Atlantis/La Fiera/Vampiro Casanova vs. Negro Casas/Mano Negra/Black Magic, CMLL 9/17/93

Negro Casas/Dr. Wagner Jr./Sangre Chicana vs. La Fiera/King Haku/Pegasus Kid, CMLL 9/24/93

Some more of the lead in to the Casas vs. Fiera Anniversary Show match has become available. I think the Haku match was on YouTube previously but the account was deleted. Matt reviewed it a while back mostly for the novelty of seeing Haku in Mexico; which reminds me, since he's probably reading this, that he needs to check out Kamala's matches in Mexico, which are a lot more fun.

Because these aren't that great.

Fiera and Casas chase each other around a lot, and just about everything Casas does looks good, but the matches are far from compelling; certainly compared with the trios work in Casas/Dandy and Casas/Dragon.

The first match has three issues going on at the same time without anything in the way of a common thread. A good lead in trios with have a central issue accompanied by supporting players. Here everyone's doing their own thing; sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background, and the TV director switches between match-ups looking for the best shot. The match establishes Fiera and Casas brawling into the crowd and Fiera smashing Casas' head against the arena seats. It also features Fiera throwing Casas into the seats, which seemed seemed like an original spot in the hair match, but was pre-established. Casas blades, but -- and here's a shock -- his selling is bad. Now when it comes to the faces a guy makes when he's bladed, you're talking about a highly subjective thing, but for me they didn't work at all, and that surprises me since Casas is normally outstanding at this sort of thing. Others may disagree or think it's a trivial thing, but that's on top of Fiera not really giving a strong babyface performance. I don't want to go overboard, but if I've watched these trios prior to seeing the hair match, the Anniversary bout would have strongly exceeded my expectations.

The second match is hardly worth watching unless, like Matt, you're interested in King Haku. The only thing it really sets up is that Fiera can pin Casas with his german, but he flubs the german and it doesn't even look good. What really disappointed me was that they had this interesting wrinkle where Casas was tagging with Chicana, who was Fiera's former trios partner and the man he'd feuded with to turn tecnico; they could have conspired to make Fiera's life a living misery, but instead it was less violent than the trios the week before. Haku and Pegasus Kid were superfluous and distracted from what should have been Casas and Fiera at each other's throats.

The hair match is starting to get some acclaim as an all-time great lucha match and one of the best of the 90s, but the build doesn't help the feud much and I wouldn't put the total package as high as a lot of other 90s stuff.