos, prismatic effects, after images or saturation of light that occurs when filming (and temporarily blinding the camera men no doubt) and further manipulate it.
Baba
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Kabuki vs Flair
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The Funker
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
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
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
